Author(s): Mary J. Dobson

Popular Science

From the earliest times disease has been a major influence on the history of humanity. Only in recent years has it ceased to be the key determiner of life expectancy. Disease has had a far greater impact on humankind than war, famine or natural disasters: it has had a huge influence on population size, for example, and the epidemics that have occasionally ravaged humanity have had a massively disruptive social, political and economic impact. "Disease" tells the story of the impact of disease on human history by means of 50 lively and readable essays on 50 key diseases, plagues and epidemics, from heart disease to haemophilia, from leprosy to lupus, from scrofula to syphilis, from tuberculosis to typhoid, and from the Black Death of the 14th century to the AIDS epidemic of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.These essays function both as self-contained mini-histories of individual diseases and as part of a larger narrative chronicling the history of medicine.