Surviving Captivity
Edna Bonhomme ’06 explores how public health initiatives harm marginalized communities.
When Edna Bonhomme ’06 was four years old, she fell seriously ill and was hospitalized for a month—an isolating experience of separation from her family and community that would inform her later work as a historian studying public health. “What had started as a fever turned into a curse that my miniature body, mind, and spirit could no longer bear,” she writes in the early pages of her 2024 book A History of the World in Six Plagues: How Contagion, Class, and Captivity Shaped Us, from Cholera to COVID-19. An associative journey through the medical records of humanity, A History of the World in Six Plagues explores the unintended consequences of public health mandates that attempt to contain the spread of illness by separating people from their communities and resources—a dynamic that, as Edna documents in her book, all too often impacts groups that are already marginalized or face large health disparities.
Having experienced this isolation personally, she explores its consequences on a global scale through a series of major health crises. She begins in the Americas, training her lens on cholera as it impacted enslaved people on southern plantations. Enslaved people who already suffered dehumanizing treatment were resilient in the face of debilitating infectious disease and a complete lack of medical care.
Cholera research is a throughline to Dr. Robert Koch, a German physician best known for winning a Nobel Prize for his research on tuberculosis (he also discovered the root causes of cholera and anthrax). Edna exposes what is perhaps less common knowledge about Koch: that he traveled to East Africa seeking a cure for trypanosomiasis, a parasitic infection caused by the tsetse fly, and experimented with ineffective treatments using local people he met there. She writes, “it is unclear if the African research subjects volunteered.”
Over and over again, Edna sees this power dynamic play out in other public health emergencies, as people in marginalized groups are continuously failed by their governments, whether they’re incarcerated women advocating for their HIV-positive friends or residents of West Point, the Liberian community shuttered by the local government during the 2014 Ebola outbreak.
Though Edna is a historian by trade, A History of the World in Six Plagues does not stay rooted in the past, but draws parallels between these complex responses to disease and death and the current state of public health in the United States. She argues that the government has isolated people in a variety of ways, often citing concerns about public health or safety, all while ignoring how captivity and separation—like her own confinement as a child—can also negatively impact health. Ultimately, the book is a call for a more even-handed, holistic approach to public health that considers the social determinants of health. “Though fear of infectious disease is often reasonable and of genuine concern, quarantines, lockdowns, and exclusions alone cannot eliminate the spread of illness if most of the population lacks access to free healthcare, stable housing, and wholesome food,” she writes. “In contrast, such emergencies may act as a distraction from the root causes of our society’s ills, the same afflictions that exacerbate the impacts of those emergencies in the first place.”
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