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.
Through its coverage of 19 epidemics associated with a broad range of wars, and blending medical knowledge, demographics, geographic, and medical information with historical and military insights, this book reveals the complex relationship between epidemics and wars throughout history. How did small pox have a tremendous effect on two distinct periods of war—one in which the disease devastated entire native armies and leadership, and the other in which technological advancements and the application of medical knowledge concerning the disease preserved an army and as a result changed the course of events? Epidemics and War: The Impact of Disease on Major Conflicts in History examines fascinating historical questions like this and dozens more, exploring a plethora of communicable diseases—viral, fungal, and/or bacterial in nature—that spread and impacted wars or were spread by some aspect of mass human conflict. Written by historians, medical doctors, and people with military backgrounds, the book presents a variety of viewpoints and research approaches. Each chapter examines an epidemic in relation to a period of war, demonstrating how the two impacted each other and affected the populations involved directly and indirectly. Starting with three still unknown/unidentified epidemics (ranging from Classical Athens to the Battle of Bosworth in England), the book's chapters explore a plethora of diseases that spread through wars or significantly impacted wars. The book also examines how long-ended wars can play a role in the spread of epidemics a generation later, as seen in the 21st-century mumps epidemic in Bosnia, 15 to 20 years after the Bosnian conflicts of the 1990s.
This book focuses on the trench diseases—trench fever, trench nephritis and trench foot—and examines how doctors responded to them in the context of the Great War. It details the problems that they faced in tackling these conditions, “new” to military warfare. After an introduction to the subject, the second chapter sketches the socio-economic and scientific context within which the response was mounted. The development of bacteriology, sanitation and medical research in the British Army is examined, as is the structure and role of the wartime RAMC, the main body involved in the response to the trench diseases. Divisions between medical practitioners concerning the aetiology of epidemic disease are also described. The third and fourth chapters present a detailed inquiry into how the diseases were defined, and how these definitions were used to counteract them. The effectiveness of the medical response is evaluated in the conclusion, which also examines the impact that the response to the trench diseases had on military-medical progress and medical specialisation. An analysis of the medical response to the trench diseases reveals a conflict between clinicians holding views on disease causation along a spectrum—contagionists, contingent-contagionists and con-figurationists. Faced with their inability to treat the trench diseases effectively, the book argues that the extremely diverse initial interpretation of the trench diseases was replaced by a majority view that all three were a product of the trenches. This enabled an effective response to be mounted, using public health methods, reinforced by discipline, close surveillance, administrative organisation, and cooperation between military and medical branches, as well as within the Army Medical Service.
"This illustrated book is published to coincide with the exhibition War and Medicine, organised by Wellcome Collection, London, in collaboration with the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, Dresden. It explores the complex and fascinating relationship between war and medicine, and the ways in which they have influenced each other throughout the modern period. As civilisations develop more sophisticated and destructive technologies with which to wage war, medicine evolves to meet the needs of resulting casualties. This in turn informs advances in civilian medicine and social policy. War and Medicine charts this complex process and the ethical, political and personal issues raised." "From the sometimes counterintuitive and ethically challenging principles of triage, to the recent arguments over whether and how post-traumatic stress can be clinically diagnosed, it reveals how humankind's desire to repair and heal has tried, with varying degrees of success, to keep pace with its capacity to maim and kill. The result is an engrossing history of war and medicine in the modern era."--BOOK JACKET.
Florence Nightingale is famous as the “lady with the lamp” in the Crimean War, 1854—56. There is a massive amount of literature on this work, but, as editor Lynn McDonald shows, it is often erroneous, and films and press reporting on it have been even less accurate. The Crimean War reports on Nightingale’s correspondence from the war hospitals and on the staggering amount of work she did post-war to ensure that the appalling death rate from disease (higher than that from bullets) did not recur. This volume contains much on Nightingale’s efforts to achieve real reforms. Her well-known, and relatively “sanitized”, evidence to the royal commission on the war is compared with her confidential, much franker, and very thorough Notes on the Health of the British Army, where the full horrors of disease and neglect are laid out, with the names of those responsible.
An engaging history of the role that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin played in the origins of public health in America. Before the advent of modern antibiotics, one’s life could be abruptly shattered by contagion and death, and debility from infectious diseases and epidemics was commonplace for early Americans, regardless of social status. Concerns over health affected the Founding Fathers and their families as it did slaves, merchants, immigrants, and everyone else in North America. As both victims of illness and national leaders, the Founders occupied a unique position regarding the development of public health in America. Historian Jeanne E. Abrams’s Revolutionary Medicine refocuses the study of the lives of George and Martha Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John and Abigail Adams, and James and Dolley Madison away from politics to the perspective of sickness, health, and medicine. For the Founders, republican ideals fostered a reciprocal connection between individual health and the “health” of the nation. Studying the encounters of these American Founders with illness and disease, as well as their viewpoints about good health, not only provides a richer and more nuanced insight into their lives, but also opens a window into the practice of medicine in the eighteenth century, which is at once intimate, personal, and first hand. Today’s American public health initiatives have their roots in the work of America’s Founders, for they recognized early on that government had compelling reasons to shoulder some new responsibilities with respect to ensuring the health and well-being of its citizenry—beginning the conversation about the country’s state of medicine and public healthcare that continues to be a work in progress.
Acclaimed author Gail Jarrow, recipient of a 2019 Robert F. Sibert Honor Award, explores the science and grisly history of U.S. Civil War medicine, using actual medical cases and first-person accounts by soldiers, doctors, and nurses. The Civil War took the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans and left countless others with disabling wounds and chronic illnesses. Bullets and artillery shells shattered soldiers' bodies, while microbes and parasites killed twice as many men as did the battles. Yet from this tragic four-year conflict came innovations that enhanced medical care in the United States. With striking detail, this nonfiction book reveals battlefield rescues, surgical techniques, medicines, and patient care, celebrating the men and women of both the North and South who volunteered to save lives.
Cover -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Call and Response -- 1 Understanding Civil War Medicine -- 2 Women, War, and Medicine -- 3 Infectious Disease in the Civil War -- 4 Connecting Home to Hospital and Camp: The Work of the USSC -- 5 The Sanitary Commission and Its Critics -- 6 The Union's General Hospital -- 7 Medicine for a New Nation -- 8 Confederate Medicine: Disease, Wounds, and Shortages -- 9 Mitigating the Horrors of War -- 10 A Public Health Legacy -- 11 Medicine in Postwar America -- Afterword -- Notes -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.
Nearly nine times as many died from diseases during the American Revolution as did from wounds. Poor diet, inadequate sanitation and sometimes a lack of basic medical care caused such diseases as dysentery, scurvy, typhus, smallpox and others to decimate the ranks. Scurvy was a major problem for both the British and American navies, while venereal diseases proved to be a particularly vexing problem in New York. Respiratory diseases, scabies and other illnesses left nearly 4,000 colonial troops unable to fight when George Washington's troops broke camp at Valley Forge in June 1778. From a physician's perspective, this is a unique history of the American Revolution and how diseases impacted the execution of the war effort. The medical histories of Washington and King George III are also provided.