Historical epidemiology

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This graduate seminar introduces students to state-of-the-art multidisciplinary studies concerning historical pathogenic disease. Students acquire foundations in the burgeoning fields of palaeomicrobiology and palaeogenetics as well as familiarity with the historiography on the great human and livestock disease events of the past. An ever-growing quantity of data directly relevant to the historian of health and disease is emerging from the bioarchaeological and natural sciences. Historians capable of tackling this material head on as it appears stand to gain immensely. While establishing a reading knowledge of the literature in these palaeoscientific fields, students as well assess the role history and the historian have played (and continue to play) in the production of palaeo-disease data. In doing so, opportunities for interdisciplinary research will become apparent. Most meetings focus on the pre-laboratory era, but time is given also to twentieth- and twentieth-first-century disease (influenza, foot-and-mouth, ebola) and the uses of past disease experience today. Emerging and re-emerging disease, the influences of climate and landscape change on disease occurrence, pathogen-to-pathogen interaction, and the relationship between war and illness are among the themes addressed.