Disease and Empire

Disease and Empire PDF Author: Philip D. Curtin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521598354
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Before the nineteenth century, European soldiers serving in the tropics died from disease at a rate several times higher than that of soldiers serving at home. Then, from about 1815 to 1914, the death rates of European soliders, both those serving at home and abroad, dropped by nearly 90%. But this drop applied mainly to soliders in barracks. Soldiers on campaign, especially in the tropics, continued to die from disease at rates as high as ever, in sharp contrast to the drop in barracks death rates. This book, first published in 1998, examines the practice of military medicine during the conquest of Africa, especially in the 1880s and 1890s. Curtin examines what was done, what was not done, and the impact of doctors' successes and failures on the willingness of Europeans to embark on imperial adventures.

Disease and Empire

Disease and Empire PDF Author: Philip D. Curtin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521598354
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Before the nineteenth century, European soldiers serving in the tropics died from disease at a rate several times higher than that of soldiers serving at home. Then, from about 1815 to 1914, the death rates of European soliders, both those serving at home and abroad, dropped by nearly 90%. But this drop applied mainly to soliders in barracks. Soldiers on campaign, especially in the tropics, continued to die from disease at rates as high as ever, in sharp contrast to the drop in barracks death rates. This book, first published in 1998, examines the practice of military medicine during the conquest of Africa, especially in the 1880s and 1890s. Curtin examines what was done, what was not done, and the impact of doctors' successes and failures on the willingness of Europeans to embark on imperial adventures.

Difference and Disease

Difference and Disease PDF Author: Suman Seth
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108418309
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
Suman Seth reveals how histories of medicine, empire, race and slavery intertwined in the eighteenth-century British Empire.

The Fate of Rome

The Fate of Rome PDF Author: Kyle Harper
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400888913
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
How devastating viruses, pandemics, and other natural catastrophes swept through the far-flung Roman Empire and helped to bring down one of the mightiest civilizations of the ancient world Here is the monumental retelling of one of the most consequential chapters of human history: the fall of the Roman Empire. The Fate of Rome is the first book to examine the catastrophic role that climate change and infectious diseases played in the collapse of Rome’s power—a story of nature’s triumph over human ambition. Interweaving a grand historical narrative with cutting-edge climate science and genetic discoveries, Kyle Harper traces how the fate of Rome was decided not just by emperors, soldiers, and barbarians but also by volcanic eruptions, solar cycles, climate instability, and devastating viruses and bacteria. He takes readers from Rome’s pinnacle in the second century, when the empire seemed an invincible superpower, to its unraveling by the seventh century, when Rome was politically fragmented and materially depleted. Harper describes how the Romans were resilient in the face of enormous environmental stress, until the besieged empire could no longer withstand the combined challenges of a “little ice age” and recurrent outbreaks of bubonic plague. A poignant reflection on humanity’s intimate relationship with the environment, The Fate of Rome provides a sweeping account of how one of history’s greatest civilizations encountered and endured, yet ultimately succumbed to the cumulative burden of nature’s violence. The example of Rome is a timely reminder that climate change and germ evolution have shaped the world we inhabit—in ways that are surprising and profound.

Disease, Medicine and Empire

Disease, Medicine and Empire PDF Author: Roy Macleod
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000566153
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
Originally published in 1988, the essays in this book focus primarily on colonial medicine in the British Empire but comparative material on the experience of France and Germany is also included. The authors show how medicine served as an instrument of empire, as well as constituting an imperializing cultural force in itself, reflecting in different contexts, the objectives of European expansion – whether to conquer, to occupy or to settle. With chapters from a distinguished array of social and medical historians, colonial medicine is examined in its topical, regional and professional diversity. Ranging from tropical to temperate regions, from 18th Century colonial America to 20th Century South Africa, this book is an important contribution to our understanding of the influence of European medicine on imperial history.

Doctors and Diseases in the Roman Empire

Doctors and Diseases in the Roman Empire PDF Author: Ralph Jackson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780806121673
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
Topics include the effects of disease and medicine on people at different levels of Roman society, the role of the physician in the Roman army, contraception, drugs, surgery, and magic. Jackson (curator, Department of Pre-historic and Romano-British antiquities, British Museum) adds evidence from excavations, sculptures, reliefs, vases, and wall-paintings to the testimony of ancient medical authors. Fascinating and chilling. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

A History of Disease in Ancient Times

A History of Disease in Ancient Times PDF Author: Philip Norrie
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319289373
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
This book shows how bubonic plague and smallpox helped end the Hittite Empire, the Bronze Age in the Near East and later the Carthaginian Empire. The book will examine all the possible infectious diseases present in ancient times and show that life was a daily struggle for survival either avoiding or fighting against these infectious disease epidemics. The book will argue that infectious disease epidemics are a critical link in the chain of causation for the demise of most civilizations in the ancient world and that ancient historians should no longer ignore them, as is currently the case.

Disease, War, and the Imperial State

Disease, War, and the Imperial State PDF Author: Erica Charters
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022618000X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
The Seven Years' War, often called the first global war, spanned North America, the West Indies, Europe, and India. The author demonstrates how disease played a vital role in shaping strategy and campaigning, British state policy, and imperial relations during the Seven Years' War.

Medicine and Empire

Medicine and Empire PDF Author: Pratik Chakrabarti
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1137374802
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
The history of modern medicine is inseparable from the history of imperialism. Medicine and Empire provides an introduction to this shared history – spanning three centuries and covering British, French and Spanish imperial histories in Africa, Asia and America. Exploring the major developments in European medicine from the seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth century, Pratik Chakrabarti shows that the major developments in European medicine had a colonial counterpart and were closely intertwined with European activities overseas: - The increasing influence of natural history on medicine - The growth of European drug markets - The rise of surgeons in status - Ideas of race and racism - Advancements in sanitation and public health - The expansion of the modern quarantine system - The emergence of Germ theory and global vaccination campaigns Drawing on recent scholarship and primary texts, this book narrates a mutually constitutive history in which medicine was both a 'tool' and a product of imperialism, and provides an original, accessible insight into the deep historical roots of the problems that plague global health today.

Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies

Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies PDF Author: David Arnold
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719024955
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
In recent years it has become apparent that the interaction of imperialism with disease, medical research, and the administration of health policies is considerably more complex. This book reflects the breadth and interdisciplinary range of current scholarship applied to a variety of imperial experiences in different continents. Common themes and widely applicable modes of analysis emerge include the confrontation between indigenous and western medical systems, the role of medicine in war and resistance, and the nature of approaches to mental health. The book identifies disease and medicine as a site of contact, conflict and possible eventual convergence between western rulers and indigenous peoples, and illustrates the contradictions and rivalries within the imperial order. The causes and consequences of this rapid transition from white man's medicine to public health during the latter decades of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth centuries are touched upon. By the late 1850s, each of the presidency towns of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras could boast its own 'asylum for the European insane'; about twenty 'native lunatic asylums' had been established in provincial towns. To many nineteenth-century British medical officers smallpox was 'the scourge of India'. Following the British discovery in 1901 of a major sleeping sickness epidemic in Uganda, King Leopold of Belgium invited the recently established Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine to examine his Congo Free State. Cholera claimed its victims from all levels of society, including Americans, prominent Filipinos, Chinese, and Spaniards.

Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World

Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World PDF Author: Nükhet Varlik
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316351823
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
This is the first systematic scholarly study of the Ottoman experience of plague during the Black Death pandemic and the centuries that followed. Using a wealth of archival and narrative sources, including medical treatises, hagiographies and travellers' accounts, as well as recent scientific research, Nükhet Varlik demonstrates how plague interacted with the environmental, social, and political structures of the Ottoman Empire from the late medieval through the early modern era. The book argues that the empire's growth transformed the epidemiological patterns of plague by bringing diverse ecological zones into interaction and by intensifying the mobilities of exchange among both human and non-human agents. Varlik maintains that persistent plagues elicited new forms of cultural imagination and expression, as well as a new body of knowledge about the disease. In turn, this new consciousness sharpened the Ottoman administrative response to the plague, while contributing to the makings of an early modern state.