American plagues : lessons from our battles with disease

Summary: Smallpox, yellow fever, malaria, polio... now largely just unhappy history. Yet from our confrontations with these past plagues come lessons. As we struggle to understand and remedy problems like HIV/AIDS, coronary heart disease, and Ebola infection, Gehlbach shows how encounters with epidemics in the past will aid our present understanding of health and disease.

Record details

ISBN: 9781442256507
ISBN: 1442256508
ISBN: 9781442256514
ISBN: 1442256516
Physical Description: print
ix, 301 pages ; illustrations, portraits ; 24 cm
Edition: Updated edition.
Publisher: Lanham : Rowman Littlefield, [2016]
Copyright: ©2016

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Formatted Contents Note:

Gunpowder and calomel : Benjamin Rush and the malignant yellow fever -- Doctors and ministers : smallpox in Boston, 1721 -- Noddle's Island experiment : Benjamin Waterhouse and vaccination -- Scourge of the middle west : autumnal fever and Daniel Drake -- Improving the numbers : Lemuel Shattuck's report -- Adirondack cure : consumption and Edward Trudeau -- The beginning and the end : epidemic poliomyelitis -- A cancer grows : Edward Murrow and the cigarette -- Searching America's heart : the Framingham study -- A cure for complacency : HIV/AIDS -- Too little, too much : healthcare related infections -- Another kind of plague : measles and misinformation.