History Of Disease

This article examines the relationship between disease, pollution and sin in the Priestly writings, focusing on the rites for the purification of ṣara‛at in Leviticus 14. In particular, it will evaluate the contested question of whether this text is implicitly polemical in light of ancient West Asian rituals dealing with similar subject matter, especially a ritual for the treatment of skin disease from Emar. These comparisons will enable a more precise characterization of the Priestly agenda reflected in Leviticus 14 and suggest that the traditional notion of pollution in Israel has been deliberately reinterpreted.

Vector-borne diseases (VBDs) are embedded within complex socio-ecological systems. While research has traditionally focused on the direct effects of VBDs on human morbidity and mortality, it is increasingly clear that their impacts are much more pervasive. VBDs are dynamically linked to feedbacks between environmental conditions, vector ecology, disease burden, and societal responses that drive transmission. As a result, VBDs have had profound influence on human history. Mechanisms include: (1) killing or debilitating large numbers of people, with demographic and population-level impacts; (2) differentially affecting populations based on prior history of disease exposure, immunity, and resistance; (3) being weaponised to promote or justify hierarchies of power, colonialism, racism, classism and sexism; (4) catalysing changes in ideas, institutions, infrastructure, technologies and social practices in efforts to control disease outbreaks; and (5) changing human relationships with the land and environment. We use historical and archaeological evidence interpreted through an ecological lens to illustrate how VBDs have shaped society and culture, focusing on case studies from four pertinent VBDs: plague, malaria, yellow fever and trypanosomiasis. By comparing across diseases, time periods and geographies, we highlight the enormous scope and variety of mechanisms by which VBDs have influenced human history.

Why do racial and ethnic controversies become attached, as they often do, to discussions of modern genetics? How do theories about genetic difference become entangled with political debates about cultural and group differences in America? Such issues are a conspicuous part of the histories of three hereditary diseases: Tay-Sachs, commonly identified with Jewish Americans; cystic fibrosis, often labeled a "Caucasian" disease; and sickle cell disease, widely associated with African Americans.

In this captivating account, historians Keith Wailoo and Stephen Pemberton reveal how these diseases—fraught with ethnic and racial meanings for many Americans—became objects of biological fascination and crucibles of social debate. Peering behind the headlines of breakthrough treatments and coming cures, they tell a complex story: about different kinds of suffering and faith, about unequal access to the promises and perils of modern medicine, and about how Americans consume innovation and how they come to believe in, or resist, the notion of imminent medical breakthroughs.

With Tay-Sachs, cystic fibrosis, and sickle cell disease as a powerful backdrop, the authors provide a glimpse into a diverse America where racial ideologies, cultural politics, and conflicting beliefs about the power of genetics shape disparate health care expectations and experiences.

Este trabajo parte de una revisión de fuentes hemerográficas y bibliográficas para tratar el tema de investigación sobre la fiebre aftosa y el rifle sanitario dentro de la ciudad de Guanajuato cuyo objetivo se aborda en la problemática del qué ocurrió dentro de los municipios de la región y como tuvo repercusiones de nivel, incluso internacional. El tema de la Contingencia actual por la causa del SARS-COV 2: Coronavirus-19 ha infringido no solo el conocimiento del virus en cualquier dimensión de su conocimiento sino hasta la re-investigación de los conceptos que lo relacionan o la reciprocidad de entre epidemias mortales provocadas en nuestra sociedad. En el caso de la fiebre aftosa afecta principalmente al ganado pero también ha provocado desequilibrios en varias partes alrededor del mundo. 1 La llamada fiebre aftosa (FA), también conocida como Glosopeda o Foot and Mouth disease por la World Organisation for animal Health, proviene de

This post, on the Arc-Medieval, Global Medieval Studies blog, recounts my experiences teaching my undergraduate course, "The Black Death: Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World." Over the course of the past decade and a half, there has been a radical change in scientific understandings of the evolution and spread of *Yersinia pestis*, the causative organism of plague. This course is based on the idea that that evolutionary history can also serve as the foundation for an epidemiological and cultural history of plague, a disease that has spread in just 2000 years to all the continents of the world (save Antartica). The course focuses on the most awful plague pandemic, the Black Death, but it examines it within the whole global history of plague up to the present day. The blog includes links both to the complete syllabus and to other resources we used throughout the semester.

Between the years 1346 and 1353 CE, a terrible disease swept across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, bringing death and desolation in its wake. This widespread epidemic, now known as the “Black Death”, caused dramatic losses, surpassing those of any large-scale disaster recorded before. In Europe, the disease killed an estimated 30–60% of the population over a 5-year period. Its impact elsewhere in the Old World is not as well-known, but historical evidence suggests massive depopulation as well. By causing such a large demographic collapse, the Black Death initiated or enhanced major social, economic, and political changes throughout Western Eurasia and Northern Africa. It also constituted the starting point of a period of high mortality, marked by recurrent outbreaks of the disease over the next four centuries. Due to its many effects on society and culture, the Black Death is generally considered as one of the most significant events of the late medieval world and as a turning point in European history.

«Sida y temor es un gran aporte a la historia de las epidemias y de la salud en el Perú en la década de 1980. Su principal contribución es mostrar cómo existió un desfase entre el conocimiento médico sobre el VIH/sida de aquel entonces y el papel que cumplió la prensa en representar de manera prejuiciosa y sensacionalista a los principales afectados por esta enfermedad y difundir temores en la sociedad». Claudia Rosas Lauro

In 1918-19, with Ireland in transition from British rule towards independence, the Local Government Board for Ireland, the body responsible for the supervision of Poor Law dispensary system and sanitation, faced what turned out to be the last great crisis before its abolition.  The 1918-19 influenza pandemic, which killed at least 20,057 people and infected an estimated 800,000 on the island, placed an enormous stress on the under-funded, over-stretched and awkwardly structured health system. This chapter will explore how the influenza crisis was handled in Ireland, and will suggest that during the influenza epidemic, the Local Government Board for Ireland was widely perceived as being either unwilling or incapable of devising a plan of action to deal with the epidemic. The LGB was portrayed, through reports from Boards of Guardians’ meetings in the newspapers, as being quite obstructive to Boards of Guardians as they tried to cope with increased demands on medical staff and resources during the crisis. In the absence of a centralised crisis management strategy emerging from the LGB, local authorities fulfilled their statutory obligations in relation to sanitation, while a range of voluntary healthcare providers, from hospitals and charitable societies to landlords and neighbours, devised localised strategies to feed and nurse the ill.

Between 1793 and 1822, a series of successive yellow fever outbreaks ravaged the eastern seaboard of the United States. The outbreaks generated not only the biggest public health crisis in that period but also one of the most pressing and contentious disputes in medical theory. Often told as a national story, this article re-examines that controversy by situating it in the context of outbreaks, research, and debates in other parts of the anglophone Atlantic. It argues that American responses to disease were shaped by the young republic’s post-imperial relations to both Great Britain and the West Indies. On a broader level, this study challenges current approaches in the formation of American natural knowledge and identity during this period. It looks beyond both national boundaries and relations to former metropolitan centers, locating some of the above developments in a more ‘‘multi-centered’’ Atlantic world.

Esta coletânea, composta por 26 contribuições e um prólogo de Pedro Paulo Funari, é um compêndio sobre epidemias na História, em linguagem acessível ao grande público, com textos do Antigo Oriente à contemporaneidade, da malária no Egito antigo à AIDS no Brasil do final do séc. XX, de autores brasileiros e argentinos, que visa a disponibilizar informações e reflexões sobre diversas epidemias e como as sociedades as entenderam e reagiram a elas ao longo da História

Focusing on the natural, settlement and disease ecologies, I present the story of how typhoid fever came to be a major threat to health and life in Prahran between 1865-95. Typhoid was dubbed Melbourne’s ‘special shame’ because it was universally understood to be an affliction of depressed health and living conditions – which flourished throughout greater Melbourne during the nineteenth-century.
Prahran was a product of the two boom periods in Victoria’s history. Between the 1850s and 1880s houses, shops and factories were established throughout the municipality. The topography and class discrepancies that developed in Prahran meant that there were vastly different living conditions and exposure to unhealthy environments. When Prahran’s population spiked, overcrowding, flooding, and filth accumulation problems developed. Over the century living standards deteriorated, as housing and infrastructure creation could not keep up with demand, and waste was not handled effectively. In places where water and filth accumulated
stench became an unbearable problem. The result of the combined natural, settlement and disease ecologies in Prahran was an increased instance of infection.

Typhoid was the filth disease that most impacted the Victorian colony. The result of the combinations of topographic, class and filth issues in the vicinity of Prahran was that after 1870 disease flourished. Typhoid swept through the suburb with increasing frequency and impact after that time, reaching epidemic proportions and finally prompting action that would see the instant city nature of the colony transition to a
more settled and tempered development. The story of the settlement, pollution and eventually the Government mandated clean up of greater Melbourne during the
nineteenth-century, will be examined using Prahran as the focus.

In two articles in English I have used the material from the book Digerdöden (Black Death) published in 2003 – which is the standard work on Late Medieval plagues in Sweden.  In this article I give an overview of epidemics in Sweden during the 14th and 15th century. It was in research on plagues I fully developed the Source Pluralistic method. The title alludes to an older notion that the plague did not hit Sweden.

The Black Death had an unparalleled impact in the history of Europe, and of all Old World, generally. Consensus around this interpretation and a vast and consolidated historiography – enriched by the contributions of physical and life sciences – has been allowing extraordinary new international achievements. However, the characteristics of the surviving Portuguese documentation requires an indirect approach, through the use of economic sources, mainly property management. This preference allows to reveal short-term tendencies, as the fall of property rents, instantaneous and very significant in the main institutions studied, but allows equally to discard the direct influence of the Black Death in processes such as monetarization or the preferential length of agrarian contracts. Without the possibility of present mortality rates, due to the lack of data, the demographic fall is perceptible; however, the volume of deaths – no matter its real value – was not able to interrupt the normal functioning of institutions for more than a few months. This does not mean that there were not perennial marks of the plague, surviving in the memory of those who survived and their descendants. It is clear, however, that only a succession of other negative events – earthquakes, droughts, new plagues and wars, among others – allowed that these acute consequences could last, with the maintenance of low rents which, in some way, reveal a smaller population, but not smaller enough to provoke a remarkable abandonment of fields and/or villages. It was not a prosperous kingdom the one the Black Death encountered, and even less the one which emerged after the plague. However, the infamous epidemic seems to have failed to produce remarkable structural changes, even if its impact and its consequences were important, immediate and clear to the eyes of those who experienced it.

To appear in ed. Patricia Lorcin and Todd Shepard, French Mediterraneans, (University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming).

From Flaubert’s fascination with lesions in the anuses of Egyptian soldiers at Qasr al-Ayni Hospital to the seeming-ubiquity of eyeless, noseless syphilitic death-heads in French military, travel, and medical accounts of North Africa, French travelers and physicians frequently mentioned syphilis among the Arabs.  Yet French physicians 1860-1925 consolidated the various rashes, sores and birth defects observed in North Africa to invent a physiological racial type, the degenerate and diseased “syphilitic Arab.”  The reification and incorporation of racism to biomedical knowledge exists across colonial contexts, but “Arab syphilis” reveals the peculiar role of native bodies to the French mission civilisatrice, the location of irreducible difference between French citizens and colonized French subjects in the French “imperial family” envisioned by Minister of Colonies Albert Sarraut. 

    Arab syphilis suggests how medical science could animate and naturalize French rule in the Mediterranean.  Richard Keller, Kim Pelis, and others have shown that French Pasteurian physicians were a single Mediterranean community circulating between metropole and colonies; indeed, the architect of French anti-syphilis programs in Morocco was Paris venerologist and former chef de clinique at Saint-Lazare, Georges Lacapère.  But as Michel Foucault argues, biopolitics is a way of governing that defines the political subject through his body,  an analytical frame that Ann Laura Stoler extended to French empire.  In French North Africa, Arab syphilis created the Muslim as a cultural, social, and biological inferior, a non-évolué who could only be a non-citizen.  Medicine helped to draw a climatological, biological, and civilizational topography of the Mediterranean, a natural order for the subjects of the French empire.

Grip, her yıl olağan bölgesel grip salgınları sırasında dünya genelinde yaklaşık 500.000 ölüme yol açmasına karşın, yaşlılar ve kronik hastalar gibi gruplar dışında genellikle hafif seyreden bir hastalık olduğundan, bugüne dek pek önemsenmemiştir. Daha seyrek görülen küresel grip salgınları, yani grip pandemileri sırasında ise, çok daha büyük kayıplar kaydedilmektedir. Kayıtlı tarihte onlarca grip pandemisi gerçekleşmiş olduğu bilinmektedir ve bunların en şiddetlisi olan 1918 “İspanyol” gribi pandemisi, bir yıldan kısa süre içinde 40 ila 100 (ortalama 50) milyon insanı ölüme götürmüştür. Üstelik en ağır seyrettiği grup, sıra dışı bir biçimde sağlıklı genç yetişkinler olmuştur. Çok sarsıcı sosyal, demografik ve ekonomik sonuçları nedeniyle 1918 “İspanyol” gribi pandemisi, sağlık otoritelerince solunum yoluyla yayılan salgınlar için olabilecek “en kötü senaryo” kabul edilegelmiştir. Sürmekte olan COVID-19 pandemisi sırasında bu kıyas ve ikaz, T.C. Sağlık Bakanlığı tarafından da yapılmıştır.

Yabancı dillerdeki eserlere karşın, bu yıkıcı pandemiyi ele alan Türkçe çalışmalar oldukça az sayıdadır. İlkin 2015 yılında yayımlanmış olan Gelmiş Geçmiş En Büyük Katil: 1918 “İspanyol” Gribi, kapsamlı bir araştırmanın ardından bu konudaki başlıca bilgi ve belgeleri Türkçe literatüre kazandırmayı amaçlayan bir ilk eserdir. Kitapta pandeminin köken, neden ve sonuçlarına; morbidite, mortalite ve üç dalgalı seyrine; Birinci Dünya Savaşı ile ilişkisine; genel küresel yayılımına ve bölgesel farklılıklarına; klinik semptom ve karakteristiklerine; dünyada ve Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda pandemiye karşı alınan önlemlere; yabancı kaynaklardan hastalığın teşhis ve tedavisi ile ilgili bildirim, anekdot ve gözlemlere; Osmanlı basınından hastalığın semptomları, seyri, payitaht İstanbul’a gelişi, hasta istatistikleri ile ilgili haberlere ve de yerli doktorların açıklama, karşılaştırma ve otopsi bulgularına yer verilmiştir. Ayrıca, gribin de yeni koronavirüs hastalığının da solunumsal salgın hastalıklar olması paydasında, genişletilmiş ikinci baskı güncel COVID-19 pandemisi ile mukayeseler de içermektedir.

ISBN 9786257187015

www.dr.com.tr/Kitap/Gelmis-Gecmis-En-Buyuk-Katil-1918-Ispanyol-Gribi/Arastirma-Tarih/Tarih/Dunya-Tarihi/urunno=0001740904001
www.idefix.com/Kitap/Gelmis-Gecmis-En-Buyuk-Katil-1918-Ispanyol-Gribi/Arastirma-Tarih/Tarih/Dunya-Tarihi/urunno=0001740904001
www.kitapyurdu.com/kitap/gelmis-gecmis-en-buyuk-katil-1918-ispanyol-gribi/372430.html

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EN. "The Greatest Killer Ever: The 1918 'Spanish' Flu," with a separate chapter on the occurrence, course, effects and reports of the pandemic in the Ottoman capital Istanbul. Currently available only in Turkish.

Between the world wars, diphtheria immunisation formed the vanguard of burgeoning
federal responsibility for health across Australia. However, the iatrogenic ‘Bundaberg tragedy’ of
1928—in which 12 children died after receiving contaminated diphtheria toxin–antitoxin—
compromised both local and global inoculation programmes. This article documents the deployment
of medical science to address the subsequent political crisis, particularly the Royal Commission
chaired by prominent local researcher, Charles Kellaway. I argue that this inquiry was a critical experiment
in narrowing the terms of reference for health from the social milieu to medical expertise.
Strategies central to this rescripting were enlisting an all-medical Commission, transposing laboratory
culture to the tragedy site and focusing blame on individual, behavioural aspects of contamination.
Examining discourses of both lay and medical dissent suggests how this event fed into wider cultural
negotiations, advancing the social stature of medical research while highlighting its potential value in
federal control of health.

O nosso estudo incide no hospital da misericórdia de Penafiel, desde 1600 até 1850. Nesta senda analisamos a sua evolução, quer no que respeita ao edifício onde se localizava, os profissionais contratados para prestarem a assistência aos doentes, os seus utentes, as patologias de que sofriam, o tratamento efetuado, inserindo-o na confraria que o administrava.
Tentamos estabelecer ligações e ver o hospital como uma das valências e funções da misericórdia, a par de outras. Para tal, tivemos sempre que o contextualizar com o nascimento, afirmação e consolidação da confraria e das restantes obras de misericórdia que praticava. A evolução e desenvolvimento da assistência hospitalar da irmandade inserem-se e interligam-se na instituição que a geria e não poderiam ser desvinculadas dos avanços e recuos da mesma, dos períodos de maior desafogo económico ou de maiores dificuldades financeiras e tensões internas ou externas. Teve-se em linha de conta as especificidades da localidade, as medidas tomadas pelo município, as características populacionais, de maneira a se entender quem geria a santa casa, quem cuidava dos doentes e quem eram os pobres que caíam internados. Ao mesmo tempo, procurou-se entender as linhas evolutivas da medicina e farmácia, nestes duzentos e cinquenta anos, de forma, a integrar o hospital de Penafiel, mostrando os seus avanços ou estagnações face às linhas gerais da história hospitalar europeia e sobretudo nacional.
A análise do hospital pressupôs, igualmente, o estudo da forma de aquisição de medicamentos, dos remédios utilizados para a cura, dos locais de confeção dos mesmos, essencialmente, após a santa casa ter criado botica própria. A administração da botica, a relação dos provedores e mesários com a mesma e com os boticários, os conhecimentos destes, a riqueza ou debilidades dos seus produtos face aos conhecimentos existentes na altura, foram analisados.  A cura dos corpos não se poderia fazer sem o apoio das panaceias que os reabilitavam. A evolução da ciência farmacêutica, da botânica e da química estão intrinsecamente ligadas à medicina e desta forma o hospital da misericórdia esteve profundamente ligado à sua botica.
A observação de um lato período temporal permitiu compreender a evolução, os períodos de estagnação e os avanços ou recuos da assistência hospitalar proporcionada pela confraria, sempre interligados com a vida confraternal e os seus constrangimentos e conquistas. Os avanços da medicina, as políticas régias relacionadas com a assistência foram tidos em linha de conta, pois a cura e tratamento de doentes em Penafiel, não podem ser analisadas sem uma visão global que se insere na evolução e preocupação europeia e nacional do cuidado para com os corpos dos outros.
O peso da alma face ao corpo numa fase inicial desta assistência e depois do corpo face à alma, espelho da evolução das mentalidades durante estes duzentos e cinquenta anos foram tidos em conta. Ambos fizeram parte da assistência hospitalar proporcionada pela misericórdia evoluindo de acordo com a sociedade e as necessidades mais prementes desta.
A tipologia das doenças que afligiram a população internada, as suas características e a forma de serem encaradas, diagnosticas e tratadas, a sua evolução e formas de as encarar foram igualmente estudadas. Identificou-se grupos de doentes e épocas, quer anuais, quer sazonais em que algumas patologias eram mais preponderantes. 
Caracterizou-se social e economicamente os assalariados da casa ao serviço do hospital e botica, avaliando a sua relação com a confraria, quer como funcionários, quer como irmãos ou parentes de irmãos, a relação destes e a sua presença em cargos camarários, tendo-se efetuado breves estudos de caso, na medida em que só se conhecendo profundamente estes homens se conheceria a medicina e o tratamento por estes efetuado.

During the first half of the 17th century, the Ottoman dynasty repeatedly faced serious threats of extinction in ways hitherto unseen since the beginning of their monarchical rule in the early 1300s. While the primary factor behind this problem was the coming to the throne of a series of underage and/or childless sultans between 1603 and 1648, it was the incessant military rebellions in the capital city of Istanbul directly targeting the Ottoman ruler that often deepened the political/dynastic crisis prevailing in the same period. Meanwhile, frequent outbreaks of epidemic diseases, such as the plague and smallpox, in the densely populated Istanbul only worsened the precarious situation of the royal family, particularly since all of its male members were by then residing in the Topkapı Palace and thus exposed to the fatal threats of such biological calamities. Hence, under these circumstances, the Ottoman royal family tried to secure not only the well-being of the reigning young sultan and, if any, his male siblings and children, but also the critical problem of dynastic continuity with the introduction of new patrilineal principles of succession, namely that of seniority.
In this context, this article examines the political impact of the communicable diseases in early 17th-century Istanbul and aims to demonstrate how diseases such as smallpox intertwined with the Ottoman political/dynastic crisis of the period, problems which have not been thus far explored in conjunction by scholars. My discussion focuses on the early reign of Sultan Ahmed I (1603-1617) who, at the age of thirteen, became the first Ottoman sultan to assume the throne childless at a time when there was no other adult male in the dynastic family. I establish that, with Ahmed I’s enthronement, the Ottoman dynasty experienced their first serious fear of genealogical extinction when the new sultan and the only other male member of the dynasty, his four-year-old brother Mustafa, survived a near-fatal bout of smallpox in March 1604. Overall, this article aims to show that while scholars of early modern Ottoman history typically emphasize that the Ottoman male line came close to extinction only during the last years of Sultan Murad IV’s reign (1623-1640) and the early years of Sultan İbrahim’s (1640-1648), such threat of dynastic extinction actually emerged decades earlier, during the early reign of Ahmed I and under the terrifying exigencies of epidemics.

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. ...

This article attempts to explain the survival of tens of thousands of ring-forts in the Irish landscape. The sites probably owe their preservation to superstitious fear of leprechauns and fairies. But what gave rise to such fears? The paper proposes, tentatively, that medieval outbreaks of disease may be to blame.

For many historians, sociologists, and anthropologists of medicine, “disease” and “illness” are not equivalent. Whereas “disease” denotes the physician’s ostensibly objective criteria, “illness” emphasizes the patient’s subjective experience. This dissertation examines that distinction precisely at a point where it breaks down, in the history of a diagnosis called “anosognosia,” also known as the denial of illness.
    In the 1890s, Austrian psychiatrist Gabriel Anton observed a number of patients who denied being blind, deaf, or paralyzed. “That is just how it is,” a patient demurred, “one sees better in youth.” The question to Anton was, were such patients truly unaware of their loss or did they sense it on some level, if only to deny it?
    The history of Anton’s syndrome, later named “anosognosia” by the French neurologist Joseph Babinski, spans more than a century and a half across two continents and through both world wars. I treat its history as a special type of lens to focus on some of the broader intellectual and professional differences between neurology and psychiatry. I argue that the clinical perception and portrayal of this apparent loss of the patient’s experience depended on historical patterns of thinking about the distinction between conscious and unconscious perception as well as categories of health and disease. To think about the denial of illness was to think about the very meaning of illness and awareness, and the difference, if any, between the mind and the brain.

Short Description
Significance: By the details of the symptom description, the treatment options, and the regionalisation the evil kernel descriptions may well be identified as suspected bubonic plague. BENEDICTOW (2004: 41) hypothesized that evil kernel swellings may be considered to be sporadic incidences of endemic plague.

Abstract
For more than hundred years the textual documentation of evil kernel swellings (è hé zhǒng 惡核腫) consisted of merely two passages YU Botao cited 1910 in his Nuanced Points on Bubonic Plague. Identification with lymph node swellings due to Yersinia pestis infection was made easy by projecting backwards colloquial expressions for plague buboes that likewise made use of a fruit kernel metaphor (Li Yushang 2002a). Since WU Lien-teh et al. (1936: 11) took this point from YU this two-passage-story was never questioned. But while BENEDICTOW (2010: 499) asserted that the two medical texts’ “clinical descriptions are unambiguous”, BUELL (2012: 132-135) considered them to be “too vague to say for sure”.
This interim report expands on preliminary findings that enlarged the number of medical texts on the evil kernel topic. Among them, the source text to both of the above-mentioned passages was found in a fragment of the Xiao pin fang 小品方 written between 454 and 473 CE by CHEN Yanzhi 陳延之 (PFISTER 2019). It was considered indispensable for medical students both in the Tang Code and ancient Japanese codes (KOSOTO 1986).
The work gives both a theoretical elucidation of evil kernels and two prescriptions to treat them. It describes the size and terrible painfulness of the swellings, the strong fever and shivers, psychologic changes, and uses the dispersion of an unspecific poison in the body as explanatory model. This complex sign of disease is regionalised as being one often seen in the southern parts of China.
The degree to that one was acquainted with the disease is shown in Chan jing 產經, which gives a prescription adapted to children. SUN Simiao modifies the regionalisation of the disease, and adds specific travel advice for officials deployed in these regions.

Panel *104: The ‘New Paradigm’ of Plague Studies:  Expanded Geographies and Chronologies of the Medieval Pandemics, Organized by: William H. York.
May 10, 2022, 11:00 EDT; 17:00 CEST

The 57th International Congress on Medieval Studies will take place online Monday, May 9, through Saturday, May 14, 2022.
https://wmich.edu/medievalcongress