Health and disease in human history

For more than thirty years, interdisciplinary historians have studied how groups and individuals of the past progressed despite food shortages, nutritional deficiencies, exposure to virulent pathogens, dangerous forms of sanitation and other problems. of public health, the threatening urban streets, the fearsome and infectious sea voyages. , and many other morbid and fatal risks. That populations have grown and economies have developed is a tribute to many types of human advancement. But progress was neither linear nor consistent; nor was it equivalent across continents and cultures. This collection of essays suggests how much exploration, settlement, agricultural growth, colonization, urbanization, and even human stature have been influenced by environmental and epidemiological realities, as well as political and economic responses to these realities.

Contributors
Dauril Alden, Andrew Appleby, Kenneth Fliess, Myron Gutmann, Susan Hanley, Anne Hardy, Irene Hecht, Andrew Hinde, Kenneth Kiple, Virginia Kiple, Massimo Livi-Bacci, Robert McCaa, Joseph Miller, David Northrup, James Riley, Daniel Blake Smith , Robert Woods