The Personification of Medicine, Pharmacy and Surgery

For my last post of the year, I'm going to look at an image that has really summed up the fall semester for me. For my degree capstone, I've been doing a lot of research in the history and anthropology of medicine (plague, big surprise, huh). This is one of those finds that won't fit...

Lazarus does not have the plague!

I get it. We would all like to have more illustrations of the plague. It is hard to fathom how a horrific event like the Black Death has left so few bonafide illustrations. Misidentified illustrations do not solve the problem; they compound the confusion. Three images commonly used to illustrate the Black Death have been proven misidentifications;...

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...

CFP: Contagions sessions at the International Congress for Medieval Studies 2018

by Michelle Ziegler Contagions: The Society for Historic Infectious Disease Studies has been given the opportunity of organizing three sessions at next year's International Congress for Medieval Studies. This is the equivalent of a full day at the Congress. The Congress will be held from May 10 to May 13, 2018, at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo...

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...

Medieval Historians Taking Genomics into Account

At the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo (Kzoo) last month, I couldn't help feeling that we have reached a turning point. I went to four sessions that engaged in genomics, human and/or bacterial, in some way. Granted, these are a tiny proportion of the 500+ sessions offered, but I have learned that if you...

Pregnancy, ‘coffin birth’, and the Black Death

by Michelle Ziegler The Genoese have always been central in the legend of the start of the Black Death, by their own claim, linking a siege of the Genoese at Kaffa to the spread of the epidemic in the Mediterranean. Last month the first confirmed plague graves in the region of Genoa were reported by...

Evolutionary Clues in 17th-Century Smallpox Genome

By Michelle Ziegler Smallpox is one of those diseases long believed to have an ancient pedigree, the suspected culprit of legendary epidemics. Yet, so far, smallpox hasn't made a big impression in ancient DNA surveys. If it was truly endemic throughout the Old World before 1492, so much so that it pops up in the...