Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of plates
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- PART I Landscapes of the past
- PART II Contours of mortality
- PART III Environments and movements of disease
- 5 The spectrum of death, disease and medical care
- 6 Marshlands, mosquitoes and malaria
- 7 Crises, fevers and poxes
- PART IV Contours of death; contours of health
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Population, Economy and Society in Past Time
7 - Crises, fevers and poxes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of plates
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- PART I Landscapes of the past
- PART II Contours of mortality
- PART III Environments and movements of disease
- 5 The spectrum of death, disease and medical care
- 6 Marshlands, mosquitoes and malaria
- 7 Crises, fevers and poxes
- PART IV Contours of death; contours of health
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Population, Economy and Society in Past Time
Summary
Hence there is nothing so much wanted at present, either in natural history or physick, as a good general history of epidemics, or of the effects of the winds, weather, and mercury, to see the various epidemics, their different symptoms, cures, terminations or transitions in divers countries and ages. A work long wanted, highly necessary, and most extensively useful; the want of which has cost the lives of millions in a long series of ages.
(Short, 1750, p.418)FROM MARSHLAND MALARIA TO A CHRONOLOGY OF EPIDEMIC VISITATIONS
The outstanding feature of the geography of mortality in south-east England has been explained in terms of one predominant disease. Malaria was a disease confined to the marshlands and bounded – both in time and space – by its ecological and biological controls of stagnant waters, a plasmodium parasite and a mosquito vector. Its geographical incidence emphasises the strong and direct association between the environment and the epidemiology of a single disease.
But both within and beyond the marshland zones, many other diseases and epidemics raged throughout this period. Other pockets of elevated mortality also existed elsewhere in south-east England. Some urban centres, in particular, were found to be unhealthy with large annual and seasonal fluctuations of burials, and the demographic findings suggest that low-lying and riverine areas throughout south-east England experienced higher and more unstable mortality series than upland parishes. Areas such as the High Weald, by contrast, appeared to have patterns of unusually low or stable seasonal and annual mortality.
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- Information
- Contours of Death and Disease in Early Modern England , pp. 368 - 490Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997