The Concept of Contagion in Medicine, Literature, and Religion

The Concept of Contagion in Medicine, Literature, and Religion PDF Author: Saul Jarcho
Publisher: Krieger Publishing Company
ISBN:
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description
This study highlights the relationship between medicine, literature and religion. Dr Jarcho describes what the Ancient Greeks and Romans wrote and may have thought about contagion and what caused the spread of disease. He then considers Moslem ideas on the subject, and follows these with writings by saints, theologians and controversialists in both religious and non-religious contexts. His final section presents detailed writings of Leonicenus (1428-1524), a physician and classical scholar, and those of Frascatorius (ca 1478-1533), an astronomer, cartographer and philosopher.

The Concept of Contagion in Medicine, Literature, and Religion

The Concept of Contagion in Medicine, Literature, and Religion PDF Author: Saul Jarcho
Publisher: Krieger Publishing Company
ISBN:
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 120

Get Book Here

Book Description
This study highlights the relationship between medicine, literature and religion. Dr Jarcho describes what the Ancient Greeks and Romans wrote and may have thought about contagion and what caused the spread of disease. He then considers Moslem ideas on the subject, and follows these with writings by saints, theologians and controversialists in both religious and non-religious contexts. His final section presents detailed writings of Leonicenus (1428-1524), a physician and classical scholar, and those of Frascatorius (ca 1478-1533), an astronomer, cartographer and philosopher.

Contagionism and Contagious Diseases

Contagionism and Contagious Diseases PDF Author: Thomas Rütten
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110306115
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
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.

Endemic

Endemic PDF Author: Kari Nixon
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137521414
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
This book develops a new multimodal theoretical model of contagion for interdisciplinary scholars, featuring contributions from influential scholars spanning the fields of medical humanities, philosophy, political science, media studies, technoculture, literature, and bioethics. Exploring the nexus of contagion's metaphorical and material aspects, this volume contends that contagiousness in its digital, metaphorical, and biological forms is a pervasively endemic condition in our contemporary moment. The chapters explore both endemicity itself and how epidemic discourse has become endemic to processes of social construction. Designed to simultaneously prime those new to the discourse of humanistic perspectives of contagion, complicate issues of interest to seasoned scholars of science and technology studies, and add new topics for debate and inquiry in the field of bioethics, Endemic will be of wide interest for researchers and educators.

Contagion

Contagion PDF Author: Alison Bashford
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134540647
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
In the age of HIV, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the Ebola Virus and BSE, metaphors and experience of contagion are a central concern of government, biomedicine and popular culture. 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 reconceptualisations of embodied subjectivity. The essays are written from within the fields of cultural studies, biomedical history and critical sociology. The contributors examine the geographies, policies and identities which have been produced in the massive social effort to contain diseases. They explore both social responses to infectious diseases in the past, and contemporary theoretical and biomedical sites for the study of contagion.

Cultures of Contagion

Cultures of Contagion PDF Author: Beatrice Delaurenti
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262045915
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
Contagion as process, metaphor, and timely interpretive tool, from antiquity to the twenty-first century. Cultures of Contagion recounts episodes in the history of contagions, from ancient times to the twenty-first century. It considers contagion not only in the medical sense but also as a process, a metaphor, and an interpretive model--as a term that describes not only the transmission of a virus but also the propagation of a phenomenon. The authors describe a wide range of social, cultural, political, and anthropological instances through the prism of contagion--from anti-Semitism to migration, from the nuclear contamination of the planet to the violence of Mao's Red Guard. The book proceeds glossary style, with a series of short texts arranged alphabetically, beginning with an entry on aluminum and "environmental contagion" and ending with a discussion of writing and "textual resemblance" caused by influence, imitation, borrowing, and plagiarism. The authors--leading scholars associated with the Center for Historical Research (CRH, Centre de recherches historiques), Paris--consider such topics as the connection between contagion and suggestion, "waltzmania" in post-Terror Paris, the effect of reading on sensitive imaginations, and the contagiousness of yawning. They take two distinct approaches: either examining contagion and what it signified contemporaneously, or deploying contagion as an interpretive tool. Both perspectives illuminate unexpected connections, unnoticed configurations, and invisible interactions.

Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe

Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: Claire L. Carlin
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230522610
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
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.

Eras in Epidemiology

Eras in Epidemiology PDF Author: Mervyn Susser
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195300661
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
At its core, epidemiology is concerned with changes in health and disease. The discipline requires counts and measures: of births, health disorders, and deaths, and in order to make sense of these counts it requires a population base defined by place and time. Epidemiology relies on closely defined concepts of cause - experimental or observational - of the physical or social environment, or in the laboratory. Epidemiologists are guided by these concepts, and have often contributed to their development. Because the disciplinary focus is on health and disease in populations, epidemiology has always been an integral driver of public health, the vehicle that societies have evolved to combat and contain the scourges of mass diseases.In this book, the authors trace the evolution of epidemiological ideas from earliest times to the present. Beginning with the early concepts of magic and the humors of Hippocrates, it moves forward through the dawn of observational methods, the systematic counts of deaths initiated in 16th-century London by John Graunt and William Petty, the late 18th-century Enlightenment and the French Revolution, which established the philosophical argument for health as a human right, the national public health system begun in 19th-century Britain, up to the development of eco-epidemiology, which attempts to re-integrate the fragmented fields as they currently exist. By examining the evolution of epidemiology as it follows the evolution of human societies, this book provides insight into our shared intellectual history and shows a way forward for future study.

Encyclopedia of Pestilence, Pandemics, and Plagues [2 volumes]

Encyclopedia of Pestilence, Pandemics, and Plagues [2 volumes] PDF Author: Joseph P. Byrne
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1573569593
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 917

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Book Description
Editor Joseph P. Byrne, together with an advisory board of specialists and over 100 scholars, research scientists, and medical practitioners from 13 countries, has produced a uniquely interdisciplinary treatment of the ways in which diseases pestilence, and plagues have affected human life. From the Athenian flu pandemic to the Black Death to AIDS, this extensive two-volume set offers a sociocultural, historical, and medical look at infectious diseases and their place in human history from Neolithic times to the present. Nearly 300 entries cover individual diseases (such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, Ebola, and SARS); major epidemics (such as the Black Death, 16th-century syphilis, cholera in the nineteenth century, and the Spanish Flu of 1918-19); environmental factors (such as ecology, travel, poverty, wealth, slavery, and war); and historical and cultural effects of disease (such as the relationship of Romanticism to Tuberculosis, the closing of London theaters during plague epidemics, and the effect of venereal disease on social reform). Primary source sidebars, over 70 illustrations, a glossary, and an extensive print and nonprint bibliography round out the work.

Medical Jurisprudence and Rules of the Medical Profession

Medical Jurisprudence and Rules of the Medical Profession PDF Author: Rudolf Ramm
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030252450
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
The Nazi Viewpoint on the Position and Responsibilities of the Physician in the German National Socialist Society. This work is translated, annotated and introduced by Melvin Wayne Cooper. This is the first translation in English of Rudolf Ramm’s textbook Ärztliche Rechts- und Standeskunde: Der Arzt als Gesundheitserzieher, translated and introduced by Melvin Wayne Cooper. Medical Jurisprudence and Rules of the Medical Profession has been reported to be an influential manual for medical ethics in Nazi Germany and is commonly quoted as representing the Nazi viewpoint of the position and responsibilities of the physician in the National Socialist society. It interprets the National Socialist Weltanschauung, i.e. the National Socialist Philosophical Worldview, and makes explicit how this world view was to be actuated by the true National Socialist physician. It is a good text to attempt to see the National Socialist medical world view from the perspective of its practitioners. Ramm’s text could be viewed as being analogous to an Army Field Manual for the practicing National Socialist physician. It dictates the specific applications of the legal values and rules which emanate from this Weltanschauung to the developing medical students and practicing National Socialist physicians. According to some scholars Ramm’s book, which was written not only for students but also for postgraduates, and which received positive reviews in German medical journals, is the most important known historical source pertaining to the instruction of Nazi medical ethics. The 1942 edition sold out within a year, and a second edition published in 1943 included an extended appendix of medical laws. Through this book Ramm’s unique text is now available for an English language audience, thanks to the thorough translation and accessible introduction by Melvin Wayne Cooper.

The Longest Journey

The Longest Journey PDF Author: Eric Tagliacozzo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199989710
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
The pilgrimage to Mecca, or Hajj, has been a yearly phenomenon of great importance in Muslim lands for well over one thousand years. Each year, millions of pilgrims from throughout the Dar al-Islam, or Islamic world, stretching from Morocco east to Indonesia, make the trip to Mecca as one of the five pillars of their faith. By the end of the nineteenth century, and the beginning of the twentieth, fully half of all pilgrims making the journey in any given year could come from Southeast Asia. The Longest Journey, spanning eleven modern nation-states and seven centuries, is the first book to offer a history of the Hajj from one of Islam's largest and most important regions.