Plague and the City

Plague and the City
Author: Lukas Engelmann
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2018-11-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0429832494

Plague and the City uncovers discourses of plague and anti-plague measures in the city during the medieval, early modern and modern periods, and explores the connection between plague and urban environments including attempts by professional bodies to prevent or limit the outbreak of epidemic disease. Bringing together leading scholars of plague working across different historical periods, this book provides an inter-disciplinary study of plague in the city across time and space. The chapters cover a wide range of periods, geographical locations and disciplinary approaches but all seek to answer significant questions, including whether common motives can be identified, and how far knowledge about plague was based on an understanding of the urban space. It also examines how maps and photographs contribute to understanding plague in the city through exploring the ways in which the relationship between plague and the urban environment has been visualised, from the poisoned darts of plague winging their way towards their victims in the votive pictures from the Renaissance, to the mapping of the spread of disease in late nineteenth-century Bombay and photographing Honolulu’s great plague fire in 1900. Containing a series of studies that illuminate plague’s urban connection as a key social and political concern throughout history, Plague and the City is ideal for students of early modern history, and of the early modern city and plague more specifically.

Plague Town

Plague Town
Author: Dana Fredsti
Publisher: Titan Books
Total Pages: 378
Release: 2012-04-27
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0857686380

People are dying. Then they are waking up hungry. In the small university town of Redwood Grove, people are succumbing to a lethal strain of flu. They are dying—but not for long. Ashley Parker and her boyfriend are attacked by these shambling, rotting creatures that crave human flesh. Their lives will never be the same again. When she awakes Ashley discovers that she is a "wild card"— immune to the virus—and is recruited by a shadowy paramilitary organization that offers her the chance to fight back. Trained by gorgeous vegan Gabriel, and bonding with her fellow wild cards, Ashley begins to discover skills she never knew she had. As the town falls to ever-growing numbers of the infected, Ashley and her team fight to contain the outbreak—but will they be enough?

Florence Under Siege

Florence Under Siege
Author: John Henderson
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 415
Release: 2019-08-20
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0300196342

A vivid recreation of how the governors and governed of early seventeenth-century Florence confronted, suffered, and survived a major epidemic of plague Plague remains the paradigm against which reactions to many epidemics are often judged. Here, John Henderson examines how a major city fought, suffered, and survived the impact of plague. Going beyond traditional oppositions between rich and poor, this book provides a nuanced and more compassionate interpretation of government policies in practice, by recreating the very human reactions and survival strategies of families and individuals. From the evocation of the overcrowded conditions in isolation hospitals to the splendor of religious processions, Henderson analyzes Florentine reactions within a wider European context to assess the effect of state policies on the city, street, and family. Writing in a vivid and approachable way, this book unearths the forgotten stories of doctors and administrators struggling to cope with the sick and dying, and of those who were left bereft and confused by the sudden loss of relatives.

City of the Plague God

City of the Plague God
Author: Sarwat Chadda
Publisher: Disney Electronic Content
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2021-01-12
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1368066631

Thirteen-year-old Sikander Aziz has to team up with the hero Gilgamesh in order to stop Nergal, the ancient god of plagues, from wiping out the population of Manhattan in this adventure based on Mesopotamian mythology.

Cats in the City of Plague

Cats in the City of Plague
Author: A. L. Marlow
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Total Pages: 142
Release: 2021-11-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1665541946

Fans of Tad Williams's Tailchaser's Song and Richard Adams's Watership Down, add Cats in the City of Plague to your list of favorite books. Set amidst the chaos of the worst pandemic in history, the Black Death of the 14th century, Cats in the City of Plague tells the tale of a group of cats who are unfairly blamed for the plague. The main character, Leander, and his fellow cats cannot understand why people they have trusted have turned against them. But they realize that their only hope of survival is to escape from the French city that has long been their home and return to the forests where, cat legend has it, their kind originally lived. While evading the humans who seek to destroy them, the cats embark on what Booklife calls “a tense and dramatic journey through the city, powered by the danger and sacrifice inherent in tales of epic quests.” Racing over rooftops, hiding in the cathedral’s crypt, can they make it out of the city before dawn reveals them? And if they do make it, can these city cats learn to live in the wild? The setting of a great pandemic will resonate with modern readers, but it’s the flight of these intrepid cats that makes Cats in the City of Plague an unforgettable story.

Plague Hospitals

Plague Hospitals
Author: Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 363
Release: 2016-04-22
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1317080289

Developed throughout early modern Europe, lazaretti, or plague hospitals, took on a central role in early modern responses to epidemic disease, in particular the prevention and treatment of plague. The lazaretti served as isolation hospitals, quarantine centres, convalescent homes, cemeteries, and depots for the disinfection or destruction of infected goods. The first permanent example of this institution was established in Venice in 1423 and between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries tens of thousands of patients passed through the doors. Founded on lagoon islands, the lazaretti tell us about the relationship between the city and its natural environment. The plague hospitals also illustrate the way in which medical structures in Venice intersected with those of piety and poor relief and provided a model for public health which was influential across Europe. This is the first detailed study of how these plague hospitals functioned, where they were situated, who worked there, what it was like to stay there, and how many people survived. Comparisons are made between the Venetian lazaretti and similar institutions in Padua, Verona and other Italian and European cities. Centred on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, during which time there were both serious plague outbreaks in Europe and periods of relative calm, the book explores what the lazaretti can tell us about early modern medicine and society and makes a significant contribution to both Venetian history and our understanding of public health in early modern Europe, engaging with ideas of infection and isolation, charity and cure, dirt, disease and death.

Ralph Tailor's Summer

Ralph Tailor's Summer
Author: Keith Wrightson
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2011-12-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300174470

The plague outbreak of 1636 in Newcastle-upon-Tyne was one of the most devastating in English history. This hugely moving study looks in detail at its impact on the city through the eyes of a man who stayed as others fled: the scrivener Ralph Tailor. As a scrivener Tailor was responsible for many of the wills and inventories of his fellow citizens. By listening to and writing down the final wishes of the dying, the young scrivener often became the principal provider of comfort in people’s last hours. Drawing on the rich records left by Tailor during the course of his work along with many other sources, Keith Wrightson vividly reconstructs life in the early modern city during a time of crisis and envisions what such a calamitous decimation of the population must have meant for personal, familial, and social relations.

Black Death at the Golden Gate: The Race to Save America from the Bubonic Plague

Black Death at the Golden Gate: The Race to Save America from the Bubonic Plague
Author: David K. Randall
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2019-05-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0393609464

“A mash-up of Erik Larson and Richard Preston.” —Tina Jordan, New York Times Book Review podcast On March 6, 1900, the bubonic plague took its first victim on American soil: Chinese immigrant Wong Chut King. Empowered by racist pseudoscience, officials rushed to quarantine Chinatown—but when corrupt politicians mounted a cover-up to obscure the threat, it fell to federal health officer Rupert Blue to save San Francisco, and the nation, from a gruesome fate. Black Death at the Golden Gate is a spine-chilling saga of virulent racism, human folly, and the ultimate triumph of scientific progress.

Plague Ports

Plague Ports
Author: Myron Echenberg
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2010-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0814722334

Reveals the global effects of the bubonic plague, and what we can learn from this earlier pandemic A century ago, the third bubonic plague swept the globe, taking more than 15 million lives. Plague Ports tells the story of ten cities on five continents that were ravaged by the epidemic in its initial years: Hong Kong and Bombay, the Asian emporiums of the British Empire where the epidemic first surfaced; Sydney, Honolulu and San Francisco, three “pearls” of the Pacific; Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro in South America; Alexandria and Cape Town in Africa; and Oporto in Europe. Myron Echenberg examines plague's impact in each of these cities, on the politicians, the medical and public health authorities, and especially on the citizenry, many of whom were recent migrants crammed into grim living spaces. He looks at how different cultures sought to cope with the challenge of deadly epidemic disease, and explains the political, racial, and medical ineptitudes and ignorance that allowed the plague to flourish. The forces of globalization and industrialization, Echenberg argues, had so increased the transmission of microorganisms that infectious disease pandemics were likely, if not inevitable. This fascinating, expansive history, enlivened by harrowing photographs and maps of each city, sheds light on urbanism and modernity at the turn of the century, as well as on glaring public health inequalities. With the recent outbreak of COVID-19, and ongoing fears of bioterrorism, Plague Ports offers a necessary and timely historical lesson.