The Burdens of Disease

by Hays, J. N.

• ISBN13: 9780813525280
• ISBN10: 0813525284
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-09-01
• Publisher: Rutgers Univ Pr

Summary

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 multidimensional 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.

Author Biography

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

Table of Contents

List of Tables
Acknowlegments
Introduction	p. 1
The Western Inheritance: Greek and Roman Ideas about Disease	p. 8
Medieval Diseases and Responses	p. 18
The Great Plague Pandemic	p. 37
New Diseases and Transatlantic Exchanges	p. 62
Continuity and Change: Magic, Religion, Medicine, and Science, 500-1700	p. 78
Disease and the Enlightenment	p. 106
Cholera and Sanitation	p. 135
Tuberculosis and Poverty	p. 154
Disease, Medicine, and Western Imperialism	p. 178
The Scientific View of Disease and the Triumph of Professional Medicine	p. 212
The Apparent End of Epidemics	p. 240
Disease and Power	p. 278
Notes	p. 307
Suggestions for Further Reading	p. 331
Index	p. 345
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