The Burdens of Disease: Epidemics and Human Response in Western History

The Burdens of Disease is a comprehensive and sweeping history of disease that chronicles perceptions and responses to plague and pestilence over two thousand years of western history.

This book provides a multi-dimensional construct of disease, situated at the intersection of history, politics, culture, and medicine, and rooted in mentalities and social relations as much as in biological conditions of pathology.

The author shows how diseases affect social and political change, reveal social tensions, and are mediated both within and outside the realm of scientific medicine. The book covers a wide range of dramatic epidemics from leprosy and bubonic plague to syphilis, smallpox, cholera, tuberculosis, influenza, poliomyelitis, and AIDS, as well as the devastating exchange of diseases between cultures and continents during the age of exploration.

The author also examines disease through the lenses of medical theory, public health, folk traditions, and government response. The history of epidemics is also the history of their victims, and the book pays close attention to the relationships between poverty and power and disease.

The author uses contemporary case studies to argue that diseases concentrate their pathological effects on the poor, while elites associate the cause of disease with the culture and habits of the poor. This updated edition includes revisions and additions to the original content, including the evolution of drug-resistant diseases and expanded coverage of HIV/AIDS, along with recent data on mortality figures.

Don't miss out on this comprehensive and thought-provoking history of disease that will change the way you think about health and society.