Epidemics and Ideas
Epidemics and Ideas
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USDFrom plague to AIDS, epidemics have been the most spectacular diseases to afflict human societies. This volume examines the way in which these great crises have influenced ideas, how they have helped to shape theological, political and social thought, and how they have been interpreted and understood in the intellectual context of their time.
- A wide-ranging volume of interdisciplinary essays covering ancient times to our own day
- Relates the problems of AIDS to those of previous great epidemics worldwide
- Includes many outstanding contributors who write across a broad canvas and with the widest terms of reference
Reviews & endorsements
"The high scholarly quality of the essays is sustained throughout the book...This book will be of interest not only to the medical profession, but to sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and statesmen." The New England Journal of Medicine
"Like history itself, this book does not contain any simple answers. But it will provoke creative reflection, and the world needs all the insight it can muster." New Scientist
"There are 11 excellent essays in this volume, which collectively and individually illustrate that epidemics cause no necessary or particular cluster of human responses....The contents of this book deserve exhaustive review, for in every essay the results of these case studies confound commonplace assumptions about the history of epidemics...a dynamic, state-of-the-art collection, containing much of the best current research in the social history of epidemics." American Scientist
"...a remarkably cohesive and delightfully variegated book that brings medical and biological history into firm and fruitful contact with intellectual and social history....This is, in short, a splendid book--subtle, informed, sophisticated and coherent. It shows how successfully the social history of epidemics has come of age in recent years." William H. McNeill, Journal of Social History
"...will be of great interest to those concerned with the historical context of and societal response to diseases, such as AIDS, Legionnaire's disease, hantavirus, etc." Michael Zimmermann, Chronic Hepatitis: Morphology and Nomenclature
Product details
May 2012Adobe eBook Reader
9781139240468
0 pages
0kg
This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.
Table of Contents
- 1. Introduction Paul Slack
- 2. Epidemic, ideas and classical Athenian society James Longrigg
- 3. Disease, dragons and saints: the management of epidemics in the Dark Ages Peregrine Horden
- 4. Epidemic disease in formal and popular thought in early Islamic Society Lawrence I. Conrad
- 5. Plague and perceptions of the poor in early modern Italy Brian Pullan
- 6. Dearth, dirt and fever epidemics: rewriting the history of British 'public health', 1780–1850 John V. Pickstone
- 7. Epidemics and revolutions: cholera in nineteenth-century Europe Richard J. Evans
- 8. Hawaiian depopulation as a model for the Amerindian experience A. W. Crosby
- 9. Plague panic and epidemic politics in India, 1896–1914 Rajnarayan Chandavarkar
- 10. Plagues of beasts and men
- prophetic responses to epidemic in eastern and southern Africa Terence Ranger
- 11. Syphilis in colonial East and Central Africa: the social construction of an epidemic Megan Vaughan
- 12. The early years of AIDS in the United Kingdom 1981–6: historical perspectives Virginia Berridge
- Index.
