Disease and Discrimination in Colonial Atlantic America

Reviewed by Michelle Ziegler Dale Hutchinson. Disease and Discrimination: Poverty and Pestilence in Colonial Atlantic America. University of Florida Press, 2016. $85 Dale Hutchinson's latest book fits into a recent trend of a more critical analysis of the role disease played in the demographic collapse of Native Americans in the Colonial period. After spending most of...

Roundtable on Campbell’s Climate, Disease, and Society in the Late Medieval World

by Michelle Ziegler Bruce Campbell. The Great Transition: Climate, Disease, and Society in the Late Medieval World. Cambridge University Press, 2016. When I first learned that Bruce Campbell was working on this book, I wondered if it would be the first grand synthesis of the new paradigm. Although there have been some very good regional...

Environment, Society and the Black Death in Sweden

Environment, Society and the Black Death: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Late Medieval Crisis in Sweden. Edited by Per Lagerås. Oxbow Books, 2016.  The Black Death is a bit of a phantom in this book. Like the human body casts of Pompeii, the Black Death is perceptible  by the void it left behind -- a void...

Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America

Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America. Edited by Catherine Cameron, Paul Kelton and Alan Swedlund. University of Arizona Press, 2015. With the number of emerging infectious diseases climbing and new revelations about plague's past, this book is a timely caution to the rhetoric surrounding so-called virgin soil epidemics. This book is the publication of...

Autumn Reading

While autumn is not officially over yet, December always seems like winter to me so here is my reading review from autumn. This season I'm introducing a book review rating system. On my scale, an average book would get three scopes; a good book, four; and only the extraordinary book gets five scopes. I probably...

An Unnatural History of Emerging Infections

Ron Barrett and George Armelagos. An Unnatural History of Emerging Infections. Oxford University Press, 2013 (e-book) This is not a traditional review. In keeping with this blog's function as my shared file cabinet, this post will be something like a précis /notes with a few of  my comments in italics. Medical anthropologists Ron Barrett and George Aremelagos...

On Giant’s Shoulders #66: Contagious History!

Welcome to the 66th edition of On Giant's Shoulders, the blog carnival for the history of science, medicine and technology! I wish I could pull a bunch of holiday posts out of Santa's bag, but the blogosphere does not appear to be in the festive mood yet. An anniversary and commemoration mood seems to be...

Setting Affairs in Order During the Plague, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne 1636

Keith Wrightson, Ralph Tailor's Summer: A Scrivener, his City, and the Plague. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011. Newcastle-upon-Tyne is one of those cities that is rarely the focus of a plague study - an industrial town whose prosperity and continued existence was based on its economic impact. Coal was king in seventeenth century...

Wendy Orent on the Plague

Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World's Most Dangerous Disease Wendy Orent, New York: Free Press, 2004, reprinted 2013 I've been way for far too long. One of the reasons for the quiet is because I've been reading quite a few books this summer. This book was one of them. I wouldn't normally...