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Darrera modificació: 2011-07-11
Bases de dades: Sciència.cat
Benedictow, Ole J., What Disease Was Plague?: On the Controversy Over the Microbiological Identity of Plague Epidemics of the Past, Leiden, E. J. Brill (Brill's Series in the History of the Environment), 2011, xvi + 746 pp.
- Resum
- In recent decades, alternatives to the established bubonic-plague theory have been presented as to the microbiologcal identity and mechanism(s) of spread of historical plague epidemics. In this monograph, the six important alternative theories are intensively discussed in the light of the historical sources, the central primary studies and standard works on bubonic plague and the alternative microbiological agents, insofar as they are testable. These seven theories are incompatible and at least six of them must be untenable. In the author's opinion, the arguments against the bubonic-plague theory and for all alternative theories are untenable. This monograph therefore also has been written also as a standard work on bubonic plague, giving a broad and in-depth presentation of the medical, epidemiological and historical evidence and the methodological tenets for identification of historical diseases by comparison with modern medical knowledge. Ole J. Benedictow, Cand. Philol. in History (1961), University of Oslo, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Oslo.
Contents:
-- 1. The Issue:
* The issue and the problems
-- 2. How S. K. Cohn Makes Physicians and Historians «Square the Circle»:
* The ethics of scholarly work
-- 3. Basic Conditions for Bubonic Plague in Medieval Europe:
* Rats
* The spread of bubonic plague over distances
* Morality in India
* Was historical plague a viral or bacterial disease? The question of immunity
-- 4. Defining Features:
* Defining feature 1: Latency periods
* Defining feature 2: Inverse correlation between mortality rate and population density
* Defining feature 3: Buboes as a normal clinical feature in epidemics
* Defining feature 4: DNA of Yersinia pestis from plague graves
* Defining feature 5: Seasonality of bubonic plague
-- 5. The Alternative Theories:
* Introduction: The history and essence of the alternative theories
* The beginning: the alternative theories of Shrewsbury and Morris
* Gunnar Karlsson's alternative theory: that historical plague was pure epidemics of primary pneumonic plague
* Twigg's alternative theory
* The alternative theory of Scott and Duncan
* Cohn's alternative theory
-- Epilogue
-- Appendices:
* Black death mortality in Siena: the material provided by the necrology of the monastery of San Domenico in Camporegio
* The accounts of the Icelandic epidemics of 1402-4 and 1494-5 Given in Icelandic annals
* The extrinsic incubation period and the structure and composition of the latency period
- Matèries
- Medicina - Pesta i altres malalties
Història de la medicina
- Notes
- Fitxa de l'editor: http://www.brill.nl/what-disease-was-plague
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