Patterns Of Plague

For centuries, recurrent plague outbreaks took a grim toll on populations across Europe and Asia. While medical interventions and treatments did not change significantly from the fourteenth century to the eighteenth century, understandings of where and how plague originated did. Through an innovative reading of medical advice literature produced in England and France, Patterns of Plague explores these changing perceptions across four centuries. When plague appeared in the Mediterranean region in 1348, physicians believed the epidemic’s timing and spread could be explained logically and the disease could be successfully treated. This confidence resulted in the widespread and long-term circulation of plague tracts, which described the causes and signs of the disease, offered advice for preventing infection, and recommended therapies in a largely consistent style. What, where, and especially who was blamed for plague outbreaks changed considerably, however, as political, religious, economic, intellectual, medical, and even publication circumstances evolved. Patterns of Plague sheds light on what was consistent about plague thinking and what was idiosyncratic to particular places and times, revealing the many factors that influence how people understand and respond to epidemic disease.

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.

This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of Islamic studies find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs. Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consult and editorial commentary to make it clear how the cited sources are interrelated related. This ebook is a static version of an article from Oxford Bibliographies Online: Renaissance and Reformation, a dynamic, continuously updated, online resource designed to provide authoritative guidance through scholarship and other materials relevant to the study of European history and culture between the 14th and 17th centuries. Oxford Bibliographies Online covers most subject disciplines within the social science and humanities, for more information visit www.oxfordbibliographies.com.

Geographies of Plague Pandemics synthesizes our current understanding of the spatial and temporal dynamics of plague, Yersinia pestis. The environmental, political, economic, and social impacts of the plague from Ancient Greece to the modern day are examined. Chapters explore the identity of plague DNA, its human mortality, and the source of ancient and modern plagues. This book also discusses the role plague has played in shifting power from Mediterranean Europe to north-western Europe during the 500 years that plague has raged across the continent. The book demonstrates how recent colonial structures influenced the spread and mortality of plague while changing colonial histories. In addition, this book provides critical insight into how plague has shaped modern medicine, public health, and disease monitoring, and what role, if any, it might play as a terror weapon. The scope and breadth of Geographies of Plague Pandemics offers geographers, historians, biologists, and public health educators the opportunity to explore the deep connections among disease and human existence.

Plague and the City uncovers discourses of plague and anti-plague measures in the city during the medieval, early modern and modern periods, and explores the connection between plague and urban environments including attempts by professional bodies to prevent or limit the outbreak of epidemic disease. Bringing together leading scholars of plague working across different historical periods, this book provides an inter-disciplinary study of plague in the city across time and space. The chapters cover a wide range of periods, geographical locations and disciplinary approaches but all seek to answer significant questions, including whether common motives can be identified, and how far knowledge about plague was based on an understanding of the urban space. It also examines how maps and photographs contribute to understanding plague in the city through exploring the ways in which the relationship between plague and the urban environment has been visualised, from the poisoned darts of plague winging their way towards their victims in the votive pictures from the Renaissance, to the mapping of the spread of disease in late nineteenth-century Bombay and photographing Honolulu’s great plague fire in 1900. Containing a series of studies that illuminate plague’s urban connection as a key social and political concern throughout history, Plague and the City is ideal for students of early modern history, and of the early modern city and plague more specifically.

The Routledge History of Disease draws on innovative scholarship in the history of medicine to explore the challenges involved in writing about health and disease throughout the past and across the globe, presenting a varied range of case studies and perspectives on the patterns, technologies and narratives of disease that can be identified in the past and that continue to influence our present. Organized thematically, chapters examine particular forms and conceptualizations of disease, covering subjects from leprosy in medieval Europe and cancer screening practices in twentieth-century USA to the ayurvedic tradition in ancient India and the pioneering studies of mental illness that took place in nineteenth-century Paris, as well as discussing the various sources and methods that can be used to understand the social and cultural contexts of disease. Chapter 24 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315543420.ch24

CD-ROM contains: Introductions and verse-by-verse commentaries to Genesis and Mark's Gospel -- Logos Library System.