Plague Pox And Pestilence PDF Download

Although the invention of agriculture was the most important event in the history of civilization, it was a disaster for human health. Hunter-gatherers, frequently on the move, ate a great variety of foods and seldom paused in one place long enough to allow diseases to flourish. As people settled, living cheek to jowl with their newly domesticated animals, water teemed with pathogens, waste piled up, and nutrition deteriorated as diets focused on just a few items. Diseases became rampant. The build-up of large urban populations bred new and even more deadly diseases. Restless humans -- marauders, missionaries, merchants -- carried these strains across the world to communities never exposed to them. Death on epic scales ensued. The plague, scrofula, leprosy -- all these flourished in the early modern world. War was a harbinger of death in more ways than the traditional -- whenever soldiers were drawn together in large groups the potential for an epidemic increased exponentially. Some diseases in particular are linked to war; typhus, because it killed more soldiers and sailors than they have killed each other; cholera, which is carried by contaminated water; scurvy, 'the sailors' disease;; and syphilis, which burst upon the world from a battlefield. In this ... illustrated survey of disease in history, Kenneth Kiple, editor of The Cambridge World History of Human Disease, has brought together a team of experts to show for the first time how our world is the product of disease -- and its eradication.