Pandemics: A Very Short Introduction

Description

This Very Short Introduction describes history's major pandemics - plague, tuberculosis, malaria, smallpox, cholera, influenza, and HIV/AIDS - highlighting how each disease's biological characteristics affected its pandemic development. McMillen discusses state responses to pandemics, such as quarantine, isolation, travel restrictions, and other forms of social control, and pays special attention to the rise of public health and the explosion of medical research in the wake of pandemics, especially as the germ theory of disease emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today, medicine is able to control all of these diseases, yet some of them are still devastating in much of the developing world. 

About th author:

Christian W. McMillen is Professor of History at the University of Virginia, where he teaches courses on American Indian history and the history of epidemic disease. He is the author of Making Indian Law: The Hualapai Land Case and the Birth of Ethnohistory and Discovering Tuberculosis: A Global History, 1900 to the Present.

Table of contents

Introduction
Chapter 1: Plague
Chapter 2: Smallpox
Chapter 3: Malaria
Chapter 4: Cholera
Chapter 5: Tuberculosis
Chapter 6: Influenza
Chapter 7: HIV/AIDS
References
Further Reading
Index