Expelling The Plague

A vibrant city-state on the Adriatic sea, Dubrovnik, also known as Ragusa, was a hub for the international trade between Europe and the Ottoman Empire. As a result, the city suffered frequent outbreaks of plague. Through a comprehensive analysis of these epidemics in Dubrovnik, Expelling the Plague explores the increasingly sophisticated plague control regulations that were adopted by the city and implemented by its health officials. In 1377, Dubrovnik became the first city in the world to develop and implement quarantine legislation, and in 1390 it established the earliest recorded permanent Health Office. The city’s preoccupation with plague control and the powers granted to its Health Office led to a rich archival record chronicling the city’s experience of plague, its attempts to safeguard public health, and the social effects of its practices of quarantine, prosecution, and punishment. These sources form the foundation of the authors' analysis, in particular the manuscript Libro deli Signori Chazamorbi, 1500-30, a rare health record of the 1526-27 calamitous plague epidemic. Teeming with real people across the spectrum, including gravediggers, laundresses, and plague survivors, it contains the testimonies collected during trial proceedings conducted by health officials against violators of public health regulations. Outlining the contributions of Dubrovnik in conceiving and establishing early public health measures in Europe, Expelling the Plague reveals how health concerns of the past greatly resemble contemporary anxieties about battling epidemics such as SARS, avian flu, and the Ebola virus.

The veteran Wall Street Journal science reporter Marilyn Chase’s fascinating account of an outbreak of bubonic plague in late Victorian San Francisco is a real-life thriller that resonates in today’s headlines. The Barbary Plague transports us to the Gold Rush boomtown in 1900, at the end of the city’s Gilded Age. With a deep understanding of the effects on public health of politics, race, and geography, Chase shows how one city triumphed over perhaps the most frightening and deadly of all scourges.

The Black Death was the fourteenth century's equivalent of a nuclear war. It wiped out one-third of Europe's population, taking millions of lives. The author draws together the most recent scientific discoveries and historical research to pierce the mist and tell the story of the Black Death as a gripping, intimate narrative.

Former Ontario Chief Coroner James Young and infectious disease expert Dick Zoutman recount their efforts to contain the mysterious new disease. In answer to questions about "lessons from the past," several distinguished historians of epidemics examine how their knowledge of responses to older plagues influenced their perception of SARS. They also reflect on how the advent of SARS alters their views of the past. Finally, policy experts comment on possible changes to health care that the SARS experience suggests should be made.

Architecture in the Family Way explores the relationship between domestic architecture, health reform, and feminism in late nineteenth-century England. Annmarie Adams examines the changing perceptions about the English middle-class house from 1870 to 1900, highlighting how attitudes toward health, women, home life, and even politics were played out in architecture.

Offers an original and holistic approach to understanding the impact of the plague in late sixteenth-century Spain.

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 travelers' 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.

Explores how preventative health practices shaped urban communities, social ties and living environments in the medieval Low Countries.