The Conquest of Epidemic Disease

The Conquest of Epidemic Disease
Author: Charles-Edward Amory Winslow
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 428
Release: 1980
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780299082444

The Conquest of Epidemic Disease, Charles-Edward Amory Winslow's classic study in the history of medicine and public health, returns to print in this attractive paperback editon for students, scholars, and practitioners.

Conquering Sickness

Conquering Sickness
Author: Mark Allan Goldberg
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2017-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 0803295820

Published through the Early American Places initiative, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Conquering Sickness presents a comprehensive analysis of race, health, and colonization in a specific cross-cultural contact zone in the Texas borderlands between 1780 and 1861. Throughout this eighty-year period, ordinary health concerns shaped cross-cultural interactions during Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo colonization. Historians have shown us that Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo American settlers in the contested borderlands read the environment to determine how to live healthy, productive lives. Colonizers similarly outlined a culture of healthy living by observing local Native and Mexican populations. For colonists, Texas residents' so-called immorality--evidenced by their "indolence," "uncleanliness," and "sexual impropriety"--made them unhealthy. In the Spanish and Anglo cases, the state made efforts to reform Indians into healthy subjects by confining them in missions or on reservations. Colonists' views of health were taken as proof of their own racial superiority, on the one hand, and of Native and Mexican inferiority, on the other, and justified the various waves of conquest. As in other colonial settings, however, the medical story of Texas colonization reveals colonial contradictions. Mark Allan Goldberg analyzes how colonizing powers evaluated, incorporated, and discussed local remedies. Conquering Sickness reveals how health concerns influenced cross-cultural relations, negotiations, and different forms of state formation. Focusing on Texas, Goldberg examines the racialist thinking of the region in order to understand evolving concepts of health, race, and place in the nineteenth century borderlands.

Born to Die

Born to Die
Author: Noble David Cook
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 1998-02-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521627306

The biological mingling of the Old and New Worlds began with the first voyage of Columbus. The exchange was a mixed blessing: it led to the disappearance of entire peoples in the Americas, but it also resulted in the rapid expansion and consequent economic and military hegemony of Europeans. Amerindians had never before experienced the deadly Eurasian sicknesses brought by the foreigners in wave after wave: smallpox, measles, typhus, plague, influenza, malaria, yellow fever. These diseases literally conquered the Americas before the sword could be unsheathed. From 1492 to 1650, from Hudson's Bay in the north to southernmost Tierra del Fuego, disease weakened Amerindian resistance to outside domination. The Black Legend, which attempts to place all of the blame of the injustices of conquest on the Spanish, must be revised in light of the evidence that all Old World peoples carried, though largely unwittingly, the germs of the destruction of American civilization.

The Conquest of Malaria

The Conquest of Malaria
Author: Frank M. Snowden
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2008-10-01
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0300128436

At the outset of the twentieth century, malaria was Italy’s major public health problem. It was the cause of low productivity, poverty, and economic backwardness, while it also stunted literacy, limited political participation, and undermined the army. In this book Frank Snowden recounts how Italy became the world center for the development of malariology as a medical discipline and launched the first national campaign to eradicate the disease. Snowden traces the early advances, the setbacks of world wars and Fascist dictatorship, and the final victory against malaria after World War II. He shows how the medical and teaching professions helped educate people in their own self-defense and in the process expanded trade unionism, women’s consciousness, and civil liberties. He also discusses the antimalarial effort under Mussolini’s regime and reveals the shocking details of the German army’s intentional release of malaria among Italian civilians—the first and only known example of bioterror in twentieth-century Europe. Comprehensive and enlightening, this history offers important lessons for today’s global malaria emergency.

Epidemic Illusions

Epidemic Illusions
Author: Eugene T Richardson
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2020-12-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0262045605

A physician-anthropologist explores how public health practices--from epidemiological modeling to outbreak containment--help perpetuate global inequities. In Epidemic Illusions, Eugene Richardson, a physician and an anthropologist, contends that public health practices--from epidemiological modeling and outbreak containment to Big Data and causal inference--play an essential role in perpetuating a range of global inequities. Drawing on postcolonial theory, medical anthropology, and critical science studies, Richardson demonstrates the ways in which the flagship discipline of epidemiology has been shaped by the colonial, racist, and patriarchal system that had its inception in 1492. Deploying a range of rhetorical tools and drawing on his clinical work in a variety of epidemics, including Ebola in West Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo, leishmania in the Sudan, HIV/TB in southern Africa, diphtheria in Bangladesh, and SARS-CoV-2 in the United States, Richardson concludes that the biggest epidemic we currently face is an epidemic of illusions—one that is propagated by the coloniality of knowledge production.

Epidemics and Society

Epidemics and Society
Author: Frank M. Snowden
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 603
Release: 2019-10-22
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0300249144

A wide-ranging study that illuminates the connection between epidemic diseases and societal change, from the Black Death to Ebola This sweeping exploration of the impact of epidemic diseases looks at how mass infectious outbreaks have shaped society, from the Black Death to today. In a clear and accessible style, Frank M. Snowden reveals the ways that diseases have not only influenced medical science and public health, but also transformed the arts, religion, intellectual history, and warfare. A multidisciplinary and comparative investigation of the medical and social history of the major epidemics, this volume touches on themes such as the evolution of medical therapy, plague literature, poverty, the environment, and mass hysteria. In addition to providing historical perspective on diseases such as smallpox, cholera, and tuberculosis, Snowden examines the fallout from recent epidemics such as HIV/AIDS, SARS, and Ebola and the question of the world’s preparedness for the next generation of diseases.

Plagues and Peoples

Plagues and Peoples
Author: William McNeill
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2010-10-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0307773663

The history of disease is the history of humankind: an interpretation of the world as seen through the extraordinary impact—political, demographic, ecological, and psychological—of disease on cultures. "A book of the first importance, a truly revolutionary work." —The New Yorker From the conquest of Mexico by smallpox as much as by the Spanish, to the bubonic plague in China, to the typhoid epidemic in Europe, Plagues and Peoples is "a brilliantly conceptualized and challenging achievement" (Kirkus Reviews). Upon its original publication, Plagues and Peoples was an immediate critical and popular success, offering a radically new interpretation of world history. With the identification of AIDS in the early 1980s, another chapter was added to this chronicle of events, which William McNeill explores in his introduction to this edition. Thought-provoking, well-researched, and compulsively readable, Plagues and Peoples is essential reading—that rare book that is as fascinating as it is scholarly, as intriguing as it is enlightening.

Splendid Solution

Splendid Solution
Author: Jeffrey Kluger
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2006-02-07
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1440684650

The compelling true story of Dr. Jonas Salk's quest to develop a vaccine for polio. In 1916, the United States was hit with one of the worst polio epidemics in history. The disease was a terrifying enigma: striking out of nowhere, it afflicted tens of thousands of children and left them—literally overnight—paralyzed. Others it simply killed. At the same time, a child named Jonas Salk was born.... When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was diagnosed with polio shortly before assuming the Presidency, Salk was given an impetus to study this deadly illness. After assisting in the creation of an influenza vaccine, Salk took up the challenge. His progress in combating the virus was hindered by the politics of medicine and by a rival researcher determined to discredit his proposed solution. But Salk's perseverance made history—and for close to seventy years his vaccine has saved countless lives, bringing humanity close to eradicating polio throughout the world. Splendid Solution chronicles Dr. Salk's race against time to achieve an unparalleled breakthrough that made him a cultural hero and icon of modern medicine.

Pox Americana

Pox Americana
Author: Elizabeth A. Fenn
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2002-10-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780809078219

A horrifying epidemic of smallpox was sweeping across the Americas when the War of Independence began, and yet little is known about it. Fenn reveals how deeply "variola" affected the outcome of the war in every colony and the lives of everyone in North America. Illustrations.