Cholera

Abstract

From 1817 onwards European governments, struggling in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, watched with growing horror as a new and terrible disease left its historical heartland in south Asia and began to move west. Cholera, in the words of an editorial in the Quarterly Review, was “one of the most terrible pestilences which have ever devastated the earth”. Like malaria or HIV/AIDS, cholera has an inescapably global history: seven subsequent pandemics have provoked revolutions in public health, and an entirely new vision of global medicine in an age of interconnection. SchistosomiasisEven the most colourless clinical description of schistosomiasis comes across like a pitch for an early David Lynch body horror. Waterborne flatworm larvae penetrate the skin, and move in the bloodstream through the heart and lungs to the liver. Here they mature and mate in the portal circulation, before laying eggs that lodge in the liver—occasionally the spinal cord or genitals—or leave the body via the bladder or intestinal walls. The framing of schistosomiasis as a parasitic tropical disease emerged from a series of global encounters—between medicine and science, between industrial nations competing for dominance, and between imperial governments and their indigenous subjects. Full-Text PDF Parkinson's diseaseHad James Parkinson never written An Essay on the Shaking Palsy, he might now be remembered as an adventurous activist in an age of turmoil. Born in London, in 1755, he belonged to a generation whose political consciousness was shaped by the French and American Revolutions and the writings of firebrand democrats like Thomas Paine. When some of his colleagues in the London Corresponding Society were charged with treason, Parkinson stood up for them in the witness box, and, in 1796, he was suspected of involvement in the Popgun Plot—an alleged conspiracy to assassinate George III with a poisoned dart from an airgun. Full-Text PDF InfluenzaIn daily life, influenza might seem almost banal: how many of us get through the winter without a bout of flu? For those concerned with global health, however, few diseases provoke more unease. Influenza's history evokes the great themes of modern medicine: the insecure relationship between clinical knowledge and effective treatments; medicine's growing role in global networks of control; and the importance of memory and uncertainty in our responses to disease. Full-Text PDF