This book shows how contagionism evolved in eighteenth century Britain and describes the consequences of this evolution. By the late eighteenth century, the British medical profession was divided between traditionalists, who attributed acute diseases to the interaction of internal imbalances with external factors such as weather, and reformers, who blamed contagious pathogens. The reformers, who were often “outsiders,” English Nonconformists or men born outside England, emerged from three coincidental transformations: transformation in medical ideas, in the nature and content of medical education, and in the sort of men who became physicians. Adopting contagionism led them to see acute diseases as separate entities, spurring a process that reoriented medical research, changed communities, established new medical institutions, and continues to the present day.

A revealing look at how the memory of the plague held the poor responsible for epidemic disease in eighteenth-century Britain Britain had no idea that it would not see another plague after the horrors of 1666, and for a century and a half the fear of epidemic disease gripped and shaped British society. Plague doctors had long asserted that the bodies of the poor were especially prone to generating and spreading contagious disease, and British doctors and laypeople alike took those warnings to heart, guiding medical ideas of class throughout the eighteenth century. Dense congregations of the poor--in workhouses, hospitals, slums, courtrooms, markets, and especially prisons--were rendered sites of immense danger in the public imagination, and the fear that small outbreaks might run wild became a profound cultural force. Extensively researched, with a wide body of evidence, this book offers a fascinating look at how class was constructed physiologically and provides a new connection between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries and the ravages of plague and cholera, respectively.

Examines British engagement with the Mediterranean quarantine system to show how fear of disease drew Britain into a Continental biopolity.

This first full study of Erasmus Darwin's gardening, horticulture and agriculture shows he was as keen a nature enthusiast as his grandson Charles, and demonstrates the ways in which his landscape experiences transformed his understanding of nature.

The research of pandemics, epidemics, and pathogens like COVID-19 reaches far beyond the scope of biomedicine. It is not only an objective for the health, political and social sciences, but epidemics and pandemics are a matter of geography: foci and vectors of communicable diseases continue to test the efficacy of medical control at state borders. This volume illuminates these issues from various disciplinary viewpoints. It starts by exploring historical models of quarantine, spatial isolation and detention as precautionary means against the dissemination of disease and contagion by border crossers, migrants and refugees. Besides the patterns of prejudice with which these groups are confronted, the book also deals with various kinds of fear of contamination from outside of the nation state. The contributors address the implementation of medical techniques at state borders in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as well as the presently practiced measures of medical and biometric screening of migrants and refugees. Uniquely, this volume shows that the current border security regimes of Western states exhibit a high share of medicalised techniques of power, which originate both in European modernity and in the medical and biological disciplines developed during the last quarter of the millennium. Drawing on the collective expertise of a network of international researchers, this interdisciplinary volume is essential reading for those wishing to understand the medicalisation of borders across the globe, from the early eighteenth century up to the present day.

Ninety years after the discovery of human influenza virus, Modern Flu traces the history of this breakthrough and its implications for understanding and controlling influenza ever since. Examining how influenza came to be defined as a viral disease in the first half of the twentieth century, it argues that influenza’s viral identity did not suddenly appear with the discovery of the first human influenza virus in 1933. Instead, it was rooted in the development of medical virus research and virological ways of knowing that grew out of a half-century of changes and innovations in medical science that were shaped through two influenza pandemics, two world wars, and by state-sponsored programs to scientifically modernise British medicine. A series of transformations, in which virological ideas and practices were aligned with and incorporated into medicine and public health, underpinned the viralisation of influenza in the 1930s and 1940s. Collaboration, conflict and exchange between researchers, medical professionals and governmental bodies lay at the heart of this process. This book is a history of how virus researchers, clinicians, and epidemiologists, medical scientific and public health bodies, and institutions, and philanthropies in Britain, the USA and beyond, forged a new medical consensus on the identity and nature of influenza. Shedding new light on the modern history of influenza, this book is a timely account of how ways of knowing and controlling this intractable epidemic disease became viral.

This edited collection explores disease transmission and the ways that the designed environment has promoted or limited its spread. It discusses the many design factors that can be used for infection and disease control through lenses of history, public health, building technology, design, and education. This book calls on designers to consider the role of the built environment as the primary source of bacterial, viral, and fungal transfers through fomites, ventilation systems, and overcrowding and spatial organization. Through 19 original contributions, it provides an array of perspectives to understand how the designed environment may offer a reprieve from disease. The authors build a historical foundation of infection and disease, using examples ranging from lazarettos to leprosy centers to show how the ability to control infection and disease has long been a concern for humanity. The book goes on to discuss disease propagation, putting forth a variety of ideas to control the transmission of pathogens, including environmental design strategies, pedestrian dynamics, and open space. Its final chapters serve as a prospective way forward, focusing on COVID-19 and the built environment in a post-pandemic world. Written for students and academics of architecture, design, and urban planning, this book ignites creative action on the ways to design our built environment differently and more holistically. Please note that research on COVID-19 has exponentially grown since this volume was written in October 2020. References cited reflect the evolving nature of research studies at that time.

The idea of contagious transmission, either by material particles or by infectious ideas, has played a powerful role in the development of the Western World since antiquity. Yet it acquired quite a precise signature during the process of scientific and cultural differentiation in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This volume explores the significance and cultural functions of contagionism in this period, from notions of infectious homosexuality and the concept of social contagion to the political implications of bacteriological fieldwork. The history of the concept ‘microbe’ in aesthetic modernism is adressed as well as bacteriological metaphors in American literary historiography. Within this broad framework, contagionism as a literary narrative is approached in more focussed contributions: from its emotional impact in literary modernism to the idea of physical or psychic contagion in authors such as H.G. Wells, Kurt Lasswitz, Gustav Meyrinck, Ernst Weiss, Thomas Mann and Max Frisch. This twofold approach of general topics and individual literary case studies produces a deeper understanding of the symbolic implications of contagionism marking the boundaries between sick and healthy, familiar and alien, morally pure and impure.

Scabies is a parasitic disease caused by the human itch mite Sarcoptes scabiei, which burrows through the skin leading to an intensely itchy rash. The scabies mite, which is just smaller than can be visualized by the naked eye (to most), mates and lays eggs in the human skin which hatch and mature, thereby propagating its life cycle. A diagnosis of scabies causes many patients anxiety and consternation. The Itch: Scabies details the essential clinic details of scabies - what it is, how to diagnose it, how to treat it, and examines common pitfalls in its recognition and cure. The methods of transmission of scabies and its level of contagiousness are also discussed in detail. Accounts of scabies date back to antiquity; this book reveals a history which is replete with medical and scientific missteps. The scabies mite was in fact the first infectious organism to ever be discovered, which represents a underrecognized landmark in the development of modern medicine. In spite of this, however, because it cannot be easily studied in the lab, our current knowledge of scabies is somewhat limited. Much of our current clinical understanding of scabies derives from a most unusual set of human experiments performed on conscientious objectors by Kenneth Mellanby in Britain during World War II. Through its use of clinical vignettes and images, this book brings the fascinating story of scabies to light and will be of interest to medical practitioners, historians of medicine, and the general public alike.

A sweeping germ’s-eye view of history from human origins to global pandemics Plagues upon the Earth is a monumental history of humans and their germs. Weaving together a grand narrative of global history with insights from cutting-edge genetics, Kyle Harper explains why humanity’s uniquely dangerous disease pool is rooted deep in our evolutionary past, and why its growth is accelerated by technological progress. He shows that the story of disease is entangled with the history of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism, and reveals the enduring effects of historical plagues in patterns of wealth, health, power, and inequality. He also tells the story of humanity’s escape from infectious disease—a triumph that makes life as we know it possible, yet destabilizes the environment and fosters new diseases. Panoramic in scope, Plagues upon the Earth traces the role of disease in the transition to farming, the spread of cities, the advance of transportation, and the stupendous increase in human population. Harper offers a new interpretation of humanity’s path to control over infectious disease—one where rising evolutionary threats constantly push back against human progress, and where the devastating effects of modernization contribute to the great divergence between societies. The book reminds us that human health is globally interdependent—and inseparable from the well-being of the planet itself. Putting the COVID-19 pandemic in perspective, Plagues upon the Earth tells the story of how we got here as a species, and it may help us decide where we want to go.