Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence

by Edited by Terence Ranger , Paul Slack

• ISBN13: 9780521558310
• ISBN10: 052155831X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1996-01-26
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

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.