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Darrera modificació: 2024-06-18
Bases de dades: Sciència.cat
Green, Monica H., "The Pandemic Arc: Expanded Narratives in the History of Global Health", Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, (2024), jrae008 (publicació electrònica).
- Resum
- Using the examples of plague, smallpox, and HIV/AIDS, the present essay argues for the benefits of incorporating the evolutionary histories of pathogens, beyond visible epidemic spikes within human populations, into our understanding of what pandemics actually are as epidemiological phenomena. The pandemic arc — which takes the pathogen as the defining “actor” in a pandemic, from emergence to local proliferation to globalization — offers a framework capable of bringing together disparate aspects not only of the manifestations of disease but also of human involvement in the pandemic process. Pathogens may differ, but there are common patterns in disease emergence and proliferation that distinguish those diseases that become pandemic, dispersed through human communities regionally or globally. The same methods of genomic analysis that allow tracking the evolutionary development of a modern pathogen such as SARS-CoV-2 also allow us to trace pandemics into the past. Reconstruction of these pandemic arcs brings new elements of these stories into view, recovering the experiences of regions and populations hitherto overlooked by Eurocentric narratives. This expanded global history of infectious diseases, in turn, lays a groundwork for reconceiving what ambitions a truly global health might aim for.
- Matèries
- Medicina - Pesta i altres malalties
- Notes
- Actualización de un estudio anterior:
"A paper I originally wrote in 2021-22 and which has been too long in press has finally been published. I'm afraid I didn't have funds to publish it open-access. An earlier draft of it is available open-access at my Knowledge Commons account, as noted. But that does not have the final edits from earlier this year.
(...)
Draft of 06/29/2023 posted at https://doi.org/10.17613/hsvs-sa63  .
As will be obvious, the work I and many other colleagues have been doing to try to explore the possibilities of integrating material and documentary histories of infectious diseases over the longue durée is evident here. I think the most important passage in the essay, for me, is this, with its accompanying footnote:
"Stepping back from the crisis, however, it is possible to take a longer view, one that moves beyond the limits of human perception and sees processes within a larger framework than current political cycles or even human lifespans.[11]"
[n. 11] I was greatly impacted in my thinking on this point by comments from historian and archaeologist of the later Roman Empire, Stephen Mitchell, who noted the human lifespan focus of documentary sources vs the centuries-long perspective possible from archaeology: “No ancient writer was able to adopt a perspective that surveyed the demographic catastrophe over two centuries, a task that has to be left to modern analysis.” Stephen Mitchell, A History of the Later Roman Empire, AD 284–641, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2014), 490–91". (Monica H. Green).
- URL
- https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jrae008
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