A Modern Contagion

Author : Amir A. Afkhami
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421427222
Total Pages : 296 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Modern Contagion written by Amir A. Afkhami and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2019-02-05 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Remedying an important deficit in the historiography of medicine, public health, and the Middle East, A Modern Contagion increases our understanding of ongoing sociopolitical challenges in Iran and the rest of the Islamic world.

Author : Lawrence I. Conrad
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351949241
Total Pages : 201 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Contagion written by Lawrence I. Conrad and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contagion - even today the word conjures up fear of disease and plague and has the power to terrify. The nine essays gathered here examine what pre-modern societies thought about the spread of disease and how it could be controlled: to what extent were concepts familiar to modern epidemiology present? What does the pre-modern terminology tell us about the conceptions of those times? How did medical thought relate to religious and social beliefs? The contributors reveal the complexity of ideas on these subjects, from antiquity through to the early modern world, from China to India, the Middle East, and Europe. Particular topics include attitudes to leprosy in the Old Testament and the medieval West, conceptions of smallpox etiology in China, witchcraft and sorcery as disease agents in ancient India, and the influence of classical Greek medical theory. An important conclusion is that non-medical perceptions are as crucial as medical ones in people’s beliefs about disease and the ways in which it can be combatted. Today we may not believe in the power of demons, but the idea that illness is retribution for sin retains great power, as was shown by the popular reaction to the spread of AIDS/HIV, and this is a lesson from the past that the medical profession would do well to heed.

Author : Adam Kucharski
Publisher : Profile Books
ISBN 13 : 1782834303
Total Pages : 302 pages
Book Rating : 4.04/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Rules of Contagion written by Adam Kucharski and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2020-02-13 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Observer Book of the Year A Times Science Book of the Year A New Statesman Book of the Year A Financial Times Science Book of the Year 'Astonishingly bold' Daily Mail 'It is hard to imagine a more timely book ... much of the modern world will make more sense having read it.' The Times We live in a world that's more interconnected than ever before. Our lives are shaped by outbreaks - of disease, of misinformation, even of violence - that appear, spread and fade away with bewildering speed. To understand them, we need to learn the hidden laws that govern them. From 'superspreaders' who might spark a pandemic or bring down a financial system to the social dynamics that make loneliness catch on, The Rules of Contagion offers compelling insights into human behaviour and explains how we can get better at predicting what happens next. Along the way, Adam Kucharski explores how innovations spread through friendship networks, what links computer viruses with folk stories - and why the most useful predictions aren't necessarily the ones that come true. Now revised and updated with content on Covid-19.

Author : Claire L. Carlin
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 0230522610
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe written by Claire L. Carlin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-10-14 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ideological underpinnings of early modern theories of contagion are dissected in this volume by an integrated team of literary scholars, cultural historians, historians of medicine and art historians. Even today, the spread of disease inspires moralizing discourse and the ostracism of groups thought responsible for contagion; the fear of illness and the desire to make sense of it are demonstrated in the current preoccupation with HIV, SARS, 'mad cow' disease, West Nile virus and avian flu, to cite but a few contemporary examples. Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe explores the nature of understanding when humanity is faced with threats to its well-being, if not to its very survival.

Author : Justin K. Stearns
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421401053
Total Pages : 303 pages
Book Rating : 4.58/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Infectious Ideas written by Justin K. Stearns and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Infectious Ideas is a comparative analysis of how Muslim and Christian scholars explained the transmission of disease in the premodern Mediterranean world. How did religious communities respond to and make sense of epidemic disease? To answer this, historian Justin K. Stearns looks at how Muslim and Christian communities conceived of contagion, focusing especially on the Iberian Peninsula in the aftermath of the Black Death. What Stearns discovers calls into question recent scholarship on Muslim and Christian reactions to the plague and leprosy. Stearns shows that rather than universally reject the concept of contagion, as most scholars have affirmed, Muslim scholars engaged in creative and rational attempts to understand it. He explores how Christian scholars used the metaphor of contagion to define proper and safe interactions with heretics, Jews, and Muslims, and how contagion itself denoted phenomena as distinct as the evil eye and the effects of corrupted air. Stearns argues that at the heart of the work of both Muslims and Christians, although their approaches differed, was a desire to protect the physical and spiritual health of their respective communities. Based on Stearns's analysis of Muslim and Christian legal, theological, historical, and medical texts in Arabic, Medieval Castilian, and Latin, Infectious Ideas is the first book to offer a comparative discussion of concepts of contagion in the premodern Mediterranean world.

Author : Mark Harrison
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300123574
Total Pages : 428 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Contagion written by Mark Harrison and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looks at the connection between trade and disease, tracing the plagues that swept through Eurasia in the fourteenth century and exposes the weaknesses in the current public health system that make our world susceptible to a pandemic.

Author : Priscilla Wald
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780822341536
Total Pages : 396 pages
Book Rating : 4.30/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Contagious written by Priscilla Wald and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2008-01-09 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVShows how narratives of contagion structure communities of belonging and how the lessons of these narratives are incorporated into sociological theories of cultural transmission and community formation./div

Author : Carlos Rojas
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674286979
Total Pages : 346 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Homesickness written by Carlos Rojas and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-06 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The collapse of China’s Qing dynasty coincided roughly with discoveries that helped revolutionize views of infectious disease. Together, these parallel developments generated a set of paradigm shifts in the understanding of society, the individual, as well as the cultural matrix that mediates between them. In Homesickness, Carlos Rojas examines an array of Chinese literary and cinematic tropes of illness, arguing that these works approach sickness not solely as a symptom of dysfunction but more importantly as a key to its potential solution. Rojas focuses on a condition he calls “homesickness”—referring to a discomfort caused not by a longing for home but by an excessive proximity to it. The product of a dialectics of internal alienation and self-differentiation, this inverse homesickness marks a movement away from the “home,” conceived as spaces associated with the nation, the family, and the individual body. The result is a productive dynamism that gives rise to the possibility of long-term health. Without sickness, in other words, there could be no health. Through a set of detailed analyses of works from China, Greater China, and the global Chinese diaspora—ranging from late-imperial figures such as Liu E and Zeng Pu to contemporary figures such as Yan Lianke and Tsai Ming-liang—Rojas asserts that the very possibility of health is predicated on this condition of homesickness.

Author : Alison Bashford
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1134540655
Total Pages : 255 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Contagion written by Alison Bashford and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-11 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contagion explores cultural responses of infectious diseases and their biomedical management over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It also investigates the use of 'contagion' as a concept in postmodern research.

Author : Peter Baldwin
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 113942615X
Total Pages : 599 pages
Book Rating : 4.52/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830-1930 written by Peter Baldwin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-08-19 with total page 599 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a groundbreaking study of the historical reasons for the divergence in public health policies adopted in Britain, France, Germany and Sweden, and the spectrum of responses to the threat of contagious diseases such as cholera, smallpox and syphilis. In particular the book examines the link between politics and prevention. Did the varying political regimes influence the styles of precaution adopted? Or was it, as Peter Baldwin argues, a matter of more basic differences between nations, above all their geographic placement in the epidemiological trajectory of contagion, that helped shape their responses and their basic assumptions about the respective claims of the sick and of society, and fundamental political decisions for and against different styles of statutory intervention? Thus the book seeks to use medical history to illuminate broader questions of the development of statutory intervention and the comparative and divergent evolution of the modern state in Europe.