Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence (Past and Present Publications)

Cambridge University Press, 11/30/1995
EAN 9780521558310, ISBN10: 052155831X

Paperback, 358 pages, 21.6 x 14 x 2.3 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English

From 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.

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.