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...

Presentations on the Plague from the European Association of Archaeologists, Vilnius, Lithuania, 2016

I just discovered that most of the presentations from the "Plague in Diachronic and Interdisciplinary Perspective" session of the Europan Association of Archaeologists meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania on 2 September 2016 are now on YouTube.  I think I have collected them all here. Enjoy 3 hours of plague talks! Introduction-Plague in diachronic and Interdisciplinary perspective by...

Landscapes of Disease Themed Issue

For the last couple years, I have been writing about a landscape-based approach to the study of infectious disease in general and historic epidemics in particular. When I first wrote about Lambin et al.'s now classic paper "Pathogenic landscapes" nearly three years ago, I did not know then that it would be so influential in...

The Case for Louse-Transmitted Plague

by Michelle Ziegler The key to understanding plague -- past, present, and future -- has always been understanding its vector dynamics. By the latest tally, there are 269 known flea species, plus a small collection of ticks and lice, that can be infected with Yersinia pestis. With this many infected parasites, it's not a surprise that...

Rivers in European Plague Outbreak Patterns, 1347-1760

by Michelle Ziegler The era of big data is coming to historic epidemiology. A new study published this month in Scientific Reports took a database of 5559 European outbreak reports (81.9% from UK, France, and Germany) between 1347 and 1760 to analyze the role of rivers in the incidence and spread of plague. Their hypothesis...

Contagions: The Society for Historic Infectious Disease Studies

  Over the coming year, I would like to organize a new society specifically on the study of infectious diseases in the past.  It is called Contagions: Society for Historic Infectious Disease Studies. It is open to everyone working on contemporary or historical aspects infectious diseases that can be studied in the past. Examples of these...

The Great Pneumonic Plague of 1910-1911

The Great Manchurian Plague of 1910-1911: Geopolitics of an Epidemic Disease by William C. Summers Yale U Press, 2012 Manchuria was a political mess at the turn of the 20th century. Although it was the homeland of the Qing dynasty, the Chinese considered it a backwater. Japan and Russia on the other hand saw it...