Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism

by: Watts, S.

Price: 28,17 EURO

1 copy in stock

This book is a major and wide-ranging study of the great epidemic scourges of humanity―plague, leprosy, smallpox, syphilis, cholera, and yellow fever/malaria―over the last six centuries. It is also much more. Sheldon Watts, a cultural and social historian who has spent much of his career studying and teaching in the world?s South, applies a wholly original perspective to the study of global disease, exploring the connections between the movement of epidemics and the manifestations of imperial power in the Americas, Asia, Africa, and in European homelands. He shows how the perceptions of whom a disease targeted changed over time and effected various political and medical responses. He argues that not only did Western medicine fail to cure the diseases that its own expansion engendered, but that imperial medicine was in fact an agent and tool of empire.Watts examines the relationship between the pre-modern and modern medical profession and such epidemic disasters as the plague in western Europe and the Middle East; leprosy in the medieval West and in the nineteenth-century tropical world; the spread of smallpox to the New World in the age of exploration; syphilis and nonsexual diseases in Europe?s connection with Asia; cholera in India during British rule; and malaria in the Atlantic Basin during the eras of slavery and Social Darwinism. He investigates in detail the relation between violent environmental changes and disease, and between disease and society, both in the material sphere and in the minds and spirits of rulers and ruled. This book will become the standard account of the way diseases―arising through chance, through reckless environmental change engineered by man, or through a combination of each―were interpreted in Western Europe and in the colonized world

The human response to plague in Western Europe and the Middle East, 1347 to 1844
Dark hidden meanings: leprosy and lepers in the medieval west and in the tropical world under the European imperium
Smallpox in the New World and in the Old: from holocaust to eradication, 1518 to 1977
The secret plague: syphilis in West Europe and East Asia
Cholera and civilization: Great Britain and India
Yellow fever, malaria and development: Atlantic Africa and the New World, 1647 to 1928

Subjects:
Disease Outbreaks
Epidemics
Epidemics History
Epidemics Political aspects
Epidemics Social aspects
Epidémies Histoire
Épidémies Histoire
History
Médecine sociale
Pandémies
Social Medicine
Social medicine

Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism

by: Watts, S.

• ISBN-13: 9780300080872 / 978-0-300-08087-2
• ISBN-03: 0300080875 / 0-300-08087-5
• Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1999

Price: 28,17 EURO

1 copy in stock