Main description:

This book makes use of extensive primary source material such as chronicles, legal records, and medical treatises as well as appropriate secondary works drawn from historical and scientific scholarship, providing students with a comprehensive overview of disease in England.

It examines how infectious diseases such as plague, syphilis, or the English Sweat and everyday medical issues, such as dysentery, affected people and how/why they spread. Enabling students to see the link between disease and society.

This book examines how people tried to cope with disease in a variety of ways, such as improvements in hygiene and provides comparisons with present issues. Allowing students to see the differences and similarities with the social reaction to and ways people dealt with disease in the past and now.

Contents:

1. Finding the Impact of Disease in Premodern England 2. Human Impacts on Health in Premodern England 3. The Everyday Threat of Infectious Disease 4. Epidemic Disease and Its Arrival in England 5. The Second Plague Pandemic and the Demographic Crisis It Produced 6. Responses to the Plague 7. New Diseases at the Turn of the Sixteenth Century: The Mystery of the English Sweat 8. New Diseases at the Turn of the Sixteenth Century: The Certainty of Syphilis, the Great Pox 9. A New Era for Epidemic Disease 10. Disease and its Impact at the Beginning of a New Era