As the Ebola outbreak in West Africa continues its dreadful march, Duncan McLean looks at the 600-year-old practice of isolating individuals and communities in order to bring an end to epidemics and assesses the effectiveness of such measures.
While most people have heard of the Black Death, medieval Europe was also afflicted by a less deadly but more perplexing epidemic: the English sweating sickness.
‘Man has made himself what he is today.’ Joe Rogaly writes how important biological changes have recently transformed his whole existence.
John Henderson challenges received ideas on how medieval and early modern societies dealt with perils such as plague.
The notorious malady of the 18th century is on the increase in the UK.
St Bartholomew’s was refounded in the reign of Henry VIII. Courtney Dainton describes how, for nearly two centuries, it was one of only two major hospitals in England for the care of the general sick.
Louis C. Kleber describes how, for the American Indians, ‘medicine’ was a spiritual belief as well as a curative.
During the Middle Ages, writes Courtney Dainton, English hospitals continued to flourish until the beginning of the fifteenth century.
Frances Austin reads the lively late eighteenth century letters of a great surgeon’s apprentice to his family in Cornwall.
J.J.N. McGurk profiles Roger Bacon; a 13-century Franciscan, with a reputation as a necromancer, who showed a remarkable combination at Oxford and in Paris of philosophic and scientific gifts.
