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Epidemics in Western Society Since 1600

Yale, , Prof. Frank Snowden

Updated On 02 Feb, 19

Overview

Introduction to the Course - Classical Views of Disease: Hippocrates, Galen, and Humoralism - Plague:Pestilence as Disease,Responses and Measures,Illustrations and Conclusions - Smallpox:The Speckled Monster,Jenner, Vaccination, and Eradication - Nineteenth-Century Medicine: The Paris School of Medicine - Asiatic Cholera:Personal Reflections,Five Pandemics - The Sanitary Movement and the 'Filth Theory of Disease' - Syphilis: From the - Contagionism versus Anticontagionsim - The Germ Theory of Disease - Tropical Medicine as a Discipline - Malaria:The Case of Italy,The Global Challenge - Tuberculosis:The Era of Consumption,After Robert Koch - Pandemic Influenza - The Tuskegee Experiment - AIDS - Poliomyelitis: Problems of Eradication - SARS, Avian Inluenza, and Swine Flu: Lessons and Prospects

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Lecture 10: Asiatic Cholera (II) Five Pandemics

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Lecture Details

Epidemics in Western Society Since 1600 (HIST 234)

Asiatic cholera was the most dreaded disease of the nineteenth century. While its demographic impact could not compare to that of the bubonic plague, it nonetheless held a tremendous purchase on the European social imagination. One reason for the intense fear provoked by the disease was its symptoms not only did cholera exact a degrading and painful toll on the human body, it also struck suddenly, and was capable of reducing the seemingly healthy in a period of hours. A second major reason for the diseases significance was its overwhelming predilection for the poor transmitted through the oral ingestion of fecal matter, cholera was intimately associated with poor diets and unsanitary living conditions. This correspondence qualifies it as an archetypical disease of poverty, and implicated cholera in the larger nineteenth-century political anxiety over the "social question."

Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website httpopen.yale.educourses

This course was recorded in Spring 2010.