History Of Disease

The panel we are proposing is designed to bring together scholars with a keen interest in studying the blindness in early modern age (15th-17th) and specifically in analysing the relationship between this particular disability - total or partial - and the production and distribution of works written by blind authors in order to explore, from interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective, these often forgotten figures and their role in the European literature and history.

Because the famine of World War I marked the cusp of the Ottoman and French eras of rule in Lebanon and Syria, the crisis has been regarded in the historiography as a pivotal event – but one which primarily derives its significance from its context in national history. The unintended consequence of this outlook has been the diminution of the period of the crisis as a distinct historical unit, reducing its value to that of a stepping stone between eras. However, the complexity of life in the famine period suggests that the greater historical value of the famine lies not in what caused it or came after, but in the systemic dynamics of the famine itself as it evolved over the course of the crisis from 1915 to 1918.  Drawing from meteorological and medical reports, price lists, diaries, correspondence, relief documents and memoirs, this research explores how it was to live during the famine and how the aberrant conditions of the period fed back into the crisis to determine both how it developed and how individuals responded to it to survive. Over time, the high prices and social disintegration prompted transformations in individuals and society, increasing risk for many of the most vulnerable and compelling people to alter their behaviors and attitudes in order to cope with a world that had been redefined by the experience of the famine. Whereas many previous investigations of this topic have dwelled on death and suffering, the focus of this work is life: in spite of the appalling death tolls across the region during the famine, the dominant experience of the period was survival and endurance, not death and resignation. This dissertation seeks to reclaim these forgotten elements of life in the calamity that have so often been overshadowed by the horrors of the crisis.

TIME OF DYING – BLACK DEATH IN DUBROVNIK 1348-1349
Summary
Plague epidemic that embraced Europe in the mid-fourteenth century, commonly known as the Black Death, did not miss the eastern Adriatic coast. The extant sources witness about the course of events during the period of the plague, at least in the region of Dalmatia. Thus it is rather peculiar that Croatian historiography somehow has not dealt with the questions regarding the Black Death and its consequences on the medieval population in the Croatian lands.
The chief goal of this dissertation was to draw rough sketch of the events during the plague months in medieval Dubrovnik, and to examine the range of the plague consequences. At the same time, the results of the investigation were compared with the results of the similar researches taken in the Italian medieval towns. On the basis of the extant sources and the available literature, the investigation has proved that Dubrovnik example is in many respects analogous to the case studies about the Black Death in the Tuscan cities.
However, the investigation has explained that the question about the long term impact of the Black Death cannot be localized on the epidemics of 1348. Therefore, the statements about the Black Death as the turning-point of social history in Dubrovnik still cannot be proven. Namely, this epidemic provoked a horrible terror, and made majority of people to think about their own fragileness and mortality; especially since most of them saw Black Death as a divine act. Still, it seems that those who survived thought that they managed to escape or to redeem. The actions of Dubrovnik authorities during the plague epidemic that came in 60’s and 70’s of the same century illustrate that they have not learned anything during the previous plague. Thus, the Black Death was only the first strike (or shock) that disturbed mental structures of medieval population of Dubrovnik. The result of a supposed mental change provoked by the plague can be noticed in 1377 – when city of Dubrovnik organized the first health quarantine. Was this accompanied with the change regarding the social and intellectual values still has to be investigated – primarily through the research of the last wills of this period. Since the results of this dissertation has demonstrated that the Dubrovnik case is similar to the examples of the Italian cities, it would not be surprising that regarding this question the results will be comparable.

The first historically documented pandemic caused by Yersinia pestis started as the Justinianic Plague in 541 within the Roman Empire and continued as the so-called First Pandemic until 750. Although palaeogenomic studies have previously identified the causative agent as Y. pestis, little is known about the bacterium's spread, diversity and genetic history over the course of the pandemic. To elucidate the microevolution of the bacterium during this time period, we screened human remains from 20 sites in Austria, Britain, Germany, France and Spain for Y. pestis DNA and reconstructed six new genomes. We present a novel methodological approach assessing SNPs in ancient bacterial genomes, facilitating qualitative analyses of low coverage genomes from a metagenomic background. Phylogenetic analysis reveals the existence of previously undocumented Y. pestis diversity during the 6th-7th centuries, and provides evidence for the presence of multiple distinct Y. pestis strains in Europe. ...

Two artificial mummies found in the hospital church of S. Maria della Scala in Siena (Tuscany, central Italy) and dated back to the end of the 15th century, were examined. The mummies, in good state of preservation and still wearing their Renaissance clothes, were identified as the rector of the hospital, named Salimbene Capacci, and his wife, Margherita Sozzini. Imaging studies, X-rays and CAT were performed. Autopsy made it possible to ascertain that the bodies had been eviscerated by a longitudinal cut from the neck to the ...

Towards the end of the 15 th century, syphilis emerged in Europe's west as a new disease that had not had any medical record until then. The disease quickly spread to the rest of the world; by 1505 it was already ravaging people's lives in China and Japan. Even in the remotest places, like Iceland, syphilis epidemics dating back to 1525 were well-documented. However, the earliest known syphilis threat in the Ottoman Empire was carried by the Russian soldiers during the wars with the Russian Empire in the 19 th century. Considering its territorial extent after the 15 th century and military, commercial and diplomatic activities with Europe, it is not possible to claim that the Ottoman land was left untouched by syphilis. This fallacy has been interpreted by historians that the prevailing Islamic lifestyle of its subjects and religion-based administration prevented venereal diseases like syphilis to spread in the Empire. This interpretation is stimulated by the two state-driven ideologies in Turkey that the historian's impulses are occupied; namely, Turkish History Thesis and Turkish-Islamic Synthesis. Through readings of medical manuscripts written on syphilis, judicial court records, as well as often censored pamphlets on sexuality in the Ottoman Empire, this thesis proves that syphilis was evident in the Ottoman Empire long before the 19 th century and the sufferers were the believers of Islam. It is also aimed at analyzing the ideologies that govern Turkish historians' impulses while treating Turkish history, due to the very fact that such ideologies play an important role in the perception of Turkish people's common past.

This talk was presented on January 27, 2021 as part of the Grand Rounds series in the Department of Medicine at the UCSD School of Medicine. It examines four twentieth-century examples of attempts to manage or eradicate infectious disease (smallpox, polio, malaria, tuberculosis) and asks what insights this history offers as we look forward to the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The talk is no longer available to stream from UCSD's website, but if you would like access to it, you can reach out to medchair@health.ucsd.edu.

By the time of Carlo Borromeo’s 1566 arrival in Milan, transnational espionage networks of the Spanish governors had been identifying suspected foreign and peripatetic agents of heretical print for decades. The plague years of 1576-78 saw authorities join the rhetoric of social control against plague to the combat of heresy as a form of plague, and conversion to a form of “infection.” Policing practices such as regular issue of edicts, ticket issuance and inspection, and memorialization in collections of state edicts (gridari) and religious ordinances (Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis) continued in following decades, as authorities waged a campaign to reclaim the public sphere. The combination of powerful rhetoric and printed authority furthered a contagion theory of dissent, and top-down methods of prevention, quarantine, and treatment.

Comme l'indique l'épidémie de variole à Montréal, en 1885, à notre époque le problème d'étanchement des contagions est rarement lié à l'état de nos connaissances scientifiques - c'est ce que nous choisissons d'en faire qui fait la différence.

Texte complet: http://histoireengagee.ca/science-opinion-publique-et-resistance-de-la-variole-a-covid-19/

El enfermo venéreo, ¿víctima o criminal? El delito de contagio venéreo en México en la primera mitad del siglo xx María del Carmen Zavala Ramírez El Colegio de México La lucha antivenérea en México evidenció ambivalencias frente a los enfer-mos, en ocasiones vistos como víctimas dignas de compasión y otras tantas como criminales merecedores de castigo. La legislación penal tipificó el delito de contagio venéreo (1929 y 1931) y permitió la intervención estatal sobre los cuerpos de los enfermos para determinar su inocencia o culpabi-lidad. El artículo analiza los debates médicos acerca de la penalización del contagio venéreo. Asimismo, presenta el estudio de cuatro juicios de amparo por este delito en los que quedaron de manifiesto ideas, valores y repre-sentaciones sobre la sexualidad masculina y femenina. Palabras clave: Código penal, delito de contagio, enfermedades venéreas, víctima. The struggle against venereal disease in Mexico demonstrates ambivalence towards sick people, who are sometimes regarded as victims in need of compassion and at other times as criminals who deserve punishment. The penal code classified the crime of venereal contagion (1929 and 1931) and allowed state intervention in relation to the bodies of ill people in order to establish their innocence or culpability. This article analyzes medical debates around the criminalization of venereal contagion. As evidence, it presents a study of four cases of protection for this crime which demonstrate the ideas, values and representations of masculine and feminine sexuality.

Das ausgeschriebene Projekt hat den Fokus auf der Patientengeschichte. Erforscht wer-den sollen die „Erfahrungen von Patienten im sozialistischen Gesundheitswesen der Tschechoslowakei (ČSR) ODER Volksrepublik Polen (VRP) ODER Volksrepub-lik Ungarn (VRU)“.

Der Antrag soll sich auf eines der drei Länder (ČSR oder VRP oder VRU) beziehen und dabei eine oder max. zwei Krankheit(en) nach Wahl in den Mittelpunkt stellen.

Inhaltlich sollten in dem Projekt einige der folgenden Erfahrungsräume z. B. Sprech-zimmer, Krankenzimmer, Kurhäuser, etc. erforscht werden.

Methodisch ist eine Kombination aus sozial- und kulturwissenschaftlichen sowie medizinhistorischen Ansätzen erwünscht, die Quellen, wie z. B. Patientenakten und andere Egodokumente, einbezieht.

Ausdrücklich werden originelle, innovative und interdisziplinäre Ideen und eigene Vorschläge für die Bearbeitung des Themas begrüßt.

This paper outlines the study process and analysis of a unique historic site documented in Markham Township. It was anticipated that the Stage 4 excavation of the Riddle site (AlGt-486), which was visible in the ploughzone as a 40 x 40 meter scatter of mid-nineteenth century domestic artifacts, would reveal the cultural features of an Irish tenant’s homelot. Instead, after the topsoil was stripped away, the settlement pattern comprised 11 articulated domestic large mammal skeletons and numerous post moulds, indicating the extended use of the site as an animal burial ground. This paper will discuss the health and safety issues raised by this discovery, as well as the biomedical, historical and cultural processes that may have been involved in the formation of this unusual site.

Religion and medicine were in many ways intertwined in the Middle Ages, both in explaining deviance, illness and impairment as well as in the healing practices. They are not anymore seen as competing but rather as supporting, even complementing each other. Both religion and medicine had their own ways of defining the undesirable, which could lead to the construction of 'The Other' – be it disability, mental disorder, or heterodoxy. Some features, like lunacy, leprosy, impotence, or infertility were in the nexus of both religious and medicinal explanations. Both religion and medicine could also offer methods for cure and ways to integrate the deviant persons back into a community. The interconnection of both concepts can be found, for example, in hagiography, sermons, medical treatises and herbals. These sessions aim to analyse healing as cultural practice; the focal questions are how religious and medicinal explanation intermingled in the construction of 'the Other' and in what ways they complemented or competed in explaining, categorizing and treating different spiritual, mental and bodily conditions.

A paleopathological study was carried out on the she skeletal remains of Cardinal Carlo de' Medici (1595-1666), son of the Grand Duke Ferdinando I (1549-1609) and Cristina from Lorraine (1565-1636), to investigate the articular pathology described in the archival sources. The skeletal remains of Carlo, buried in the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence, have been exhumed and submitted to macroscopic and radiological examination. The skeleton of Carlo revealed a concentration of different severe pathologies. Ankylosis of the cervical column, associated with other facial and spine anomalies suggests a diagnosis of congenital disease: the Klippel-Feil syndrome. In addition, the cervical segment presents the results of the tuberculosis (Pott's disease) from which the Cardinal suffered in his infancy. The post-cranial skeleton shows an ankylosing disease, mainly symmetrical and extremely severe, involving the large as well as small articulations, and characterized by massive joint...

Organiser: Joanna Phillips, Institute for Medieval Studies, University of Leeds
Moderator: Alexandra Bamji, School of History, University of Leeds
Speakers: Joanna Phillips, Sunny Harrison (Institute for Medieval Studies, University of Leeds), Iona McCleery (School of History, University of Leeds)

The three papers in this session examine aspects of the importance of place and environment to health in three medieval spatial contexts, spanning the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries: the crusades to the Eastern Mediterranean; the spaces of equine medicine, from urban environments to military expeditions and occupational settings; and West Africa as experienced by Portuguese travellers. Taken together this will show how medieval medical thinking foregrounded the importance of environment to health while exploring how this was represented in very different types of sources: chronicles, guild records, hagiographies and travel narratives.

This essay offers a historical perspective on a common American anxiety: the introduction of disease from abroad by visitors and immigrants. Fear of contagion and disgust concerning the symptomatic manifestations of illness are important factors for stereotype and stigmatize them. The narrative traces such emotionally charged behavior back to the earliest conquest and colonization of the American continent. From smallpox and yellow fever to cholera, plague, polio, as well as AIDS, SARS and recently Ebola fever, nativist and often racially inspired attitudes have decisively shaped a variety of stringent public health responses, notably quarantines and institutional isolation

The article analyzes initiatives taken by physicians from both the private and public sectors who contributed to placing the fight against cancer on the federal government’s agenda of public health policies, which became embodied in the 1941 creation of Brazil’s National Cancer Service. The text
also aims to show that this historical process was directly related to the international context of scientific exchange
between Brazil and the United States that was encouraged under the Good-neighbor Policy of the 1940s. It calls attention to political disputes over the coordination of efforts to fight the disease at the federal level.

The Seven Years’ War, often called the first global war, spanned North America, the West Indies, Europe, and India.  In these locations diseases such as scurvy, smallpox, and yellow fever killed far more than combat did, stretching the resources of European states.
In Disease, War, and the Imperial State, Erica Charters demonstrates how disease played a vital role in shaping strategy and campaigning, British state policy, and imperial relations during the Seven Years’ War. Military medicine was a crucial component of the British war effort; it was central to both eighteenth-century scientific innovation and the moral authority of the British state. Looking beyond the traditional focus of the British state as a fiscal war-making machine, Charters uncovers an imperial state conspicuously attending to the welfare of its armed forces, investing in medical research, and responding to local public opinion.  Charters shows military medicine to be a credible scientific endeavor that was similarly responsive to local conditions and demands.
Disease, War, and the Imperial State is an engaging study of early modern warfare and statecraft, one focused on the endless and laborious task of managing manpower in the face of virulent disease in the field, political opposition at home, and the clamor of public opinion in both Britain and its colonies.

By the 1970s, a therapeutic revolution, decades in the making, had transformed hemophilia from an obscure hereditary malady into a manageable bleeding disorder. Yet the glory of this achievement was short lived. The same treatments that delivered some normalcy to the lives of persons with hemophilia brought unexpectedly fatal results in the 1980s when people with the disease contracted HIV-AIDS and Hepatitis C in staggering numbers. The Bleeding Disease recounts the promising and perilous history of American medical and social efforts to manage hemophilia in the twentieth century.

This is both a success story and a cautionary tale, one built on the emergence in the 1950s and 1960s of an advocacy movement that sought normalcy—rather than social isolation and hyper-protectiveness—for the boys and men who suffered from the severest form of the disease.

Stephen Pemberton evokes the allure of normalcy as well as the human costs of medical and technological progress in efforts to manage hemophilia. He explains how physicians, advocacy groups, the blood industry, and the government joined patients and families in their unrelenting pursuit of normalcy—and the devastating, unintended consequences that pursuit entailed. Ironically, transforming the hope of a normal life into a purchasable commodity for people with bleeding disorders made it all too easy to ignore the potential dangers of delivering greater health and autonomy to hemophilic boys and men."

During the 18th century, St Marylebone parish grew to become one of the wealthiest in London. The church on Marylebone High Street, built 1742, was soon too small to serve this population and relocated in 1817. Archaeologists recorded 350+ burials, mostly in the graveyard, with some in family vaults or the church crypt. Notable burials included the painter Benjamin De La Cour, the Wesley family (Charles was founder of the Methodist movement) and the Hampsons (their ancestor Sir Robert was alderman of London and sheriff in 1598). The archaeological results and detailed osteological analysis of 301 individuals are combined with documentary research into the parish and its population, making this one of the largest and most comprehensive studies of a post-medieval London cemetery.

During archaeological investigation by Gifford of St Pancras Old Church burial ground, on the eastern edge of Somers Town, London, in advance of construction of the new London terminus for the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, a full porcelain denture was discovered. The high quality porcelain dentures, manufactured in the late eighteenth century French style, may have been brought with their owner, Archbishop Arthur Richard Dillon, on his journey into exile. There is evidence of prolonged use, not only for cosmetic or vocal functions but also in mastication. The dentures are unique archaeological artefacts and represent a pivotal time in dental history, with the adoption of new materials and methods of manufacture. They reflect a period of significant social and economic change for the upper echelons of French society. This paper outlines the development of porcelain dentures, discusses the prosthesis, their owner, and a possible provenance.