Dorothy Porter

Professor in the History of Health Sciences and Chair 

UCSF-DAHSM 

DISEASE AND THE SOCIAL ORDER FROM THE BLACK DEATH TO AVIAN FLU

Week 1: Disease as an Historical Frame
Week 2: Disease, Disaster, and Social Order: Plague
Week 3: Disease and Democracy
Week 4: Dislocation, Dirt, Microbes and Environmental Reform
Week 5: Tyranny or Salvation: Smallpox and State Intervention
Week 6: Purity and Danger: Sexually Transmitted Diseases
Week 7: Chronic Epidemics
Week 8: Colonizing the Pathological
Week 9: Pandemics and Globalization
Week 10: Disease and the Civilizing Process
General Bibliography

Introductory Reading

Charles Rosenberg, Explaining Epidemics and Other Studies in the History of Medicine (CUP,1992)

Kenneth F. Kiple (ed.), The Cambridge World History of Human Disease (Cambridge University Press, 1993)

W. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York, Doubleday, 1976)

Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism. The Biological Expansion of Europe . 900-1900 (London, Cambridge University Press, 1986)

DISEASE AND THE SOCIAL ORDER FROM THE BLACK DEATH TO AVIAN FLU

The course will explore the comparative impact of disease upon European and North American Societies from the time of the Black Death focusing on the relationship between epidemics, social order and political change. It will concentrate on the historical junctures at which epidemic and pandemic diseases occurred; unravel the various levels of meaning which surrounded them in terms of their social, moral and political interpretations; analyze the patterns of response to them and discuss their historical consequences. Questions will be investigated concerning epidemics and revolutionary change, social beliefs about disease and danger, the impact of epidemics on economic and social stratification and the relationship of political philosophies and legitimate structures of public health and welfare. Thus, it will investigate the social, political, economic and cultural impact of epidemics on macro and micro historical transformation.

Week 1: DISEASE AS AN HISTORICAL FRAME

Required Reading

C. Rosenberg, 'Disease in History: Frames and Framers', Milbank Quarter­ly , 67, Supplement 1 (1990), 1-15.

Charles Rosenberg, ‘Explaining Epidemics' in Charles Rosenberg, Explaining Epidemics and Other Studies in the History of Medicine (CUP,1992) 293-204.

Charles Rosenberg, ‘What is Disease? In Memory of Owsie Temkin', Bulletin of the History of Medicine , 77 (2003), 491-505.

Optional Reading

Michael Macdonald, ' The Medicalisation of Suicide in England : Laymen, Physicians, and Cultural Change, 1500-1870'

Bert Hansen, 'American Physicians 'Discovery' of Homosexuals, 1880-1900. A New Diagnosis in a Changing Society'

Week 2: DISEASE, DISASTER AND SOCIAL ORDER: PLAGUE FROM MEDIEVAL TO MODERN TIMES  

Required Reading

Colin Platt, King Death. The Black Death and its aftermath in late-medieval England (London, UCL Press, 1996), 1-31; 177-192.

Ann Carmichael, 'Bubonic Plague' in in Kenneth F. Kiple (ed.), The Cambridge World History of Human Disease (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 628-631.

Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), 1-21, 199-226, 311-341.

Marilyn Chase, The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco ( New York , Random House, 2003), 56-74; 85-91 and 124-133; 194-216.

Optional Reading

Carlo M. Cippola, Faith, Reason and the Plague. A Tuscan Story of the Seventeenth Century (Brighton, Harvester, 1979), 1-10.

Katherine Park, 'The Black Death', in Kenneth F. Kiple (ed.), The Cambridge World History of Human Disease (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 612-615.

Carlo M. Cippola, Public Health and the Medical Profession in the Renaissance (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1976)

Andrew B. Appleby, 'The Disappearance of Plague: A Continuing Puzzle', Economic History Review , 33 (1980), 161-173.

P. Slack, 'The Disappearance of Plague: An Alternative View', Econonomic History Review. , 34 (1981), 469-76.

D.Steel, 'Plague Writing. From Boccaccio to Camus', Journal of European Studies , 11 (1981), 88-110.

Richard Palmer, 'The Church, Leprosy and Plague in Medieval and Early Modern Europe ', in W. J. Shiels (ed.), The Church and Healing (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1982), 79-101.

C. M. Cippolla, Cristofano and the lague: A Study of Public Health in the Age of Galileo (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1973).

John T. Alexander, Bubonic Plague in Early Modern Russia (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press 1980).

C. T. Gregg, Plague: An Ancient Disease in the Twentieth Century (Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1985).

Week 3: DISEASE AND DEMOCRACY: HEALTH AS A RIGHT OF CITIZENSHIP

Required Reading

George Rosen, 'Political Order and Human Health in Jeffersonian Thought', Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 26 (1952), 32-44.

Dorothy Porter, Health, Civilization and the State (Routledge, 1999), 46-64; 111-127.

C.-F. Volney, La Loi Naturelle, ou Catéchisms du Citoyen Français (Paris, Gardinier, 1793), 354-371.

L. J. Jordanova, 'Guarding the Body Politic: Volney's Catechism of 1793', in Francis Barker et. al . (eds), 1789: Reading Writing Revolution. Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociol­ogy of Literature, July 1981 (Colchester, Univer­sity of Essex, 1982),
12-21.

Optional Reading

Dora Weiner, 'Le droit de l'homme a la sante: une belle idee devant l'Assemblee constituante: 1790-1791', Clio Medica , 5 (1970), 208-23.

Rudolf Virchow, Public Health Reports , ed. by L. J. Rather (Maryland, Science History Publications, 1986), 2 vols, Vol I, 307-319.

John Duffy, The Sanitarians. A history of American public health (Chicago, Un. of Illinois Press, 1990), 52-78, 110-125.

Week 4: DISLOCATION, DIRT, MICROBES AND ENVIRONMENTAL REFORM IN THE INDUSTRIAL AGE

Required Reading

Anne Hardy, 'Urban Famine or Urban Crisis? Typhus in the Victorian City ', Medical History , 32 (1988), 401-425.

John M. Eyler, 'The Sick Poor and the State: Arthur Newsholme on Poverty, Disease and Responsibility', in Charles Rosenberg and Janet Golden (eds), Framing Disease (Rutgers University Press, 1992), 275-297.

C. Hamlin, 'Predisposing Causes and Public Health in Early Nineteenth Century Medical Thought', Social History of Medicine 5 (1992 ), 43-70.

R. J. Evans, 'Epidemics and Revolutions: Cholera in Nineteenth-Century Europe ', Past and Present , 120 (1988), 40-64; 123-150.

C. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years 1832, 1849 and 1866 ( Chicago , University of Chicago Press, 1962), 121-150.

Optional Reading

Anthony Wohl, Endangered Lives Public Health in Victorian Britain (London, Dent, 1983), 1-9.

G. Himelfarb, The Idea of Poverty. England in the Early Industrial Age (New York, Knopf, 1984), 356-370.

Bruno Latour, Microbes: The Pasteurization of France trns by Alan Sheridan and John Law (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1986), 13-58.

Christopher Hamlin, A Science of Impurity. Water Analysis in Nineteenth Century Britain (Berkeley, CA., University of California Press, 1990), 270-297.

M. Pelling, Cholera Fever and English Medicine 1825-1865 , (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1978), 300-312.

Bill Luckin, 'Evaluating The Sanitary Revolution: Typhus and Typhoid in London ', in R. Woods and J. Woodward, Urban Disease and Mortality in 19th Century England (London, Batsford Academic, 1984), 111-116.

G. M. Foster, 'Typhus disaster in the Wake of War: The American-Polish Relief Expedition, 1919-1920', Bulletin of the History of Medicine 55 (1981), 221-232.

Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice, and History (Boston, 1935).

J. S. Logan, 'Trench fever in Belfast, and the nature of the 'relapsing fevers' in the United Kingdom in the 19th century', Ulster Medical Journal , 58, 1989, 83-8.

G. Risse, '"Typhus" Fever in Eighteenth-Century Hospitals: New Approaches to Medical Treatment', Bulletin of the History of Medicine , 59 (1985), 176-95.

C. Webster, 'Two-Hundredth Anniversary of the 1784 Report on Fever at Radcliffe Mill', Society for the Social History of Medicine Bulletin 7 (1985), 36-65.

François Delaporte, Disease and Civilization , (Camb. Mass. , M.I.T. Press, 1986), 47-96.

R. J. Evans, Death In Hamburg . Society and Poli­tics in the Cholera Years 1830-1910 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1987), 470-490.

Bill Luckin, 'The Final Catastrophe - Cholera in London 1866', Medical History , 21 (1977), 32-42.

M. Pelling, Cholera, Fever and English Medicine 1825-1865 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1978).

R. J. Morris, Cholera 1832 The Social Response to an Epidemic (London, Croom Helm, 1976).

Roderick E. McGrew, Russia and the Cholera, 1823-1832 (Madison, Wisc. Wisconsin University Press, 1965)

M. Durey, The Return of the Plague. British Society and the Cholera 1831-2 (Dublin, Gill and Macmillan, 1979).

Week 5 : TYRANNY OR SALVATION: SMALLPOX AND STATE INTERVENTION

Required Reading

D. Porter, “Tyranny or Salvation: Historical Perspectives on Vaccination” (Unpublished Paper)

D. E. Porter and R. Porter, 'The Politics of Prevention: Anti-Vaccinationism and Public Health in Nineteenth-Century England ', Medical History , 32 (1988), 231-252.

J. W. Leavitt, 'Politics and Public Health: Smallpox in Milwaukee , 1894-1895', Bulletin of the History of Medicine 50 (1976), 553-568.

Marie Clark Nelson and John Rogers, “ The Right to Die? Anti-vaccination Activity and the 1874 Smallpox Epidemic in Stockholm ”, Social History of Medicine (1992) 5(3): 369-388.

Optional Reading

S.M. Fraser, ' Leicester and Smallpox: The Leicester Method', Medical History , 24 (1980), 315-32.

Anne Hardy, 'Smallpox in London . Factors in the Decline of the Disease in the Nineteenth Century', Medical History , 27 (1983), 111-38.

Bill Luckin, 'The Decline of Smallpox and the Demographic Revolution of the Nineteenth Century', Social History , 6 (1977), 793-97.

R. J. Evans, Death in Hamburg ( London , 1978), 218-26.

C. Huerkamp, 'The History of Smallpox Vaccination in Germany : A First Step in the Medicalization of the General Public', Journal of Contemporary History , 20 (1985), 617-35.

Martin Kaufman, 'The American Anti-Vaccinationists and their Arguments', Bulletin of the History of Medicine , 41 (1967), 463-483.

P. Razzell, The Conquest of Smallpox: The Impact of Inoculation on Smallpox Mortality in Eighteenth Century England (Firle, Sussex, Caliban Books, 1977)

Week 6: PURITY AND DANGER: SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASES, STIGMA AND SURVEILLANCE FROM THE RENAISSANCE TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Allan Brandt, 'Sexually Transmitted Diseases', in W. F. Bynum and R. Porter (eds), Encyclopaedia of the History of Medicine (London, Routledge, 1992), 562-584.

D. Porter and R. Porter, 'The Enforcement of Health', in E. Fee and D. Fox, AIDS: The Burdens of History (Berkeley, CA., University of California Press, 1988), 96-120.

Sander Gilman, Sexuality an Illustrated History (New York, Wiley, 1989), 77-88.

Claude Quetel, History of Syphilis (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1990),
1-33.

Optional Reading

Allan Brandt, No Magic Bullet. A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States since 1880 (Oxford University Press, 1987).

E. Fee and D.M.Fox (eds), AIDS: The Burdons of History (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1988), passim

J. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1980).

Frank Mort, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England Since 1830 (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul,m 1987).P. Mchugh, Prostitution and Victorian Social Reform (London, Croom Helm, 1982), 35-90.

Jon Arrizabalaga, 'Syphilis'in Kenneth F. Kiple (ed.), The Cambridge World History of Human Disease (Cambridge University Press, 1993),1025-1033.

George Vigarello, Concepts of Cleanliness. Changing Attitudes in France since the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988),21-37.

Sander Gilman, Disease and Representation

E. H. Beardsley, 'Allied Against Sin: American and British Responses to Venereal Disease in World War I', Medical History , 20 (1976), 189-202.

M. S. Thompson, 'The wages of sin: the problem of alcoholism and general paralysis in 19th cent Edinburgh ', in Bynum and Porter and Shepherd (eds), The Anatomy of Madness vol 3, (London Routledge 1988), 316-40

Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London, Routledge, 1984)

Charles Rosenberg, 'What is an Epidemic? AIDS in Historical Perspective', in Charles Rosenberg, Explaining Epidemics and Other Studies in the History of Medicine (CUP,1992), 278-293

Daniel M. Fox, 'The Politics of HIV Infection: 1989-1990 as Years of Change', in E. Fee and D. Fox (eds), AIDS: The making of a Chronic Disease (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1992), 125-141.

Charles Rosenberg, 'Explaining Epidemics', in Charles Rosenberg, Explaining Epidemics and Other Studies in the History of Medicine (CUP,1992), 293-305

Susan Sontag, AIDS and its Metaphors (London, Allan Lane, 1989) passim.

Mirko D. Grmek, The History of AIDS: Emergence and Origin of a Modern Pandemic treans Maulitz and Duffin, (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1991), 99-118, 141-155

Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On (New York, St Martins Press, 1987).

Week 7: CHRONIC EPIDEMICS: DISEASE AND PERSONAL AND SOCIAL IDENTITY

Required Reading

Roy Porter, 'Gout: Framing and Fantasizing Disease', Bulletin of the History of Medicine , 68 (1994), 1-28.

Susan Sontag, Illness as a Metaphor and Aids and Its Metaphors ( New York , Picador, 2001) passim.

S. E. Lederer, 'A Cultural History of Cancer', Medical Humanities Review , July 2 , 1988, 65-8.

Linda Bryder, Below the Magic Mountain (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988), 46-69; 157-198, 227-265.

Robert Proctor, ‘The Nazi War on Tobacco: Ideology, Evidence, and Public Health Consequences,' Bulletin of the History of Medicine (1997), 435-488.

Sir Richard Doll, ‘The First Reports on Smoking and Lung Cancer” in Stephen Lock et.al. (eds), Ashes to Ashes: The History of Smoking and Health (Rodopi, 1998), 130-142.

Alan Brandt, “Blow some my way”, in in Stephen Lock et.al. (eds), Ashes to Ashes: The History of Smoking and Health (Rodopi, 1998), 164-192.

Optional Reading

Robert Proctor, Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What We Know and Don't Know About Cancer (Basic Books, 1995), Chapter 10

Thomas G. Benedek, "Gout," in Kenneth F. Kiple, ed., The Cambridge World History of Human Disease (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 763-72

Thomas G. Benedek, "Popular Literature on Gout in the 16th and 17th Centuries," Journal of Rheumatology, 1987, 14: 186

Thomas G. Benedek and Gerald P. Rodnan, "Petrarch on Medicine and the Gout," Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 1963, 37: 397-416.

W. S. C. Copeman and Marianne Winder, "The First Medical Monograph on the Gout "On Whether it is Possible to Cure the Gout or No" (Strasbourg, 1534)," Medical History, 1969, 13: 288-93.

Kevin Fraser: "William Stukeley and his Regimen for Gout," Medical History , 1991, 35: 160-86.

F. B. Smith, The Retreat of TB 1850-1950 (London, Croom Helm, 1988), 212-35, 236-247.

Barbara Bates, 'Quid pro Quo in chronic Illness: tuberculosis in Pennsylvania 1876-1926', in Charles Rosenberg and Janet Golden (eds), Framing Disease (Rutgers University Press, 1992), 229-248.

N. J. Tommes 'The White Plague Revisited', Bulletin of the History of Medicine 63 (1989), 467-480.

Barbara Rosenkrantz, 'Introduction' to Rene Dubos, The White Plague. Tuberculosis, Man and Society (New Brunswick, N.J., Rutgers University Press, 1987).

Neil McFarlane, 'Hospitals, Housing and Tuberculosis in Glasgow , 1911-51', Social History of Medicine , 2 (1989), 59-85.

Linda Bryder, ' Papworth Village Settlement - A Unique Experiment in the Treatment and Care of the Tuberculous?', Medical History , 28 (1984), 372-390.

F.B. Smith, The Peoples Health ( London , 1979), 281-93.

E. Lomax, 'Hereditary or Aquired Disease? Early 19th cent debates on the cause of infantile scrofula and t.b.', Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 32 (1977), 356-74.

E. Posner, 'Half a Century After the Magic Mountain ', Medical History , 7 (1976), 55-61.

K. Figlio, 'Medical Mythology' [Essay Review of Sontag], Sociology of Health and Illness , 2 (1980), 335-340.

Caroline Murphey, 'From Friedenheim to Hospice: A Century of Cancer Hospitals', in L. Granshaw and R. Porter (eds), The Hospital in History (London, Routledge, 1988), 221-241.

Lesley Doyal et al ., Cancer In Britain . The Politics of Prevention (London, Pluto Press,1983), 1-24.

D de Moulin, A Short History of Breast Cancer (Boston, Martinus Nijhoff, 1983).

Joan Austoker and W. Bodmer, A history of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund 1902-1986 (Oxford, OUP, 1988).

John Cairns , Cancer, Science and Society (San Francisco, 1978).

Week 8: COLONIZING THE PATHOLOGICAL: EPIDEMICS AND MODERN COLONIAL EXPANSION

Required Reading

David Arnold, “Introduction: Disease Medicine and Empire”, in David Arnold, (ed.) Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1989), 1-27.

Rodney Sullivan, “Cholera and Colonialism in the Philappines, 1899-1903”, in Roy Macleod and Milton Lewis (eds), Disease, Medicine and Empire (London, Routledge, 1988), 284-300.

David Arnold, Colonizing the Body, State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth Century India (Berkley, University of California Press, 1993), 240-289.

Warwick Anderson , The Cultivation of Whiteness. Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia ( New York , Basic Books, 2003), 191-224.

Optional Reading

John Farley, “Bilharzia: a problem of ‘Native Health', 1900-1950” in David Arnold (ed.) Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1989), 189-203.

Francois Delaporte, The History of Yellow Fever : An Essay on the Birth of Tropical Medicine (MIT Press, 1991)

Mark Harrison, Public Healthin British India . Anglo-Indian preventive Medicine 1859-1914 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994)

Philip D. Curtin, Death by Migration (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989)

Donald Denoon, Public Health in Papua New Guinea . Medical Possibility and Social Constraint, 1884-1984 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989)

Nancy Elizabeth Gallagher, Egypt 's Other Wars. Epidemics and the Politics of Public Health (New York, Syracuse University Press, 1990)

LaVerne Kuhnke, Lives at Risk. Public Health in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Berkeley, Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1990)

Tod L Savitt, and J. H. Young (eds), Disease and Distinctiveness in the American South (Knoxville: University of Tennesse Press, 1988)

Week 9: PANDEMICS AND GLOBALISATION

Required Reading

Choose two out of the following:

Thomas Abraham, Twenty-First Century Plague: The Story of SARS (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005)

David Fidler, SARS, Governance and the Globalization of Disease (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)

John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague In History (Viking, 2004. 1 st edition 1989)

Alfred Crosby, America 's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2003)

Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: biological and cultural consequences of 1492 (Praeger, 2003, first edition 1973)

Week 10: DISEASE AND THE CIVILIZING PROCESS

Edward Shorter, From Paralysis to Fatigue (The Free Press, 1992), 295-323.

Roy Porter, 'Diseases of Civilization', in W. F. Bynum and R. Porter (eds), Encyclopaedia of the History of Medicine (London, Routledge, 1992), 585-602.

Simund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (London, Wolf Institute for Psychoanalysis, 1930) passim.

Optional Reading

Robert A. Aronowitz, ' From Myalgic Encephalitis to Yuppie Flu: A History of Chronic Fatique Syndromes.

Karl Figlio, 'Chlorosis and chronic disease in nineteenth-century Britain : the social constitution of somatic illness in a capitalist society', Social History , 3 (1978), 167-195.

Sander Gilman, Health and Illness. Images of Difference (London, Reaktion Books, 1996), 9-32.

General Works on Diseases, Epidemics, Public Health and Environmentalism.

Wesley W. Spink, Infectious Diseases. Prevention and Treatment in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1978).

W. H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York, Doublesday, 1976).

Charles Rosenberg, 'Disease in History. Frames and Framers', Milbank Quarterly , 67 (1989), 1-15..

Tod L Savitt, and J. H. Young (eds), Disease and Distinctiveness in the American South (Knoxville: University of Tennesse Press, 1988)

C. Herzlich, J. Pierret, Illness and self in society , (Baltimore, Johns Hpks Un Pr. 1987).

William Coleman, Death is a Social Disease. Public Health and Political Economy in Early Industrial France (Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin Press, 1982).

M. L. Kadin, Modernization and the social inequality of death in the United States, 1910-1970 , (Phd diss. Brown University Providence, 1982).

D. Rosner and G. Markowitz (eds), Dying for work (Bloomington Indianna, Indiana University Press, 1989).

R. P. Hudson, Disease and Its Control, The Shaping of Modern Thought (Westport, Conn., Greenwood, 1983).

G. Risse, 'History of the Concepts of Health and Disease' in W. T. Reich et al. (eds), Encyclopedia of Bioethics V. 2 (New York, Free Press, 1978), 579-85.

H. N. Simpson, Invisible Armies. The Impact of Disease on American History (Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1980).

B. Luckin, 'Death and Survival in the City: Approaches to the History of Disease', Urban History Yearb (1980), 53-62.

Kipple K. F. and Kipple V. H. 'The African Connection: Slavery, Disease and Racism', Phylon 4 (1980), 211-22.

A. B. Appleby, 'Disease, Diet and History', Journal of Interdisciplinary History , 8 (1978), 725-35.

John Duffy, Epidemics in Colonial America (Baton Rouge, Un Louisianna Prs, 1953).

H. F. Dowling, Fighting Infection: Disease Conquests of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, CUP, 1977).

Geofrey Marks and William Betty, Epidemics (New York, 1976).

J. H. Parish, The History of Immunization ( London , 1965).

W. R. Akroyd, Conquest of Deficiency Diseases: Achievements and Prospects ( Geneva 1970).