Binding: Paperback
Description: The 2014 Ebola epidemic demonstrated the power of pandemics and their ability not only to destroy lives locally but also to capture the imagination and terrify the world. In 2019 and the years that followed the coronavirus pandemic infected every continent and took the lives of millions. In this updated edition Christian W. Mc Millen provides a concise yet comprehensive account of pandemics throughout human history illustrating how pandemic disease has shaped history and at the same time social behavior has influenced pandemic disease. Extremely interesting from a medical standpoint the study of pandemics also provides unexpected broader insights into culture and politics. This Very Short Introduction describes history's major pandemics - - plague tuberculosis malaria smallpox cholera influenza and HIV/ AIDS - - highlighting how each disease's biological characteristics affected its pandemic development. Mc Millen discusses state responses to pandemics such as quarantine isolation travel restrictions and other forms of social control and pays special attention to the rise of public health and the explosion of medical research in the wake of pandemics especially as the germ theory of disease emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today medicine is able to control all of these diseases yet some of them are still devastating in much of the developing world. By assessing the relationship between poverty and disease and the geography of epidemics Mc Millen offers an outspoken and thought - provoking point of view on the necessity for global governments to learn from past experiences and proactively cooperate to prevent any future epidemic.
Title: Pandemics: A Very Short Introduction Second Edition
Author(s): Mcmillen Christian W. (Professor Of History Professor Of History University Of Virginia)
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc
Barcode: 9780197762004
Pages: 184 Pages, 10 Illus.
Publication Date: 6/27/2024
Series: Very Short Introductions
Category: History Of Medicine