Download Free Disease And Society In Premodern England Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Disease And Society In Premodern England and write the review.

Disease and Society in Premodern England examines the impact of infectious disease in England from the everyday to pandemics in the period c. 500–c. 1600, with the major focus from the eleventh century onward. Theilmann blends historical research, using a variety of primary sources, with an understanding of disease drawn from current scientific literature to enable a better understanding of how diseases affected society and why they were so difficult to combat in the premodern world. The volume provides a perspective on how society and medicine reacted to "new" diseases, something that remains an issue in the twenty-first century. The "new" diseases of the Late Middle Ages, such as plague, syphilis, and the English Sweat, are viewed as helping to lead to a change in how people viewed disease causation and treatment. In addition to the biology of disease and its relationship with environmental factors, the social, economic, political, religious, and artistic impacts of various diseases are also explored. With discussions on a variety of diseases including leprosy, tuberculosis, malaria, measles, typhus, influenza, and smallpox, this volume is an essential resource for all students and scholars interested in the history of medicine and disease in premodern England.
First modern analysis of the custom of the "royal touch" in the Tudor and Stuart reigns.
Beginning in the mid-19th century tremendous gains were made in the historical struggle with infectious diseases. The emergence of modern medicine and epidemiology, and the establishment of public health measures, helped urban populations overcome a historical death penalty. The conquest of infectious disease has created a human hubris. It is a collective self-delusion that infectious diseases, once exposed to the light of modern medicine, science, and public health would inevitably become eradicated. When these advances began in the mid-19th century the world’s population was under two billion, mostly non-urbanized. At the dawn of the 21st century the world’s population already surpassed seven billion. The world’s once far flung urban populations have exponentially expanded in number, size, and connectivity. Infectious diseases have long benefited from the concentration of human population and their opportunistic abilities to take advantage of their interconnectedness. The struggle between humans and infectious diseases is one in which there is a waxing and waning advantage of one over the other. Human hubris has been challenged since the late 1970s with the prospect that infectious diseases are not eradicated. Concerns have increased since the latter third of the twentieth century that infectious diseases are gaining a new foothold. As pandemics from AIDS to Ebola have increased in frequency, there has also developed a sense that a global pandemic of a much greater magnitude is likely to happen. Tracing the historical record, this book examines the manners in which population concentrations have long been associated with the spread of pandemic disease. It also examines the struggle between human attempts to contain infectious diseases, and the microbial struggle to contain human population advancement.
This book is about the complex ways in which science and literature are mutually-informing and mutually-sustaining. It does not cast the literary and the scientific as distinct, but rather as productively in-distinct cultural practices: for the two dozen new essays collected here, the presiding concern is no longer to ask how literary writers react to scientific writers, but rather to study how literary and scientific practices are imbricated. These specially-commissioned essays from top scholars in the area range across vast territories and produce seemingly unlikely unions: between physics and rhetoric, math and Milton, Boyle and the Bible, plague and plays, among many others. In these essays so-called scientific writing turns out to traffic in metaphor, wit, imagination, and playfulness normally associated with literature provides material forms and rhetorical strategies for thinking physics, mathematics, archeology, and medicine.
The first-ever critical anthology of the death arts in Renaissance England, this book draws together over 60 extracts and 20 illustrations to establish and analyse how people grappled with mortality in the 16th and 17th centuries. As well as providing a comprehensive resource of annotated and modernized excerpts, this engaging study includes commentary on authors and overall texts, discussions of how each excerpt is constitutive and expressive of the death arts, and suggestions for further reading. The extended Introduction takes into account death's intersections with print, gender, sex, and race, surveying the period's far-reaching preoccupation with, and anticipatory reflection upon, the cessation of life. For researchers, instructors, and students interested in medieval and early modern history and literature, the Reformation, memory studies, book history, and print culture, this indispensable resource provides at once an entry point into the field of early modern death studies and a springboard for further research.
In early modern English medicine, the balance of fluids in the body was seen as key to health. Menstruation was widely believed to regulate blood levels in the body and so was extensively discussed in medical texts. Sara Read examines all forms of literature, from plays and poems, to life-writing, and compares these texts with the medical theories.
Pre-modern society was overshadowed by illness and the threat of death. This outstanding new book examines what people did when they fell sick in Britain between 1650 - 1850. The authors investigate the well-established and flourishing tradition of self-medication, as practised by individuals, within the family and in the wider community. They look at what kinds of medical services could be obtained, both from the regular profession and among quacks and other healers. Above all they explore the personal and sociological bonds developed between patients and their doctors, examining in particular the economic and ethical dimensions of this privileged but precarious relationship. What precisely did doctors have to offer the sick in an age before scientific medicine could promise near-certain cures? This fundamental question is analysed against the background of the cultural and religious attitudes of Enlightenment England and in the context of the development of the medical profession. Drawing on the letters, journals and autobiographies of individual sufferers and from the papers of doctors, this remarkable investigation opens up new issues and offers interpretations which will certainly stimulate controversy among historians, anthropologists and sociologists and lead the way to further research in this area.
The Black Death of 1348-9 is the most catastrophic event and worst pandemic in recorded history. After the Black Death offers a major reinterpretation of its immediate impact and longer-term consequences in England. After the Black Death reassesses the established scholarship on the impact of plague on fourteenth-century England and draws upon original research into primary sources to offer a major re-interpretation of the subject. It studies how the government reacted to the crisis, and how communities adapted in its wake. It places the pandemic within the wider context of extreme weather and epidemiological events, the institutional framework of markets and serfdom, and the role of law in reducing risks and conditioning behaviour. The government's response to the Black Death is reconsidered in order to cast new light on the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. By 1400, the effects of plague had resulted in major changes to the structure of society and the economy, creating the pre-conditions for England's role in the Little Divergence (whereby economic performance in parts of north western Europe began to move decisively ahead of the rest of the continent). After the Black Death explores in detail how a major pandemic transformed society, and, in doing so, elevates the third quarter of the fourteenth century from a little-understood paradox to a critical period of profound and irreversible change in English and global history.
"This truly deserves to be considered a classic and I strongly encourage my students to read it from cover to cover. Turner′s work on the body needs to be considered in its own right within courses on the sociology of the body." - Dr Robert Meadows, Surrey University "Remains the foundational text for courses in the sociology of the body, replete with insights and a depth of analysis that has largely inspired an entire new area of studies across the social sciences." - Dr Michael Drake, Hull University "This is THE contemporary text for both academics and students exploring the sociology of the body." - Jessica Clark, University Campus Suffolk This is a fully revised edition of a book that may fairly claim to have re-opened the sociology of the body as a legitimate area of enquiry. Providing an unparalleled guide to all aspects of the subject, each chapter has been revised and updated while the book contains new material that reflects both recent changes in the field and Turner′s developing position on the centrality of vulnerability. Assured and innovative, this book provides the most authoritative statement of work on the sociology of the body by one of the leading writers in the field.
"In A History of Population Health Johan P. Mackenbach offers a broad-sweeping study of the spectacular changes in people's health in Europe since the early 18th century. Most of the 40 specific diseases covered in this book show a fascinating pattern of 'rise-and-fall', with large differences in timing between countries. Using a unique collection of historical data and bringing together insights from demography, economics, sociology, political science, medicine, epidemiology and general history, it shows that these changes and variations did not occur spontaneously, but were mostly man-made. Throughout European history, changes in health and longevity were therefore closely related to economic, social, and political conditions, with public health and medical care both making important contributions to population health improvement"--