How doctors think, past and present
White man’s diseases, more than guns or famine, wiped out Native Americans. It’s a ubiquitous, simple argument, found everywhere from children’s American history textbooks to Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize–winning tome “Guns, Germs, and Steel.” The explanation says that when European colonists landed on North American shores, they brought with them a vast array of deadly diseases for which native populations lacked immunity. There was only one problem, according to David Jones: From his standpoint as a student of medicine and history, the theory didn’t make sense. “There was a big disconnect between what thoughtful medical scientists would know about infectious disease and what many historians and scientists were saying about it,” Jones said. The question became his dissertation and then his first book, “Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600,” a sweeping survey that cut through much of the conventional wisdom about why Native Americans have long suffered worse...