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Robert Wuthnow has been praised as one of "the country's best social scientists" by columnist David Brooks, who hails his writing as "tremendously valuable." The New York Times calls him "temperate, balanced, compassionate," adding, "one can't but admire Mr. Wuthnow's views." A leading authority on religion, he now addresses one of the most profound subjects: the end of the world. In Be Very Afraid, Wuthnow examines the human response to existential threats--once a matter for theology, but now looming before us in multiple forms. Nuclear weapons, pandemics, global warming: each threatens to destroy the planet, or at least to annihilate our species. Freud, he notes, famously taught that the s...
The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919 sheds new light on what the World Health Organization described as "the single most devastating infectious disease outbreak ever recorded" by situating the Iberian Peninsula as the key point of connection, both epidemiologically and discursively, between Europe and the Americas. The essays in this volume elucidate specific aspects of the pandemic that have received minimal attention until now, including social control, gender, class, religion, national identity, and military medicine's reactions to the pandemic and its relationship with civilian medicine, all in the context of World War I. As the authors point out, however, the experiences of 1918-...
Are infectious diseases caused by novel entities, viruses that have rapidly evolved into more pathogenic forms, or viruses that have crossed species divides and become more virulent in their alternative host? These questions and how new diseases such as AIDS emerged have prompted renewed interest in the ways viruses originated and co-evolved with their hosts.Origin and Evolution of Viruses presents a full and clear description of general viral concepts and specific viral systems, and provides an excellent foundation to our understanding of how viruses emerged.This unique and comprehensive work is essential reading for all researchers in virology, molecular biology and related areas, as well ...
Urgent interest in new diseases, such as the coronavirus, and the resurgence of older diseases like tuberculosis has fostered questions about the history of human infectious diseases. How did they evolve? Where did they originate? What natural factors have stalled the progression of diseases or made them possible? How does a microorganism become a pathogen? How have infectious diseases changed through time? What can we do to control their occurrence? ; Ethne Barnes offers answers to these questions, using information from history and medicine as well as from anthropology. She focuses on changes in the patterns of human behavior through cultural evolution and how they have affected the develo...
First multi-year cumulation covers six years: 1965-70.
Influenza has become an important infectious disease with regard to its enormous clinical and economic impact on population health. Due to the recent pandemic threat by the worldwide spread of H5N1 avian influenza, the World Health Organization has shown its profound concerns regarding the possibility of having the virus spread among humans. These concerns have raised the question of vital importance: in the absence of a specific avian flu vaccine, could antiviral drugs obstruct a pandemic should the virus spread from birds to humans? Since there is a lot of mis-information out there that needs correcting, this book discovers a global view of the fight against influenza. The comprehensive ac...
Vitalism is understood as impacting the history of the life sciences, medicine and philosophy, representing an epistemological challenge to the dominance of mechanism over the last 200 years, and partly revived with organicism in early theoretical biology. The contributions in this volume portray the history of vitalism from the end of the Enlightenment to the modern day, suggesting some reassessment of what it means both historically and conceptually. As such it includes a wide range of material, employing both historical and philosophical methodologies, and it is divided fairly evenly between 19th and 20th century historical treatments and more contemporary analysis. This volume presents a significant contribution to the current literature in the history and philosophy of science and the history of medicine.