The Routledge History of Disease

by Mark Jackson

The Routledge History of Disease draws on innovative scholarship in the history of medicine to explore the challenges involved in writing about health and disease throughout the past and across the globe, presenting a varied range of case studies and perspectives on the patterns, technologies and narratives of disease that can be identified in the past and that continue to influence our present.

Organized thematically, chapters examine particular forms and conceptualizations of disease, covering subjects from leprosy in medieval Europe and cancer screening practices in twentieth-century USA to the ayurvedic tradition in ancient India and the pioneering studies of mental illness that took place in nineteenth-century Paris, as well as discussing the various sources and methods that can be used to understand the social and cultural contexts of disease.

Chapter 24 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license.

Genres: Medicine, History

618 pages, Hardcover

First published July 22, 2016

About the author

Mark Jackson is Professor of the History of Medicine and Director of the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments and Health at the University of Exeter. After qualifying in immunology in 1982 and medicine in 1985, he pursued research on the social history of infanticide and the history of `feeble-mindedness’ at the Universities of Leeds and Manchester. More recently, he has been researching and writing on the history of allergies and stress in the modern world, from an international perspective. His major publications include New-Born Child Murder: Women, Illegitimacy and the Courts in Eighteenth-Century England (1996), The Borderland of Imbecility: Medicine, Society and the Fabrication of the Feeble Mind in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain (2000), Allergy: The History of a Modern Malady (2006), Asthma: The Biography (2009), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine (ed., 2011), The Age of Stress: Science and the Search for Stability (2013), The History of Medicine: A Beginners Guide (2014, shortlisted for the Dingle Prize), Stress in Post-War Britain, 1945-85 (ed., 2015), and The Routledge History of Disease (ed., 2016). He is currently writing a cultural history of the midlife crisis and health in middle age.

He has a strong interest in developing the undergraduate medical curriculum, creating opportunities for wider public engagement activities, and collaborating with health practitioners and policy-makers to enable health and well-being. He was Senior Academic Adviser (Medical Humanities) to the Wellcome Trust (2013-16), has served as Chair of the Wellcome Trust History of Medicine and Research Resources Funding Committees, (2003-13), and was a member of the History sub-panel for REF 2014. He is Chair of the WHO Europe Expert Advisory Group on the Cultural Contexts of Health and a member of the WHO European Advisory Committee on Health Research.