The threat of unstoppable plagues, such as AIDS and Ebola, is always with us. In Europe, the most devastating plagues were those from the Black Death pandemic in the 1300s to the Great Plague of ...London in 1665. For the last 100 years, it has been accepted that Yersinia pestis, the infective agent of bubonic plague, was responsible for these epidemics. This book combines modern concepts of epidemiology and molecular biology with computer-modelling. Applying these to the analysis of historical epidemics, the authors show that they were not, in fact, outbreaks of bubonic plague. Biology of Plagues offers a completely new interdisciplinary interpretation of the plagues of Europe and establishes them within a geographical, historical and demographic framework. This fascinating detective work will be of interest to readers in the social and biological sciences, and lessons learnt will underline the implications of historical plagues for modern-day epidemiology.
Quack, conjurer, sex fiend, murderer—Simon Forman has been called all these things, and worse, ever since he was implicated (two years after his death) in the Overbury poisoning scandal that rocked ...the court of King James. But as Barbara Traister shows in this fascinating book, Forman's own unpublished manuscripts—considered here in their entirety for the first time—paint a quite different picture of the works and days of this notorious astrological physician of London. Although he received no formal medical education, Forman built a thriving practice. His success rankled the College of Physicians of London, who hounded Forman with fines and jail terms for nearly two decades. In addition to detailing case histories of his medical practice—the first such records known from London—as well as his run-ins with the College, Forman's manuscripts cover a wide variety of other matters, from astrology and alchemy to gardening and the theater. His autobiographical writings are among the earliest English examples of their genre and display an abiding passion for reworking his personal history in the best possible light, even though they show little evidence that Forman ever intended to publish them. Fantastic as many of Forman's manuscripts are, it is their more mundane aspects that make them such a priceless record of what daily life was like for ordinary inhabitants of Shakespeare's London. Forman's descriptions of the stench of a privy, the paralyzed limbs of a child, a lost bitch dog with a velvet collar all offer tantalizing glimpses of a world that seems at once very far away and intimately familiar. Anyone who wants to reclaim that world will enjoy this book.
For fifty years, Theodore Turquet de Mayerne served as a royal physician in France and then in England. Historians have long recognised him as a brilliant practitioner and chemical Galenist, but this ...book is the first major study of his remarkable Latin casebooks, the 'Ephemerides Morborum' (Diaries of Disease).
This 1997 book provides a penetrating account of death and disease in England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Using a wide range of sources for the south-east of England, the author ...highlights the tremendous variation in levels of mortality across geographical contours and across two centuries. She explores the epidemiological causes and consequences of these mortality variations, and offers the reader a fascinating insight into the way patients and practitioners perceived, understood and reacted to the multitude of fevers, poxes and plagues in past times. She examines, in particular, the significance of malaria in English demographic history, and provides a detailed account of the history of this once endemic disease. This broad-ranging and stimulating study will be of interest to historical demographers, medical historians, geographers and epidemiologists.
ESEl 26 de febrero de este año 2015 el ámbito de la cultura se vio sacudido por la noticia del ataque a la biblioteca y el museo de Mosul. Los yihadistas del Estado Islámico destrozaron valiosas ...obras artísticas del patrimonio histórico iraquí. En otras ocasiones históricas el fanatismo religioso ha sido responsable de catástrofes culturales similares; entre ellas está la que se produjo en España a partir, entre otros, de un informe científico realizado por intelectuales de las universidades de Salamanca y Alcalá. El documento en que me baso se titula "Copia de los pareceres y censuras de los reuerendissimos padres maestros, y señores catredaticos de las insignes Vniuersidades de Salamanca y Alcala y de otras personas doctas sobre el abuso de las figuras y pinturas lasciuas y deshonestas: en que se muestra que es pecado mortal pintarlas, esculpirlas y tenerlas patentes donde sean vistas". Todos los autores que se han referido a él lo hacen para hablar de su contenido. Yo ahora lo haré refiriéndome a un despiste en la transcripción que ofreció Calvo Serraller, que permite sugerir matices interpretativos, y al hecho de que fueran profesores los opinantes.
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