Overview
From the Athenian flu pandemic to the Black Death to AIDS, this extensive two-volume set offers a sociocultural, historical and medical look at infectious diseases and their place in human history from Neolithic times to the present. Nearly 300 entries cover topics which include: individual diseases such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, Ebola, and SARS; major epidemics such as the Black Death, 16th-century syphilis, cholera in the nineteenth century, and the Spanish Flu of 1918-19; environmental factors such as ecology, travel, poverty, wealth, slavery, and war; and historical and cultural effects of disease such as the relationship of Romanticism to Tuberculosis, the closing of London theaters during plague epidemics, and the effect of venereal disease on social reform.
