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Darrera modificació: 2020-09-29
Bases de dades: Sciència.cat
Green, Monica H., "Global Health in a Semi-Globalized World: History of Infectious Diseases in the Medieval Period", IsisCB, (Ejemplar dedicado a: Pandemic Essays. Weldon, Stephen P. - Sankaran, Neeraja (eds.)) Special Issue (2020), ***.
- Resum
- The field of infectious disease history has been transformed in the past decade in large part because of fortuitous developments in several fields, most importantly genetics. The medieval period (ca. 500 to ca. 1500) has proved particularly important for these developments, not simply because it is now the earliest period from which whole genomes of several bacterial and viral pathogens have been retrieved, but because the narratives that can be constructed about disease emergence and dissemination are most robust for this period. The essay briefly surveys the latest work on the evolutionary histories of the main pathogens that defined the landscape of the eastern hemisphere in the medieval period. It argues that, having already established most of their semi-global distribution by the Middle Ages, these pathogens reveal narratives that have been hidden by modern Global Health terminology of “diseases of poverty” or “tropical diseases.” Then, using the example of plague, it shows why the evolutionary narratives of genetics yield information valuable to historians, and gives examples of ways historical work has been transformed by clues from genetics that point to the effects of human activity. It concludes by arguing that infectious disease history from the pre-modern period can be used to help model
the phenomena of emerging diseases in our own day, of which COVID-19 is only the most recent example.
- Matèries
- Bibliografia
Medicina - Pesta i altres malalties
- URL
- https://isiscb.org/special-issue-on-pandemics/essay ...
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