by PhilipAlcabes (Author)
This comprehensive, fascinating journey through the history of epidemics focuses on the less-told story of how societies have responded to them - and what those responses reveal about their fears, their believes, and their times. When most of us hear the word epidemic, we think plague, festering wounds, unmitigated disease followed by death. A bout of SARS virtually shut down travel to Asia, the avian flu inspired farmers to kill thousands of animals, fearing human infection. Even at our most level-headed, the thought of an epidemic inspires a shudder of fear: it could happen to me. I could die unfairly, in a sweep of death carried in the wind. In Dread , Philip Alcabes journeys through the history of epidemics, from the ancients to the present, to reveal how, more often than being pervasive threats, epidemics offer an accurate litmus test of our times, and our greatest fears. Inarguably, plagues have swept across continents and decimated populations: Alcabes isn't challenging history. But through his research he carefully and deftly reveals how epidemics have been responsible for misplaced fears, and in recent years, imagined ones. With the black death of the 14th century that decimated European populations came new fears of strangers, poisoning and evil. In the Rhineland and parts of modern France and Switzerland, Christians hunted and burned Jews to death because they believed them responsible for spreading infestation. By the 18th century, it was thought that miasma, or bad air was responsible for the spread of deadly disease. By the 19th century, germ theory had arrived, and at last people could see the threats of diseases like cholera and tuberculosis. And with the practical identification of germs came a new host of enemies, from the Typhoid Marys of the early day, to more modern fears of bioterrorist outbreaks led by Muslim terrorist cells. As diseases are born and outbreaks unleashed, new fears surface, new enemies are born, and new behaviours inevitably emerge. What, for example, do we really mean when we talk about the 'obesity epidemic?' Dread dissects the fascinating story of the imagined epidemic: the one that we think is happening, or might happen; the one that frightens us, disguises moral meanings and political agendas and, at heart, reveals the deep seated fear within us all.
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs,U.S.
Published: 24 Mar 2009
ISBN 10: 1586486187
ISBN 13: 9781586486181
Book Overview: Dread : The Imagined Epidemic
Barry Glassner, author of The Gospel of Food and The Culture of Fear
Exceptionally insightful and persuasively argued, Dread is at once a chronicle of the uses and (more often) abuses of the term epidemic and an antidote to the modern tendency to transmute fears of strangers and societal and personal failings into diseases.
Harriet Washington, author of Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present
Dread is an insightful education in how art and science inform each other in a cultural synergy that, even today, keeps us from discerning what is medicine and what is myth. The word genius has been debased by frequent use, but this is a work of undeniable genius in the most exalted sense. What Stephen Jay Gould did for natural history, Philip Alcabes has done for public health.
SEED Magazine, April book pick
With its analysis of historical and modern epidemics, both real and imagined, Dread convinces that the fear can be worse than the disease.
Publishers Weekly, STARRED review 3/30
An engrossing, revealing account of the relationship between progress and plague.
BBC's Focus Magazine
The horrifying notion of epidemic disease is so ingrained that you will be halfway through this intriguing book before you realize just how hysterical we all are.
Spiked
(This) spookily timely book, published just as the swine flu panic kicked in, does a brilliant job of exposing the social factors behind our dread of disease and encouraging healthy scepticism towards claims of 'epidemics