Argues that epidemics, sporadic outbursts of bizarre behaviour and low fertility and high death rates from the 14th to the 18th centuries may have been caused by food poisoning from microfungi in brea
Civilized nations popularly assume that 'primitive' societies are poor, ill, and malnourished and that progress through civilization automatically implies improved health. In this provocative book, Ma
"After reading this book, no one should fail to see tuberculosis in South Africa in the light of social policies and interests which have prevented its control. In turn, it shows tuberculosis to be on
This book is a quantitative study of relocation costs among European soldiers in the tropics between about 1815 and 1914. This study, however, has broader implications. For Europe itself, this was the crucial century of the 'mortality revolution', with its profound influence on European and world demographic history. For the history of medicine, this was the transitional century between the kind of medicine that had been practiced in Europe since classical times and the kind of scientific medicine that would be spawned by the germ theory of disease. For Europe's global, political and military relations, this was the final period for the European conquest. For all these reasons, the relocation costs of this period have great bearing on human history.
Physician to the World by John M. Gibson is a study of the career of William Crawford Gorgas, focusing primarily on the 22 years from the Spanish-American War until his death at the age of 65. The boo
This book is an expanded version of the Kahn's widely used text, An Introduction to Epidemiologic Methods (Oxford, 1983). It provides clear insight into the basic statistical tools used in epidemiolo
The sixth edition of an educational handbook revised and updated in 1992 that has become a standard text for training teachers in the health sciences. Unorthodox in its approach, the book challenges t
Cholera was the classic epidemic disease of the nineteenth century, as the plague had been for the fourteenth. Its defeat was a reflection not only of progress in medical knowledge but of enduring ch
In The White Plague, Rene and Jean Dubos argue that the great increase of tuberculosis was intimately connected with the rise of an industrial, urbanized society and—a much more controversial idea whe
The Medicolegal Library is the first and only series of its kind. Its importance is self-evident. During the last decade, science, especial- ly medical practice, has become an increasingly complex und
T'zu's The Washing Away of Wrongs (Hsi yüan chi lu), printed in 1247, is the oldest extant book on forensic medicine in the world. Written as a guide for magistrates in conducting in
By the late fall of 1630, the Black Plague had descended upon northern Italy. The prentice Magistry of Public Health, centered in Florence, took steps to contain and combat the scourge. In this essay,
"Of protean diseases," wrote Sir Clifford Albutt, Cambridge Regius Professor of Physic in 1907, "influenza is the most protean." Summing up medical experience of the disease over the long nineteenth c
