HIST 234
Epidemics in Western Society Since 1600
Spring 2010
Topics
- Introduction to the Course
- Classical Views of Disease: Hippocrates, Galen, and Humoralism
- Plague (I): Pestilence as Disease
- Plague (II): Responses and Measures
- Plague (III): Illustrations and Conclusions
- Smallpox (I): "The Speckled Monster"
- Smallpox (II): Jenner, Vaccination, and Eradication
- Nineteenth-Century Medicine: The Paris School of Medicine
- Asiatic Cholera (I): Personal Reflections
- Asiatic Cholera (II): Five Pandemics
- The Sanitary Movement and the "Filth Theory of Disease"
- Syphilis: From the "Great Pox" to the Modern Version
- Contagionism versus Anticontagionism
- Midterm Exam
- The Germ Theory of Disease
- Tropical Medicine as a Discipline
- Malaria (I): The Case of Italy
- Malaria (II): The Global Challenge
- Tuberculosis (I): The Era of Consumption
- Tuberculosis (II): After Robert Koch
- Pandemic Influenza
- The Tuskegee Experiment
- AIDS (I)
- AIDS (II)
- Poliomyelitis: Problems of Eradication
- SARS, Avian Influenza, and Swine Flu: Lessons and Prospects
- Final Q&A
- Final Exam
Readings
- Brandt, Allan. No Magic Bullet . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
- Barnes, David. The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
- Chase, Marilyn. The Barbary Plague . New York: Random House, 2004.
- Defoe, Daniel. Journal of the Plague Year . New York: Penguin, 2003.
- Fenn, Elizabeth. Pox Americana . New York: Hill and Wang, 2001.
- Snow, John. Snow on Cholera, New York: The Commonwealth Fund: Oxford University Press, 1936.
- Snowden, Frank. The Conquest of Malaria . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006.
- Snowden, Frank. "Emerging and Re-emerging Diseases: A Historical Perspective," Immunological Reviews . Vol. 225, Issue 1, pages 9-26, October 2008.
- Snowden, Frank. Naples in the Time of Cholera . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
- Verghese, Abraham. My Own Country . New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
Sources
- Course catalogue ↗Historical Open Yale Courses
- Historical Open Yale Courses offering. Texts and lecture titles are reproduced as bibliographic and topic information; reading requirements vary by the linked syllabus.