On Courtroom Dramas and Plot Twists: Typhus in Eighteenth-Century London
| Autor: | Kevin Siena |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: |
History
Modernity media_common.quotation_subject Medicine (miscellaneous) Outbreak General Medicine History 18th Century medicine.disease Disease Outbreaks Contagious disease Working class London Pandemic medicine Humans Ethnology Plot (narrative) Typhus Epidemic Louse-Borne General Nursing Period (music) Typhus media_common |
| Zdroj: | Bulletin of the History of Medicine. 94:590-601 |
| ISSN: | 1086-3176 |
| DOI: | 10.1353/bhm.2020.0084 |
| Popis: | This article applies the model developed in Charles Rosenberg's seminal article "What is an Epidemic?" to typhus outbreaks in eighteenth-century London. That framework remains valuable for understanding contagious disease in early modernity by helping to highlight the structure of responses to epidemics. So-called "Jail Fever" outbreaks are especially instructive, in part because the most notorious of these epidemics were small affairs when compared to the larger pandemics that Rosenberg explored. Considering that they accounted for relatively few deaths, historians must answer why they caused such a stir. Whereas the raw body count often drives development of narratives about epidemics, eighteenth-century typhus epidemics often hinged more on who died and where than how many. Typhus ravaged poor and working class communities throughout the period. However, even significant spikes in mortality occurring in poor neighborhoods often failed to trigger proclamations of epidemics. Some deaths mattered more than others in this regard, suggesting that qualitative criteria may have played a greater role than quantitative criteria when it came to identifying which events registered as epidemics in the eighteenth century. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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