The Conquest Of Epidemic Disease

The Conquest of Epidemic Disease, Charles-Edward Amory Winslow's classic study in the history of medicine and public health, returns to print in this attractive paperback editon for students, scholars, and practitioners.

The biological mingling of the Old and New Worlds began with the first voyage of Columbus. The exchange was a mixed blessing: it led to the disappearance of entire peoples in the Americas, but it also resulted in the rapid expansion and consequent economic and military hegemony of Europeans. Amerindians had never before experienced the deadly Eurasian sicknesses brought by the foreigners in wave after wave: smallpox, measles, typhus, plague, influenza, malaria, yellow fever. These diseases literally conquered the Americas before the sword could be unsheathed. From 1492 to 1650, from Hudson's Bay in the north to southernmost Tierra del Fuego, disease weakened Amerindian resistance to outside domination. The Black Legend, which attempts to place all of the blame of the injustices of conquest on the Spanish, must be revised in light of the evidence that all Old World peoples carried, though largely unwittingly, the germs of the destruction of American civilization.

A newly revised edition of an established classic in the history of medicine. Arising from collaboration between a doctor and a historian, Disease and History offers the general reader a wide-ranging and most accessible account of some of the ways in which disease has left its often dramatic mark on the past. It reviews, for example, the impact made by bubonic plague and other infections upon the ancient and medieval worlds; the likely role of syphilis in the careers of Henry VIII and Ivan the Terrible; the significance of smallpox for the conquest of Mexico; and the contribution of typhus to Napoleon's downfall and of haemophilia to the collapse of Tsarist rule in Russia. Other topics surveyed include the influence of tropical diseases in the history of the colonization of Africa, and the global death-toll taken by the so-called 'Spanish' influenza of 1918-9. The authors show how successive eras have registered some progress against pestilence, even while also experiencing confrontation with new and often unforeseen threats. Thus the final section of the book highlights how this field of history serves to illuminate many of the current problems now facing a world where disease - especially when combined with war, famine, and ecological recklessness - presents an ongoing challenge to human survival. 'A study whose outstanding virtues are economy, clarity and readability.' New Statesman 'A welcome updating and careful revision of one of the pioneering accounts of the social history of medicine.' Roy Porter, Professor of the Social History of Medicine, UCL 'Fascinating and highly recommended.' Library Journal

Cites specific instances in which disease affecting powerful individuals and societies has influenced the course of history.

This study consists of eight essays critical of the currently dominant guns and germs theories in the historiography of European colonial conquest causes. Other methods of conquest, notably communication control, were as vital as firepower and disease importation, and motives were often more important than methods.