Author : Wyndham Bolling Blanton
Publisher :
Page : 9 pages
File Size : 12,29 MB
Release : 1957
Category : Medicine
ISBN :
Author : Gerald N. Grob
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 374 pages
File Size : 31,91 MB
Release : 2009-07
Category : History
ISBN : 9780674037946
The Deadly Truth chronicles the complex interactions between disease and the peoples of America from the pre-Columbian world to the present. Grob's ultimate lesson is stark but valuable: there can be no final victory over disease. The world in which we live undergoes constant change, which in turn creates novel risks to human health and life. We conquer particular diseases, but others always arise in their stead. In a powerful challenge to our tendency to see disease as unnatural and its virtual elimination as a real possibility, Grob asserts the undeniable biological persistence of disease. Diseases ranging from malaria to cancer have shaped the social landscape--sometimes through brief, furious outbreaks, and at other times through gradual occurrence, control, and recurrence. Grob integrates statistical data with particular peoples and places while giving us the larger patterns of the ebb and flow of disease over centuries. Throughout, we see how much of our history, culture, and nation-building was determined--in ways we often don't realize--by the environment and the diseases it fostered. The way in which we live has shaped, and will continue to shape, the diseases from which we get sick and die. By accepting the presence of disease and understanding the way in which it has physically interacted with people and places in past eras, Grob illuminates the extraordinarily complex forces that shape our morbidity and mortality patterns and provides a realistic appreciation of the individual, social, environmental, and biological determinants of human health.
Author : Thad W. Tate
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 324 pages
File Size : 21,26 MB
Release : 1979
Category : History
ISBN : 9780393009569
Seventeenth-century Chesapeake involved the area of the colonies of Virginia and Maryland.
Author : James Leitch Wright
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
Page : 414 pages
File Size : 35,50 MB
Release : 1999-01-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9780803298057
In this unsurpassed history of the Native peoples of the southern United States, J. Leitch Wright Jr. describes Native lives, customs, and encounters with Europeans and Africans from late prehistory through the nineteenth century.
Author : Albert E. Cowdrey
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
Page : 374 pages
File Size : 11,29 MB
Release : 2021-12-14
Category : History
ISBN : 0813188679
Here is the story of the long interaction between humans, land, and climate in the American South. It is a tale of exploitation and erosion, of destruction, disease, and defeat, but also of the persistent search for knowledge and wisdom. It is a story whose villains were also its victims and sometimes its heroes. Ancient forces created the southern landscape, but, as Albert E. Cowdrey shows, humankind from the time of earliest habitation has been at work reshaping it. The southern Indians, far from being the "natural ecologists" of myth, radically transformed their environment by hunting and burning. Such patterns were greatly accelerated by the arrival of Europeans, who viewed the land as a commodity to be exploited for immediate economic benefit. Cowdrey documents not only the long decline but the painfully slow struggle to repair the damage of human folly. The eighteenth century saw widespread though ineffectual efforts to protect game and conserve the soil. In the nineteenth century the first hesitant steps were taken toward scientific flood control, forestry, wildlife protection, and improved medicine. In this century, the New Deal, the explosion in scientific knowledge, and the national environmental movement have spurred more rapid improvements. But the efforts to harness the South's great rivers, to save its wild species, and to avert serious environmental pollution have often had equivocal results. Originally published in 1983 and needed now more than ever, This Land, This South was the first book to explore the cumulative impact of humans on the southern landscape and its effect on them. In graceful and at times lyrical prose, Albert Cowdrey brings together a vast array of information. Now revised and updated, this important book should be read by every person concerned with the past, present, or future of the South.
Author : Wyndham Bolling Blanton
Publisher :
Page : 448 pages
File Size : 34,49 MB
Release : 1972
Category : Medicine
ISBN :
Author : Philip D. Curtin
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 414 pages
File Size : 40,54 MB
Release : 2003-05-22
Category : Nature
ISBN : 080187517X
With its rich evolutionary record of natural systems and long history of human activity, the Chesapeake Bay provides an excellent example of how a great estuary has responded to the powerful forces of human settlement and environmental change. Discovering the Chesapeake explores all of the long-term changes the Chesapeake has undergone and uncovers the inextricable connections among land, water, and humans in this unusually delicate ecosystem. Edited by a historian, a paleobiologist, and a geologist at the Johns Hopkins University and written for general readers, the book brings together experts in various disciplines to consider the truly complex and interesting environmental history of the Chesapeake and its watershed. Chapters explore a variety of topics, including the natural systems of the watershed and their origins; the effects of human interventions ranging from Indian slash-and-burn practices to changing farming techniques; the introduction of pathogens, both human and botanical; the consequences of the oyster's depletion; the response of bird and animal life to environmental factors introduced by humans; and the influence of the land and water on the people who settled along the Bay. Discovering the Chesapeake, originating in two conferences sponsored by the National Science Foundation, achieves a broad historical and scientific appreciation of the various processes that shaped the Chesapeake region. "Today's Chesapeake Bay is only some ten thousand years old. What a different world it was . . . when the region was the home of the ground sloth, giant beaver, dire wolf, mastodon, and other megafauna. In the next few thousand years, the ice may form again and the Bay will once more be the valley of the Susquehanna, unless, of course, human-induced changes in climate create some other currently unpredictable condition."—from the Introduction
Author : Stephen V. Beck
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 305 pages
File Size : 12,11 MB
Release : 2022-02-16
Category : History
ISBN : 1351955306
’Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal.’ So wrote Charles Darwin in 1836. Though there has been considerable discussion concerning their precise demographic impact, reflected in the articles here, there is no doubt that the arrival of new diseases with the Europeans (such as typhus and smallpox) had a catastrophic effect on the indigenous population of the Americas, and later of the Pacific. In the Americas, malaria and yellow fever also came with the slaves from Africa, themselves imported to work the depopulated land. These diseases placed Europeans at risk too, and with some resistance to both disease pools, Africans could have a better chance of survival. Also covered here is the controversy over the origins of syphilis, while the final essays look at agricultural consequences of the European expansion, in terms of nutrition both in North America and in Europe.
Author : Robert A. McGuire
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 353 pages
File Size : 26,2 MB
Release : 2011-09-30
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 0262297493
The crucial role played by diseases in economic progress, the growth of civilizations, and American history. In Parasites, Pathogens, and Progress, Robert McGuire and Philip Coelho integrate biological and economic perspectives into an explanation of the historical development of humanity and the economy, paying particular attention to the American experience, its history and development. In their path-breaking examination of the impact of population growth and parasitic diseases, they contend that interpretations of history that minimize or ignore the physical environment are incomplete or wrong. The authors emphasize the paradoxical impact of population growth and density on progress. An increased population leads to increased market size, specialization, productivity, and living standards. Simultaneously, increased population density can provide an ecological niche for pathogens and parasites that prey upon humanity, increasing morbidity and mortality. The tension between diseases and progress continues, with progress dominant since the late 1800s. Integral to their story are the differential effects of diseases on different ethnic (racial) groups. McGuire and Coelho show that the Europeanization of the Americas, for example, was caused by Old World diseases unwittingly brought to the New World, not by superior technology and weaponry. The decimation of Native Americans by pathogens vastly exceeded that caused by war and human predation. The authors combine biological and economic analyses to explain the concentration of African slaves in the American South. African labor was more profitable in the South because Africans' evolutionary heritage enabled them to resist the diseases that became established there; conversely, Africans' ancestral heritage made them susceptible to northern “cold-weather” diseases. European disease resistance and susceptibilities were the opposite regionally. Differential regional disease ecologies thus led to a heritage of racial slavery and racism.
Author : Richard Harrison Shryock
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 198 pages
File Size : 30,5 MB
Release : 1960
Category : Medical
ISBN : 9780801490934
First published in 1960, Richard Harrison Shryock's Medicine and Society in America: 1660-1860 remains a sweeping and informative introduction to the practice of medicine, the education of physicians, the understanding of health and disease, and the professionalization of medicine in the Colonial Era and the period of the Early Republic. Shryock details such developments as the founding of the first medical school in America (at the College of Philadelphia in 1765); the introduction of inoculation against smallpox in Boston in 1721; the creation of the Marine Hospital Service in 1799, under which all merchant marines were required to take out health insurance; and the state of medical knowledge on the eve of the Civil War.
