Contagionism Catches On

This book shows how contagionism evolved in eighteenth century Britain and describes the consequences of this evolution. By the late eighteenth century, the British medical profession was divided between traditionalists, who attributed acute diseases to the interaction of internal imbalances with external factors such as weather, and reformers, who blamed contagious pathogens. The reformers, who were often “outsiders,” English Nonconformists or men born outside England, emerged from three coincidental transformations: transformation in medical ideas, in the nature and content of medical education, and in the sort of men who became physicians. Adopting contagionism led them to see acute diseases as separate entities, spurring a process that reoriented medical research, changed communities, established new medical institutions, and continues to the present day.

Contagionism is an old idea, but gained new life in Restoration Britain. The Germ of an Idea considers British contagionism in its religious, social, political and professional context from the Great Plague of London to the adoption of smallpox inoculation. It shows how ideas about contagion changed medicine and the understanding of acute diseases.

A revealing look at how the memory of the plague held the poor responsible for epidemic disease in eighteenth-century Britain Britain had no idea that it would not see another plague after the horrors of 1666, and for a century and a half the fear of epidemic disease gripped and shaped British society. Plague doctors had long asserted that the bodies of the poor were especially prone to generating and spreading contagious disease, and British doctors and laypeople alike took those warnings to heart, guiding medical ideas of class throughout the eighteenth century. Dense congregations of the poor--in workhouses, hospitals, slums, courtrooms, markets, and especially prisons--were rendered sites of immense danger in the public imagination, and the fear that small outbreaks might run wild became a profound cultural force. Extensively researched, with a wide body of evidence, this book offers a fascinating look at how class was constructed physiologically and provides a new connection between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries and the ravages of plague and cholera, respectively.

Examines British engagement with the Mediterranean quarantine system to show how fear of disease drew Britain into a Continental biopolity.

This first full study of Erasmus Darwin's gardening, horticulture and agriculture shows he was as keen a nature enthusiast as his grandson Charles, and demonstrates the ways in which his landscape experiences transformed his understanding of nature.

This edited collection explores disease transmission and the ways that the designed environment has promoted or limited its spread. It discusses the many design factors that can be used for infection and disease control through lenses of history, public health, building technology, design, and education. This book calls on designers to consider the role of the built environment as the primary source of bacterial, viral, and fungal transfers through fomites, ventilation systems, and overcrowding and spatial organization. Through 19 original contributions, it provides an array of perspectives to understand how the designed environment may offer a reprieve from disease. The authors build a historical foundation of infection and disease, using examples ranging from lazarettos to leprosy centers to show how the ability to control infection and disease has long been a concern for humanity. The book goes on to discuss disease propagation, putting forth a variety of ideas to control the transmission of pathogens, including environmental design strategies, pedestrian dynamics, and open space. Its final chapters serve as a prospective way forward, focusing on COVID-19 and the built environment in a post-pandemic world. Written for students and academics of architecture, design, and urban planning, this book ignites creative action on the ways to design our built environment differently and more holistically. Please note that research on COVID-19 has exponentially grown since this volume was written in October 2020. References cited reflect the evolving nature of research studies at that time.

Ninety years after the discovery of human influenza virus, Modern Flu traces the history of this breakthrough and its implications for understanding and controlling influenza ever since. Examining how influenza came to be defined as a viral disease in the first half of the twentieth century, it argues that influenza’s viral identity did not suddenly appear with the discovery of the first human influenza virus in 1933. Instead, it was rooted in the development of medical virus research and virological ways of knowing that grew out of a half-century of changes and innovations in medical science that were shaped through two influenza pandemics, two world wars, and by state-sponsored programs to scientifically modernise British medicine. A series of transformations, in which virological ideas and practices were aligned with and incorporated into medicine and public health, underpinned the viralisation of influenza in the 1930s and 1940s. Collaboration, conflict and exchange between researchers, medical professionals and governmental bodies lay at the heart of this process. This book is a history of how virus researchers, clinicians, and epidemiologists, medical scientific and public health bodies, and institutions, and philanthropies in Britain, the USA and beyond, forged a new medical consensus on the identity and nature of influenza. Shedding new light on the modern history of influenza, this book is a timely account of how ways of knowing and controlling this intractable epidemic disease became viral.

Slavery, capitalism, and colonialism were understood as racially justified through false olfactory perceptions of African bodies throughout the Atlantic World.