Ending epidemics : a history of escape from contagion Cover Image

Book

Ending epidemics : a history of escape from contagion / Richard Conniff.

Conniff, Richard, 1951- (author.).

Summary:

"From the discovery of microorganisms to the end of smallpox, the story of how we came to understand the infectious diseases that once killed us & how we might escape such diseases in the future"-- Provided by publisher.

Record details

ISBN: 9780262047968
ISBN: 0262047969
Physical Description: xvi, 353 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.
Publisher: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2023]
Copyright: ©2023.

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 313-340) and index.

Formatted Contents Note:

Preface: The healing -- What the draper saw -- Deadly preconceptions -- Foreign bodies -- Precursors -- Ridiculous diseases, inconceivable ideas -- Buying the pox -- Slaying the speckled monster -- An angel's trumpet -- The great sanitary awakening -- Finding Pathogens -- The Semmelweis reflex -- Making sense of cholera -- The Broad Street pump -- Louis Pasteur: the rising -- The subtle foe -- The mystery of the cursed meadows -- A new vaccine -- The bible of bacteriology -- Defining the indefinable something -- (Re)discovering cholera -- A sacred delirium -- Immunity and the strangling angel -- Deadly carriers -- The beast in the mosquito -- Fit for duty -- A pathogen too far -- Midnight work -- The antibacterial revolution -- Penicillin -- Race to the vaccine -- Zero pox -- Epilogue: The plague next time.