Michael Bliss’s Plague: A Story of Smallpox in Montreal has just been republished by the University of Toronto Press with a new foreword by infectious disease expert Gerald A. Evans. Originally published in 1991, the book tells the story of the 1885 smallpox epidemic which led to the deaths of over 3,000 Montrealers. Bliss’s vivid account, with its portrayal of cultural and religious divisions and violent confrontations over vaccination, seems more relevant than ever.
A new review of Michael Bliss’s The Discovery of Insulin: Enlarged Edition appears in this month’s London Review of Books. The enlarged edition was reissued by the University of Chicago Press (2025) with a foreword by Alison Li. Evolutionary biologist Liam Shaw says that The Discovery of Insulin, originally published in 1982, and since republished several times, “has rightly become a classic.” Shaw links the story of the insulin discovery to today’s complicated environment of weight-loss and anti-diabetes drugs and their huge global markets.
