Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism

by SWatts (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  1999

  $33.25

  This book is a major and wide-ranging study of the great epidemic scourges of humanity-plague, leprosy, smallpox, syphilis, cholera, and yellow fever/malaria-over the last six centuries. It will become the standard 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. This trenchant book provides a salutary antidote to world health complacency, past and present. -Roy Porter, The Times (London) Watts' ...mastery of six centuries of Western-influenced infectious disease and sanitation history is impressive. He also writes with authority about the pre-modern and modern medical profession. -Claire Panosian, Los Angeles Times Book Review Watts offers solid, stunning examples of Western idiocy that created superhighways for once-obscure microbes, leading to horrendous epidemics...His is a perspective that Western, particularly Caucasian, policy-makers would do well to comprehend. -Laurie Garrett, Foreign Affairs The convenience of so much history of diseases in one place is obvious. [An] engrossing book. -Gert Brieger, M.D., New England Journal of Medicine An important contribution to our understanding of the history of disease, public health, and imperialism. -Suzanne Austin Alchon, American Historical Review