In his work, the largest American macro-historian William McNeill (1917-2016) proposed a fundamentally new interpretation of world history, in the center of which is the huge impact of epidemic diseases on human societies. The political, economic, demographic, environmental, cultural and psychological aspects of the interaction between people and infections McNeill traces back to pre-written history, placing particular emphasis on events such as the Antonine plague in the Roman Empire, the Black plague in Europe of the XIV century, cholera epidemics of the XIX century, as well as dwelling in detail on little-known epidemics to the Western reader in China. Thanks to the scale of the material and the novelty of the theoretical approach, Epidemics and Peoples, first published in 1976, immediately became an intellectual bestseller. Attention to the work at the time of its first publication was also provided by the author's alarming forecasts. In the 1970s, many scientists and doctors were inclined to believe that the great epidemics of the past were defeated, but McNeil warned that new encounters with deadly infections were inevitable, since humans remain a biological creature. In the future, this forecast has been repeatedly confirmed - from the rapid spread of AIDS since the 1980s to the current global coronavirus pandemic.