Whether attempts to control outbreaks were successful or not, lessons can be learned that are crucial for disease containment today.Most significantly, this book explains the lessons learned from attempts to contain past disease outbreaks and how that knowledge can be utilized in the future. Crucial to this examination is exploring how past experience can help us to deal effectively with coming plagues. Historical perspectives on these diseases will be indispensable for a better understanding of how we and our forebears survived the onslaught of plagues and how we might avoid their devastating consequences in the future. Examining hemophilia, blight, tuberculosis, cholera, smallpox, bubonic plague, influenza, malaria, yellow fever, syphilis, porphyria, and AIDS, this book not only covers the diseases' histories but also addresses public health responses and societal upheavals.
In a sweeping, thoughtful account, Twelve Diseases That Changed Our World considers the history of twelve important diseases: their impact, their consequences, their costs, and the lessons learned. From the fourteenth-century plague to HIV/AIDS today, diseases have fundamentally altered the shape of society, politics, and culture. The drugs themselves mirror the diversity of their origin stories and the author assembles all sides of these fascinating stories.Diseases have significantly shaped the course of the world's history. And the people about whom these stories are told are both saints and sinners – selfless and conniving – bold and mercurial and shy and retiring loner. The stories told are dramatic and include spectacular successes and dismal failures. The author has selected a few drugs – highlights representing milestones affecting our well-being and influencers of social change. Drugs are more than just a pill or liquid and some have markedly altered history. Yet, for the most part the manner by which drugs are developed and by whom remains a mystery. Today we have drugs to protect against infectious diseases, to alleviate aches and pains, to allow new organs to replace the old, and for brain functions to be modified. This is a book about drugs, how they came to be, and how they exert their ‘magic’. Drugs are used in the diagnosis, alleviation, treatment, prevention or cure of disease.
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