Thursday, February 27, 2014

Cultures of Plague


Cultures of Plague: Medical Thought at the End of the Renaissance Hardcover – January 18, 2010

Author: Samuel K. Cohn Jr. | Language: English | ISBN: 0199574022 | Format: PDF, EPUB

Cultures of Plague: Medical Thought at the End of the Renaissance – January 18, 2010
Download electronic versions of selected books Cultures of Plague: Medical Thought at the End of the Renaissance – January 18, 2010 from mediafire, rapishare, and mirror link

Review


"[An] excellent study...It will have broad appeal for those interested in the history of plague or responses to epidemic disease, for historians of local government and administration in Italy, and for anyone with an interest in the development of medicine and medical theory." --Sixteenth Century Journal


"Offers a stimulus to more research on the theme of plague, a fascinating topic and already a very lively one among a broad range of historians of medicine, politics, religion, art, and literature." -- Renaissance Quarterly


"[An] important contribution...This book is a model of scholarly endeavor: a significant and stimulating argument is informed by rich and detailed research and conveyed in energetic and engaging writing. An indispensable contribution to the field, it should be read by every scholar interested in early modern disease and health." -- Bulletin of the History of Medicine


About the Author


Samuel K. Cohn Jr. has specialized in the Italian Renaissance, the history of disease, and popular revolt in late medieval Europe. He is the author of eleven books, the most recent of which is Lust for Liberty (Harvard University Press, 2006) and had published essays in the American Historical Review, English Historical Review, Past & Present, Economic History Review, Medical History, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Les Annales, and Studia Storici.

Download latest books on mediafire and other links compilation Cultures of Plague: Medical Thought at the End of the Renaissance Hardcover – January 18, 2010
  • Hardcover: 340 pages
  • Publisher: Oxford University Press (January 18, 2010)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0199574022
  • ISBN-13: 978-0199574025
  • Product Dimensions: 1 x 6.3 x 9.2 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,942,095 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
The Black Death struck Europe in the fourteenth century, killing hundreds of millions of people. There was little understanding of even the most basic causes and effects that might have been involved in the spread of the disease. It is not true, however, that the scientific insights about disease that were to start in the Enlightenment and continue to our own times represented the first understanding of the plague as something other than a magical curse or a lesson from God. In Italy, the plague recurred in an epidemic from 1575 to 1578, and during this particular outbreak, people began some primitive but essential epidemiology and even societal treatment. This is the surprising lesson of _Cultures of Plague: Medical Thinking at the End of the Renaissance_ (Oxford University Press) by Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., an astonishingly detailed look at the beginnings of an intellectual revolution. The author, a specialist in the Italian Renaissance and in the history of disease, reminds us that there was "no simple binary progression from a supposed premodern to modern medical thought." The doctors, medical workers, and even gatekeepers in the middle of the plague in Milan, Padua, and Venice observed, looked at the illness in new ways, and wrote about what they saw.

The writings are essential to Cohn's study, and represent a basic shift in the way the plague was documented. Barber-surgeons might write about the plague, and drug-sellers, merchants, lawyers, artisans, clerics, and minor officials all got into the act, a printed resource which Cohn has mined as the bibliographical backbone of his book, "a wide spectrum of authors from cardinals to cobblers, in prose and verse." The tracts from this time were not just in academic Latin but in the vernacular.

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