Health and Disease in Human History: A Journal of Interdisciplinary History Reader

by Robert I. Rotberg (Editor)

For more than thirty years, interdisciplinary historians have studied how groups and individuals in the past progressed despite food scarcities, nutritional deficiencies, exposure to virulent disease pathogens, dangerous forms of sanitation and other public health problems, menacing urban streets, fearsome and infectious sea voyages, and many other morbid and mortal hazards. That populations grew and economies developed is a tribute to many kinds of human advances. But progress was neither linear nor consistent; nor was it equivalent across continents and cultures. This collection of essays suggests the great extent to which exploration, settlement, agricultural growth, colonization, urbanization, and even human stature were influenced by environmental and epidemiological realities, as well as by political and economic responses to those realities. Contributors
Dauril Alden, Andrew Appleby, Kenneth Fliess, Myron Gutmann, Susan Hanley, Anne Hardy, Irene Hecht, Andrew Hinde, Kenneth Kiple, Virginia Kiple, Massimo Livi-Bacci, Robert McCaa, Joseph Miller, David Northrup, James Riley, Daniel Blake Smith, Robert Woods

308 pages, Hardcover

First published October 10, 2000

About the author

Robert Irwin Rotberg is an American academic who served as President of the World Peace Foundation (1993–2010). A professor in governance and foreign affairs, he was director of the Program on Intrastate Conflict, Conflict Prevention, and Conflict Resolution at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government (1999–2010), and has served in administrative positions at Tufts University and Lafayette College.