Epidemics and society: from the Black Death to the present

Introduction

Humoral medicine : the legacy of Hippocrates and Galen

Overview of the three plague pandemics : 541 to ca. 1950

Plague as a disease

Responses to plague

Smallpox before Edward Jenner

The historical impact of smallpox

War and disease : Napoleon, yellow fever, and the Haitian Revolution

War and disease : Napoleon, dysentery, and typhus in Russia, 1812

The Paris School of Medicine

The sanitary movement

The germ theory of disease

Cholera

Tuberculosis in the romantic era of consumption

Tuberculosis in the unromantic era of contagion

The third plague pandemic : Hong Kong and Bombay

Malaria and Sardinia : uses and abuses of history

Polio and the problem of eradication

HIV/AIDS : an introduction and the case of South Africa

HIV/AIDS : the experience of the United States

Emerging and reemerging diseases

Dress rehearsals for the twenty-first century : SARS and Ebola.