The Burdens of Disease: Epidemics and Human Response in Western History

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Rutgers University Press, 1998 - Всего страниц: 361

In this sweeping approach to the history of disease, historian J. N. Hays chronicles perceptions and responses to plague and pestilence over two thousand years of western history. Hays frames disease as a multi-dimensional construct, situated at the intersection of history, politics, culture, and medicine, and rooted in mentalities and social relations as much as in biological conditions of pathology. He shows how diseases affect social and political change, reveal social tensions, and are mediated both within and outside the realm of scientific medicine.

Beginning with the legacy of Greek, Roman, and early Christian ideas about disease, the book then discusses many of the dramatic epidemics from the fourteenth through the twentieth centuries, moving from leprosy and bubonic plague through syphilis, smallpox, cholera, tuberculosis, influenza, and poliomyelitis to AIDS. Hays examines the devastating exchange of diseases between cultures and continents that ensued during the age of exploration. He also describes disease through the lenses of medical theory, public health, folk traditions, and government response. The history of epidemics is also the history of their victims. Hays pays close attention to the relationships between poverty and power and disease, using contemporary case studies to support his argument that diseases concentrate their pathological effects on the poor, while elites associate the cause of disease with the culture and habits of the poor.

 

Содержание

Introduction
1
The Western Inheritance Greek and Roman Ideas about Disease
8
Medieval Diseases and Responses
18
The Great Plague Pandemic
37
New Diseases and Transatlantic Exchanges
62
Continuity and Change Magic Religion Medicine and Science 5001700
78
Disease and the Enlightenment
106
Cholera and Sanitation
135
Disease Medicine and Western Imperialism
178
The Scientific View of Disease and the Triumph of Professional Medicine
212
The Apparent End of Epidemics
240
Disease and Power
278
Notes
307
Suggestions for Further Reading
331
Index
345
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Tuberculosis and Poverty
154

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Об авторе (1998)

J. N. HAYS is associate professor of history at Loyola University of Chicago.

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