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The Making of Mr. Gray's Anatomy: Bodies, Books, Fortune and Fame

forces, is related to a long history of western depictions of the tropics. While Packard is not unfamiliar with this literature, it is puzzling that he ignores it; especially puzzling given the fact that the title of the book suggests its importance in the first place. While the turning away from larger societal and structural problems was important in making malaria endemic in many countries, it is important to understand how this neglect could have been legitimized in the first place. Malaria was not simply made into a tropical disease in the twentieth century through a narrow focus on vector control programmes by western powers. Understanding the long history of western engagement and constructions of the tropics is an important part of the story. However, in a book targeted to a popular audience it is understandable that such a discussion might have been omitted. Nonetheless, The Making of a Tropical Disease: A Short History of Malaria achieves what it sets out to do by demonstrating the importance of human actions and societal forces in the emergence, spread, and, in some cases, eradication or (re)entrenchment of malaria. Through an impressive global narrative, Packard convincingly shows how malaria was made into a tropical disease by predominantly western powers that ignored their own past and larger structural problems of poverty and inequality in favour of vector control programmes. Perhaps the most important aspect of Packard’s book, however, is that it charts a course for future popular biographies of disease and undergraduate textbooks, by showing that ‘diseases’ are not simply natural, transcendental biological entities, but are crucially shaped by, and impact upon us, through our own actions.