Originally published in 1943, Civilization and Disease was based on a series of lectures that the medical historian Henry E. Sigerist delivered at Cornell University in 1940. Now back in print, the book is a wide-ranging account of the importance of social factors on health and illness and the impact that disease has had on societies throughout human history. Despite considerable advances in both medicine and historiography, Civilization and Disease remains a landmark work in the history of medicine and a fascinating look at, first, civilization as a factor in the genesis and spread of disease, and second, the effects of disease on such aspects of civilization as economics, social life, law, philosophy, religion, science, and the arts. In a new foreword written for this edition, Elizabeth Fee outlines Sigerist’s life, works, and legacy as a historian, a teacher, and an advocate for universal health care, hailing Civilization and Disease as "an excellent introduction to Sigerist’s work."

Diet books contribute to a $60-billion industry as they speak to the 45 million Americans who diet every year. Yet these books don’t just tell readers what to eat: they offer complete philosophies about who Americans are and how we should live. Diet and the Disease of Civilization interrupts the predictable debate about eating right to ask a hard question: what if it’s not calories—but concepts—that should be counted? Cultural critic Adrienne Rose Bitar reveals how four popular diets retell the “Fall of Man” as the narrative backbone for our national consciousness. Intensifying the moral panic of the obesity epidemic, they depict civilization itself as a disease and offer diet as the one true cure. Bitar reads each diet—the Paleo Diet, the Garden of Eden Diet, the Pacific Island Diet, the detoxification or detox diet—as both myth and manual, a story with side effects shaping social movements, driving industry, and constructing fundamental ideas about sickness and health. Diet and the Disease of Civilization unearths the ways in which diet books are actually utopian manifestos not just for better bodies, but also for a healthier society and a more perfect world.

Disease and Civilization explores the scientific and political ramifications of the great cholera epidemic of 1832, showing how its course and its conceptualization were affected by the social power relations of the time. The epidemic which claimed the lives of 18,000 people in Paris alone, was a watershed in the history of medicine: In France, it shook the complacency of a medical establishment that thought it had the means to prevent any onslaught and led to a revolution in the concept of public health.Francois Delaporte teaches at the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico.

Vilhjalmur Stefansson has had the extraordinary privilege and the rare merit to know intimately certain segments of the world which will always be strange to most of us. He has had the alertness to note details, to make correlations which would have escaped others. He has been unhampered by professional or even by lay prejudices. And he has a gift for expressing the ideas which his observations have evoked. The story which he presents in this book is a fascinating one. Here is the sort of thing we call basic research, just as much so as if it were being conducted in the latest of laboratories. Here are the data from a series of experiments which Nature has performed for us—in the Arctic northland, in the tropic forests of Gabon, and in the temperate valley of Hunzaland. She has varied a series of environmental factors yet come up with a like result in the three places, and a result which she has produced, so far as we know, only in those three special combinations of environments, not in any other of her myriads of combinations elsewhere. What have these three in common, that they produce this result, so important to us? Nature will not repeat those experiments. And we will not have another Stefansson to read the data and present them to us. I hope, therefore, that what he has to say will be read carefully and pondered deeply.

Civilized nations popularly assume that "primitive" societies are poor, ill, and malnourished and that progress through civilization automatically implies improved health. In this provocative new book, Mark Nathan Cohen challenges this belief. Using evidence from epidemiology, anthropology, and archaeology, Cohen provides fascinating evidence about the actual effects of civilization on health, suggesting that some aspects of civilization create as many health problems as they prevent or cure. " This book] is certain to become a classic-a prominent and respected source on this subject for years into the future. . . . If you want to read something that will make you think, reflect and reconsider, Cohen's Health and the Rise of Civilization is for you."-S. Boyd Eaton, Los Angeles Times Book Review "A major accomplishment. Cohen is a broad and original thinker who states his views in direct and accessible prose. . . . This is a book that should be read by everyone interested in disease, civilization, and the human condition."-David Courtwright, Journal of the History of Medicine "Deserves to be read by anthropologists concerned with health, medical personnel responsible for communities, and any medical anthropologists whose minds are not too case-hardened. Indeed, it could provide great profit and entertainment to the general reader."-George T. Nurse, Current Anthropology "Cohen has done his homework extraordinarily well, and the coverage of the biomedical, nutritional, demographic, and ethnographic literature about foragers and low energy agriculturists is excellent. The subject of culture and health is near the core of a lot of areas of archaeology and ethnology as well as demography, development economics, and so on. The book deserves a wide readership and a central place in our professional libraries. As a scholarly summary it is without parallel."-Henry Harpending, American Ethnologist