Raymond Crawfurd's, Plague and Pestilence in Literature and Art, was an extensive examination of the portrayal of plague up to the 18th century. It is the subject of his second FitzPatrick lectures and contributions to the proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine journal.
Praise for the previous edition: "...the entries provide vivid historical detail...No other work approaches this topic in such a brief, encyclopedic manner...a useful addition to any academic reference collection..."-Choice "...a useful resource for high school and public libraries..."-Booklist "...does an excellent job...a conscious effort to put a human perspective on pestilence...Given the climate of the times and the concerns about bioterrorism, this title would be useful for a variety of subject areas. Recommended."-The Book Report Tracing the history of infectious diseases from the Philistine plague of 11th century BCE to the COVID-19 pandemic, Encyclopedia of Plague and Pestilence, Fourth Edition is a comprehensive A-to-Z reference offering international coverage of this timely and fascinating subject. This updated volume provides concise descriptions of more than 740 epidemics, listed alphabetically by location of the outbreak. Each detailed entry includes when and where a particular epidemic began, how and why it happened, who it affected, how it spread and ran its course, and its outcome and significance. Full-color and black-and-white photographs, maps, appendixes, a bibliography, and a chronology are also included. New and updated coverage includes: Cholera Cocoliztli COVID-19 Ebola H1N1 Hepatitis A HIV/AIDS Legionnaires' Disease Malaria MERS Rift Valley fever Typhoid Yellow Fever Zika
Scientists, journalists, novelists, and filmmakers continue to generate narratives of contagion, stories shaped by a tradition of disease discourse that extends to early Greco-Roman literature. Lucretius, Vergil, and Ovid developed important conventions of the western plague narrative as a response to the breakdown of the Roman res publica in the mid-first century CE and the reconstitution of stabilized government under the Augustan Principate (31 BCE-14 CE): relying on the metaphoric relationship between the human body and the body politic, these authors used largely fictive representations of epidemic disease to address the collapse of the social order and suggest remedies for its recovery. Theorists such as Susan Sontag and René Girard have observed how the rhetoric of disease frequently signals social, psychological, or political pathologies, but their observations have rarely been applied to Latin literary practices. Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature explores how the origins and spread of outbreaks described by Roman writers enact a drama in which the concerns of the individual must be weighed against those of the collective, staged in an environment signalling both reversion to a pre-historic Golden Age and the devastation characteristic of a post-apocalyptic landscape. Such innovations in Latin literature have impacted representations as diverse as Carlo Coppola's paintings of a seventeenth-century outbreak of bubonic plague in Naples and Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam Trilogy. Understanding why Latin writers developed these tropes for articulating contagious disease and imbuing them with meaning for the collapse of the Roman body politic allows us to clarify what more recent disease discourses mean both for their creators and for the populations they afflict in contemporary media.
The outbreak of the plague in 1347, commonly referred to as the Black Death, was the source of numerous socio-economic changes in the later Middle Ages. Numerous studies have traced the progress and effects of the disease in countries such as Germany, England, France, and Spain. Such a study concerning Spain has been conspicuously absent until now. The present investigation is among the first to bring together information that documents the pernicious behavior of the disease in Spain and to demonstrate how it changed the societies it afflicted. Studying the medical and imaginative texts of medieval Spain, reveals that the disease did, in fact, help change the perceived role of the medical practitioner, the idea of public health, and the portrayal of death and dying.
This volume deals with the medical and paramedical topics, compiled from the works of Flavius Josephus, the Jewish historian who lived in the first century C.E. in Judea, and later in Rome. The study of medicine from ancient Jewish sources has focused on the Bible and the Talmud, the content of which is primarily theological and cultural. The present work reveals two main trends. Josephus' paraphrase of the Biblical narrative introduced a number of additions and/or discrepancies which bear on medicine. Moreover, his account of the Jewish War and of contemporary political events includes many details related to medicine and hygiene. This book deals with physicians and healers, diseases and epidemics, with surgery, psychiatry and psychology, and with therapeutics. The work concludes with a discussion of medical metaphors and with a sequence of detailed treatments of topics including suicide, the Essenes and King Herod. It throws light on an aspect of Josephus studies which has rarely been considered till now.
Death, like most experiences that we think of as natural, is a product of the human imagination: all animals die, but only human beings suffer Death; and what they suffer is shaped by their own time and culture. Tragedy was one of the principal instruments through which the culture of early modern England imagined the encounter with mortality. The essays in this book approach the theatrical reinvention of Death from three perspectives. Those in Part I explore Death as a trope of apocalypse — a moment of un-veiling or dis-covery that is figured both in the fearful nakedness of the Danse Macabre and in the shameful openings enacted in the new theatres of anatomy. Separate chapters explore the apocalyptic design of two of the periods most powerful tragedies — Shakespeare's Othello, and Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling. In Part 2, Neill explores the psychological and affective consequences of tragedy's fiercely end-driven narrative in a number of plays where a longing for narrative closure is pitched against a particularly intense dread of ending. The imposition of an end is often figured as an act of writerly violence, committed by the author or his dramatic surrogate. Extensive attention is paid to Hamlet as an extreme example of the structural consequences of such anxiety. The function of revenge tragedy as a response to the radical displacement of the dead by the Protestant abolition of purgatory — one of the most painful aspects of the early modern re-imagining of death — is also illustrated with particular clarity. Finally, Part 3 focuses on the way tragedy articulates its challenge to the undifferentiating power of death through conventions and motifs borrowed from the funereal arts. It offers detailed analyses of three plays — Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, and Ford's The Broken Heart. Here, funeral is rewritten as triumph, and death becomes the chosen instrument of an heroic self-fashioning designed to dress the arbitrary abruption of mortal ending in a powerful aesthetic of closure.