Topic: Writing the History of Disease

Lecturer: Prof. Margaret Humphreys

Host: Prof. Li Hua-cheng

Time: 9:00 - 11:30 

Date: 2017-7-26（Wednesday）

Venue: Room 3-424, Building Wenhui, Chang’an Campus

Hosted by: Research Center for Social History of Medicine

Abstract:

Writing the history of disease presents special challenges to historians. The disease can be considered a historical actor in its own right, which changes over time, emerging as significant or virulent in one period and benign in another. The people alive at a given time may not even recognize a set of symptoms as belonging to disease. Hookworm was no doubt common in the American south for centuries, but only discovered after 1900, for example. Tuberculosis attacks many different body parts and only after the discovery of the TB bacillus in the 1880s was consumption of the lungs and Potts disease of the spine recognized as part of the same syndrome.  Retrospective diagnosis is often difficult and contested. Was the plague of 1348 the same disease that attacked Manchuria in the 20th century? New genomic techniques reveal that it was. Writing the history of disease itself is evolving in the 21st century.

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