Disease has plagued human civilisations throughout history, claiming more lives than natural disasters and warfare combined. The Black Death took the lives of one third of Europe's population in the fourteenth century. The conquest of the New World was accompanied by devastating waves of smallpox. The Industrial Revolution happened in a world blighted by the diseases of urbanisation and overcrowding, typhoid and cholera, typhus and TB. New diseases such as AIDS, Ebola, and COVID-19 present further challenges to medical science and healthcare. A Short History of Disease chronicles the historical and geographical evolution of infectious and non-infectious diseases, from their prehistoric origins to the present. It offers a comprehensive guide to ailments and the medicines developed to combat them. Analysing case studies - including the Black Death, Spanish Flu, cholera, leprosy, syphilis, cancer, and Ebola - Sean Martin maps the growth of our understanding of disease. The book offers a fascinating insight into an important area of social history, providing an accessible introduction to disease and the ongoing quest to protect human health. The second edition contains an afterword on COVID-19, looking at the origins and nature of the virus, and how governments across the globe dealt with the most serious public health emergency in a century.

Erwin H. Ackerknecht’s A Short History of Medicine is a concise narrative, long appreciated by students in the history of medicine, medical students, historians, and medical professionals as well as all those seeking to understand the history of medicine. Covering the broad sweep of discoveries from parasitic worms to bacilli and x-rays, and highlighting physicians and scientists from Hippocrates and Galen to Pasteur, Koch, and Roentgen, Ackerknecht narrates Western and Eastern civilization’s work at identifying and curing disease. He follows these discoveries from the library to the bedside, hospital, and laboratory, illuminating how basic biological sciences interacted with clinical practice over time. But his story is more than one of laudable scientific and therapeutic achievement. Ackerknecht also points toward the social, ecological, economic, and political conditions that shape the incidence of disease. Improvements in health, Ackerknecht argues, depend on more than laboratory knowledge: they also require that we improve the lives of ordinary men and women by altering social conditions such as poverty and hunger. This revised and expanded edition includes a new foreword and concluding biographical essay by Charles E. Rosenberg, Ackerknecht’s former student and a distinguished historian of medicine. A new bibliographic essay by Lisa Haushofer explores recent scholarship in the history of medicine. -- Charles E. Rosenberg, Harvard University, author of Our Present Complaint: American Medicine, Then and Now

The Routledge History of Disease draws on innovative scholarship in the history of medicine to explore the challenges involved in writing about health and disease throughout the past and across the globe, presenting a varied range of case studies and perspectives on the patterns, technologies and narratives of disease that can be identified in the past and that continue to influence our present. Organized thematically, chapters examine particular forms and conceptualizations of disease, covering subjects from leprosy in medieval Europe and cancer screening practices in twentieth-century USA to the ayurvedic tradition in ancient India and the pioneering studies of mental illness that took place in nineteenth-century Paris, as well as discussing the various sources and methods that can be used to understand the social and cultural contexts of disease. Chapter 24 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315543420.ch24

This book shows how bubonic plague and smallpox helped end the Hittite Empire, the Bronze Age in the Near East and later the Carthaginian Empire. The book will examine all the possible infectious diseases present in ancient times and show that life was a daily struggle for survival either avoiding or fighting against these infectious disease epidemics. The book will argue that infectious disease epidemics are a critical link in the chain of causation for the demise of most civilizations in the ancient world and that ancient historians should no longer ignore them, as is currently the case.

In this lively, learned, and wholly engrossing volume, F. González-Crussi presents a brief yet authoritative five-hundred-year history of the science, the philosophy, and the controversies of modern medicine. While this illuminating work mainly explores Western medicine over the past five centuries, González-Crussi also describes how modern medicine’s roots extend to both Greco-Roman antiquity and Eastern medical traditions. Covered here in engaging detail are the birth of anatomy and the practice of dissections; the transformation of surgery from a gruesome art to a sophisticated medical specialty; a short history of infectious diseases; the evolution of the diagnostic process; advances in obstetrics and anesthesia; and modern psychiatric therapies and the challenges facing organized medicine today. González-Crussi’s approach to these and other topics stems from his professed belief that the history of medicine isn’t just a continuum of scientific achievement but is deeply influenced by the personalities of the men and women who made or implemented these breakthroughs. And, as we learn, this field’s greatest practitioners were, like the rest of us, human beings with flaws, weaknesses, and limitations–including some who were scoundrels. Insightful, informed, and at times controversial in its conclusions, A Short History of Medicine offers an exceptional introduction to the major and many minor facets of its subject. Written by a renowned author and educator, this book gives us the very essence of humankind’s search to mitigate suffering, save lives, and unearth the mysteries of the human animal. Praise for F. González-Crussi “What Oliver Sacks does for the mind, González-Crussi [does] for the eye in this captivating set of philosophical meditations on the relationship between the viewer and the viewed.” –Publishers Weekly, on On Seeing “[González-Crussi fuses] science, literature, and personal history into highly civilized artifacts.” –The Washington Post, on There Is a World Elsewhere

Human history is periodically punctuated by natural disasters, from Vesuvius' eruption to the modern-day Covid-19 pandemic. Volcanoes have buried entire cities, earthquakes have reduced structures to smoldering ruins. Floods and cyclones have wreaked havoc on river valleys and coastlines, and desertification and climate change have weakened society's underpinnings. Death tolls are often escalated by starvation and illness, which frequently occur in tandem. This second edition assesses natural disasters on human society and the effect of strategies developed to reduce their impact. This book addresses the interconnectivity of disaster and human responsibility through 23 updated case studies, including a new chapter on the 2011 Tōhoku tsunami and the ensuing Fukushima nuclear disaster.

This is the only health book you will ever need. It is a natural health library in one book. It clearly explains why we lose our health, how we can work to reverse disease conditions, and how we can live a vibrant life free of disease. The author writes from his own experience of regaining his health after finally giving up on many years of pharmaceutical remedies, when he turned to researching natural health solutions. The Disease-Free Revolution gives an easy-to-understand explanation of how the human body is designed to operate, what causes it to malfunction, and what it needs to be able to create health. From almost 20 years of research and citing many doctors and scientific studies, the author shows how the present conventional medical, pharmaceutical, and agribusiness industries are at the base of our present-day escalating disease problems. You will come to understand that money, not your health, is what these industries are mostly about. This is a one of a kind book that speaks boldly to educate people about the facts and empower them to take personal responsibility for their own health care.

“Thrilling . . . a bracing summary of what we have learned [from] ‘archaeogenetics’—the study of ancient DNA . . . Krause and Trappe capture the excitement of this young field.”—Kyle Harper, The Wall Street Journal Johannes Krause is the director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and a brilliant pioneer in the field of archaeogenetics—archaeology augmented by DNA sequencing technology—which has allowed scientists to reconstruct human history reaching back hundreds of thousands of years before recorded time. In this surprising account, Krause and journalist Thomas Trappe rewrite a fascinating chapter of this history, the peopling of Europe, that takes us from the Neanderthals and Denisovans to the present. We know now that a wave of farmers from Anatolia migrated into Europe 8,000 years ago, essentially displacing the dark-skinned, blue-eyed hunter-gatherers who preceded them. This Anatolian farmer DNA is one of the core genetic components of people with contemporary European ancestry. Archaeogenetics has also revealed that indigenous North and South Americans, though long thought to have been East Asian, also share DNA with contemporary Europeans. Krause and Trappe vividly introduce us to the prehistoric cultures of the ancient Europeans: the Aurignacians, innovative artisans who carved flutes and animal and human forms from bird bones more than 40,000 years ago; the Varna, who buried their loved ones with gold long before the Pharaohs of Egypt; and the Gravettians, big-game hunters who were Europe’s most successful early settlers until they perished in the ice age. Genetics has earned a reputation for smuggling racist ideologies into science, but cutting-edge science makes nonsense of eugenics and “pure” bloodlines. Immigration and genetic exchanges have always defined our species; who we are is a question of culture, not biological inheritance. This revelatory book offers us an entirely new way to understand ourselves, both past and present.

A Companion to World History presents over 30 essays from an international group of historians that both identify continuing areas of contention, disagreement, and divergence in world and global history, and point to directions for further debate. Features a diverse cast of contributors that include established world historians and emerging scholars Explores a wide range of topics and themes, including and the practice of world history, key ideas of world historians, the teaching of world history and how it has drawn upon and challenged "traditional" teaching approaches, and global approaches to writing world history Places an emphasis on non-Anglophone approaches to the topic Considers issues of both scholarship and pedagogy on a transnational, interregional, and world/global scale