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Epidemics

Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS

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About this listen

By investigating thousands of descriptions of epidemics reaching back before the fifth-century-BCE Plague of Athens to the distrust and violence that erupted with Ebola in 2014, Epidemics challenges a dominant hypothesis in the study of epidemics, that invariably across time and space, epidemics provoked hatred, blaming of the "other," and victimizing bearers of epidemic diseases, particularly when diseases were mysterious, without known cures or preventive measures, as with AIDS during the last two decades of the 20th century.

However, scholars and public intellectuals, especially post-AIDS, have missed a fundamental aspect of the history of epidemics. Instead of sparking hatred and blame, the history of epidemics traced in this study illustrates that more often epidemics inspired compassion and drew communities closer together.

©2018 Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. (P)2018 Tantor Biological Sciences Contagious Diseases History & Commentary Medicine & Health Care Industry Physical Illness & Disease Science Social Sciences World Middle Ages Africa Medical History
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Very good to listen rather than read because of all facts n statistics only dislike was the narrator who sounded American to me miss pronounced one word all through the book and it wasn't a word that Americans pronounce different!y normally

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