Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence / Edition 1

by Terence Ranger, Paul Slack

Overview

Epidemic diseases have always been a test of the ability of human societies to withstand sudden shocks. How are such large mortalities and the illness of large proportions of the population to be explained and dealt with? How have the sources of disease been identified and controls imposed? The chapters in this book, by acknowledged experts in the history of their periods, look at the ways in which the great epidemic diseases of the past—from classical Athens to the present day—have shaped not only our views of medicine and disease, but the ways in which people have defined the "health" of society in general terms.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521558310
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	11/30/1995
Series:	Past and Present Publications
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	360
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.39(h) x 0.91(d)

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.

Editorial Reviews

"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

From the Publisher