Rising Plague

Spellberg's book is a powerful and compelling journey into the antibiotic resistance problem . . . [written] in a personal, compelling, and easy-to-understand manner. It's a must read.--Michael Osterholm, M.D., author of "Living Terrors."

During the seventeenth century, England was beset by three epidemics of the bubonic plague, each outbreak claiming between a quarter and a third of the population of London and other urban centers. Surveying a wide range of responses to these epidemics—sermons, medical tracts, pious exhortations, satirical pamphlets, and political commentary—Plague Writing in Early Modern England brings to life the many and complex ways Londoners made sense of such unspeakable devastation. Ernest B. Gilman argues that the plague writing of the period attempted unsuccessfully to rationalize the catastrophic and that its failure to account for the plague as an instrument of divine justice fundamentally threatened the core of Christian belief. Gilman also trains his critical eye on the works of Jonson, Donne, Pepys, and Defoe, which, he posits, can be more fully understood when put into the context of this century-long project to “write out” the plague. Ultimately, Plague Writing in Early Modern England is more than a compendium of artifacts of a bygone era; it holds up a distant mirror to reflect our own condition in the age of AIDS, super viruses, multidrug resistant tuberculosis, and the hovering threat of a global flu pandemic.

Cultures of Plague opens a new chapter in the history of medicine. Neither the plague nor the ideas it stimulated were static, fixed in a timeless Galenic vacuum over five centuries, as historians and scientists commonly assume. As plague evolved in its pathology, modes of transmission, and the social characteristics of its victims, so too did medical thinking about plague develop. This study of plague imprints from academic medical treatises to plague poetry highlights the most feared and devastating epidemic of the sixteenth-century, one that threatened Italy top to toe from 1575 to 1578 and unleashed an avalanche of plague writing. From erudite definitions, remote causes, cures and recipes, physicians now directed their plague writings to the prince and discovered their most 'valiant remedies' in public health: strict segregation of the healthy and ill, cleaning streets and latrines, addressing the long-term causes of plague-poverty. Those outside the medical profession joined the chorus. In the heartland of Counter-Reformation Italy, physicians along with those outside the profession questioned the foundations of Galenic and Renaissance medicine, even the role of God. Assaults on medieval and Renaissance medicine did not need to await the Protestant-Paracelsian alliance of seventeenth-century in northern Europe. Instead, creative forces planted by the pandemic of 1575-8 sowed seeds of doubt and unveiled new concerns and ideas within that supposedly most conservative form of medical writing, the plague tract. Relying on health board statistics and dramatized with eyewitness descriptions of bizarre happenings, human misery, and suffering, these writers created the structure for plague classics of the eighteenth century, and by tracking the contagion's complex and crooked paths, they anticipated trends of nineteenth-century epidemiology.

Zikarown Say'fer, memorial book as in Exodus 17:14, is a version of the Scriptures meant to bring out the ancient language intricacies that have been lost in modern translations. Zikarown is the transliteration of the Hebrew word for memorial or rehearsal. The Scriptures are meant to be rehearsed as instruction for the path to eternal life. Yahweh and Yahshua's names are restored to the text through the Bora Paleo Hebrew font. For more information please refer to Paleo Times.

The Hebrew name of God in the holy writings is El Shaddai. “El” means “God Creator” and “Shaddai” means “Almighty.” El Shaddai is the name of God. Although we read other names given to God in the Old Testament, none of those names are the true name of God. Names such as Lord, Yahweh, and Jehovah were never spoken or pronounced in Israel in the entire Old Testament as their god. Before the Kingdom of Judah fell, El Shaddai warns the Judeans that their false prophets have changed his name with Baal, which is the same name as Lord. “And it shall be at that day,” says El Shaddai, “that you shall call Me Ishi (my beloved) and shall call Me no more Baali (my lord). For I will take away the names of the Baalim (lords) gods out of their mouth and they shall no more be mentioned by their name.”