Historians David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz have built decades-long careers as collaborators on the historical relationship between health and the environment. In this, their latest co-authored book, they synthesize these shared lifetimes of work into a single volume that illustrates the ways in which people “create the conditions within which disease takes hold.” (4) Both conditions and disease are broadly defined here. The former encompasses built and natural environments, industries, institutions, economies, and politics; the latter includes disease, ill health, suffering, injury, pain, and death. The result is a vast text that covers an extraordinary amount of ground and that is most useful for those seeking a single source that summarizes the contextual and contingent nature of health in the United States from European settler colonialism to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Rosner and Markowitz begin this history with the epidemics, battery, cruelty, and deaths suffered by massive numbers of indigenous and enslaved people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The worlds that colonial settlers built, which the authors describe in Chapter 1, allowed diseases to spread and deaths to occur at colossal scales. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Chapter 2), the factories, trade, and commercial economy of the industrial state took an addit