Epidemics and History
About this book
This book is a major and wide-ranging study of the great epidemic scourges of humanityâplague, leprosy, smallpox, syphilis, cholera, and yellow fever/malariaâover the last six centuries. It is also much more. Sheldon Watts 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 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 Europeâs connection with Asia; cholera in India during British rule; and malaria in the Atlantic Basin during the eras of slavery and Social Darwinism. This book will become the standard account of the way diseasesâarising through chance, through reckless environmental change engineered by man, or through a combination of eachâwere interpreted in Western Europe and in the colonized world, and offers an interesting historical perspective for a world dealing with the spread of COVID-19.
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Information
Table of contents
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1. The Human Response to Plague in Western Europe and the Middle East, 1347 to 1844
- 2. Dark Hidden Meanings: Leprosy and Lepers in the Medieval West and in the Tropical World under the European Imperium
- 3. Smallpox in the New World and in the Old: From Holocaust to Eradication, 1518 to 1977
- 4. The Secret Plague: Syphilis in West Europe and East Asia, 1492, to 1965
- 5. Cholera and Civilization: Great Britain and India, 1817 to 1920
- 6. Yellow Fever, Malaria and Development: Atlantic Africa and the New World, 1647 to 1928
- 7. Afterword: To the Epidemiologic Transition?
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index