Dread: How Fear and Fantasy Have Fueled Epidemics from the Black Death to Avian Flu

by Philip Alcabes

Overview

Deaths from epidemic disease are rare in the developed world, yet in our technically and medically advanced society, an ever-present risk of disease has created an industry out of fear.
As Philip Alcabes persuasively argues in Dread, our anxieties about epidemics often stray from the facts on the ground. In a fascinating exploration of the social and cultural history of epidemics, Alcabes delivers a different narrative of disease-one that requires that we reexamine our choice of enemies, and carefully consider the potential motivation of epidemic alarm-bells to further medical, moral, or political campaigns.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780786741465
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	04/14/2009
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Philip Alcabes is an Associate Professor of Urban Public Health at Hunter College and Visiting Clinical Associate Professor at the Yale School of Nursing.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Origins of Dread 1

Chapter 1 The Sense of an Epidemic 7

Chapter 2 Plague: Birth of the Model Epidemic 21

Chapter 3 Cholera, Poverty, and the Politicized Epidemic 53

Chapter 4 Germs, Science, and the Stranger 83

Chapter 5 The Conquest of Contagion 119

Chapter 6 Postmodern Epidemics 143

Chapter 7 Managing the Imagined Epidemic 181

Epilogue: The Risk-Free Life 215

Acknowledgments 231

Notes 235

Selected Bibliography 289

Index 297