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...

Challenging Virgin Soil Epidemic Assumptions

The depopulation of Native Americans during the 16th to 18th centuries, one result of the 'Columbian Exchange', has been held up as the ultimate example of virgin soil epidemics. The emphasis put on the 'virginity' of the native population, bordering on biological determinism, has absolved the colonial powers of a multitude of sins. Some archaeologists...

An Anniversary year for Natural Disasters: 1815, 1665, and 1315

There are major natural disasters every year. In the last year alone we have had the major earthquake in Nepal just in the last couple days and a historic epidemic of Ebola. It's too soon to tell how these latest disasters will seen by history and effect historical interpretations. This year there are three natural...

Plague in Surat: 20 Years Later

I can't let 2014 pass in a few weeks without mentioning that this fall was the twentieth anniversary of the plague outbreak in Surat, India -- a major turning point in modern plague history and in the development of the (re)emerging infectious disease paradigm. In the final accounting, 53 people died of the plague, mostly...

Autumn Reading

So much for my plan to do monthly reading updates. I think quarterly might be more feasible. It seems like the fall has flown by and was not as productive as I would have liked. Isn't that always the way? So I'm currently working my way through Cameron's Anglo-Saxon Medicine and then next up will...

Reading in July

  As I start working on my book project, I'm going to have less time to develop blog posts, so I thought I would share what I'm reading with you each month. This will also give me an incentive to keep blogging and reading! I'll list the books I've read and the papers that I...

Famine and Epidemic Anthrax, Saint-Domingue (Haiti), 1770

Earthquakes have brought devastation on the Port-au-Prince region many times in the last 300 years. The 1770 earthquake was stronger and relatively as destructive as the 2010 quake (Ker, 2010). It also was centered near Port-au-Prince and to the west of the city.   Ship captain accounts of the earthquake in the Boston Evening-Post from 9...

Cholera’s Chain of Infection

Cholera is the pandemic that just won't go away. Worse yet, it preys on us when we are at our most vulnerable, after a natural or man-made disaster. We know how to prevent it but in times of natural disaster or in areas where infrastructure is inadequate, those conditions can be hard to maintain. A...