Epidemics and history : disease, power, and imperialism
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Epidemics and history : disease, power, and imperialism
Yale University Press, c1997
Available at 25 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [368]-384) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
A wide ranging study of the great epidemic scourges of humanity - plague, leprosy. smallpox, syphilis, cholera and yellow fever/malaria - over the last six centuries. Sheldon Watts, applies his 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 shows how the perceptions of whom a disease targeted changed over time and effected various political and medical responses. 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 medical profession and such epidemic disasters as the plague in western Europe and the Middle East; leprosy in the medieval west and in the 19th-century tropical world; the spread of smallpox to the new world in the age of exploration; syphilis and nonsexual diseases in Europe's connection with Asia; cholera in India during British rule; and malaria in the Atlantic basin during the eras of slavery and social Darwinism.
He investigates in detail the relation between violent environmental changes and disease, and between disease and society, both in the material sphere and in the minds and spirit of rulers and those who where ruled. This book is an account of the way diseases - arising through chance, through reckless environmental change engineered by man, or through a combination of each - were interpreted in western Europe and in the colonized world.
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