Over the past decades, infectious disease epidemics have come to increasingly pose major global health challenges to humanity. The Anthropology of Epidemics approaches epidemics as total social phenomena: processes and events which encompass and exercise a transformational impac…
The authors of this volume track the social and cultural history of epidemics in the 20th century from the Spanish flu through syphilis, AIDS, Ebola, SARS, and avian influenza. They investigate social responses to collective dangers and ideas about security, examine treatment an…
Epidemics and the health of African nations
News footage of disease in Africa is a familiar sight. Yet these outbreaks are often presented out of context, with no reference to the conditions that have triggered them. MISTRA's new book, Epidemics and the Health of African Nations, aims to redress that. Researchers and prac…
"This volume discusses diseases that affected human and non-human populations in areas stretching from the Red Sea and Egypt to Anatolia, the Balkans, and the Black Sea, in the early modern and modern eras. It tackles various questions of historiography and sources, tests new in…
Examines the emergence and causes of new diseases all over the world, describing a process called "spillover" where illness originates in wild animals before being passed to humans and discusses the potential for the next huge pandemic.
"This compelling new account traces the origins and development of the most dramatic and destructive disease epidemic of modern times. Jacques Pepin looks back to the early twentieth-century events in Africa that triggered the emergence of HIV/AIDS and the subsequent evolution a…
Plagues in World History provides a concise, comparative world history of catastrophic infectious diseases, including plague, smallpox, tuberculosis, cholera, influenza, and AIDS. Geographically, these diseases have spread across the entire globe; temporally, they stretch from t…
Though once relegated to the proverbial dustbin of history, the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic is now widely recognized as the most devastating disease outbreak in recorded history. This cultural history sets out to reconstruct Spaniards' collective experience of the flu, and to trac…