Lecture Description
SARS, avian influenza and swine flu are the first new diseases of the twenty-first century. They are all diseases of globalization, or diseases of modernity, and while relatively limited in their impact, they have offered dress-rehearsals for future epidemics. As information about SARS spread internationally in 2002, in spite of China's campaign of silence, the global response had a curiously twofold character: on one hand, the mobilization of biologists and epidemiologists across national frontiers was rapid and unprecedented, while on the other hand, public health strategies on the ground were largely familiar from previous eras. If the spread of information and collaboration on international health regulations have been two positive aspects of public health response in the first decade of this century, more worrying questions have been raised concerning the production and distribution of drugs and the capacity of for-profit healthcare systems to cope with a major epidemic.
Reading assignment:
Snowden, "Emerging and Re-emerging Diseases: A Historical Perspective"
Course Index
- Introduction to the Course
- Classical Views of Disease: Hippocrates, Galen, and Humoralism
- Plague (I): Pestilence as Disease
- Plague (II): Responses and Measures
- Plague (III): Illustrations and Conclusions
- Smallpox (I): 'The Speckled Monster'
- Smallpox (II): Jenner, Vaccination, and Eradication
- Nineteenth-Century Medicine: The Paris School of Medicine
- Asiatic Cholera (I): Personal Reflections
- Asiatic Cholera (II): Five Pandemics
- The Sanitary Movement and the 'Filth Theory of Disease'
- Syphilis: From the "Great Pox" to the Modern Version
- Contagionism versus Anticontagionsim
- The Germ Theory of Disease
- Tropical Medicine as a Discipline
- Malaria (I): The Case of Italy
- Malaria (II): The Global Challenge
- Tuberculosis (I): The Era of Consumption
- Tuberculosis (II): After Robert Koch
- Pandemic Influenza
- The Tuskegee Experiment
- AIDS (I)
- AIDS (II)
- Poliomyelitis: Problems of Eradication
- SARS, Avian Inluenza, and Swine Flu: Lessons and Prospects
- Final Q&A
Course Description
This course consists of an international analysis of the impact of epidemic diseases on western society and culture from the bubonic plague to HIV/AIDS and the recent experience of SARS and swine flu. Leading themes include: infectious disease and its impact on society; the development of public health measures; the role of medical ethics; the genre of plague literature; the social reactions of mass hysteria and violence; the rise of the germ theory of disease; the development of tropical medicine; a comparison of the social, cultural, and historical impact of major infectious diseases; and the issue of emerging and re-emerging diseases.
Course Structure:
This Yale College course, taught on campus twice per week for 50 minutes, was recorded for Open Yale Courses in Spring 2010.