Sheldon Watts – författare

"One of the best portrayals of life in Europe and the Islamic world during the medieval Great Plague. . . . Watts offers solid, stunning examples of Western idiocy that created superhighways for once-obscure microbes, leading to horrendous epidemics. . . . A perspective that Western, particularly Caucasian, policy-makers would do well to comprehend."—Laurie Garrett, Foreign Affairs"Fascinating . . . [Watts] exposes to daylight the dire effect of the elites' often misinformed conception of these diseases, and how they, the elites, manipulated epidemiological crises to their advantage."—Alfred Crosby, Washington PostThis book is a major and wide-ranging study of the great epidemic scourges of humanity—plague, leprosy, smallpox, syphilis, cholera, and yellow fever/malaria—over the last six centuries. It is also much more. Sheldon Watts applies a wholly original perspective to the study of global disease, exploring the connections between the movement of epidemics and the manifestations of imperial power in the Americas, Asia, Africa, and in European homelands. He argues that not only did Western medicine fail to cure the diseases that its own expansion engendered, but that imperial medicine was in fact an agent and tool of empire.Watts examines the relationship between the pre-modern and modern medical profession and such epidemic disasters as the plague in western Europe and the Middle East; leprosy in the medieval West and in the nineteenth-century tropical world; the spread of smallpox to the New World in the age of exploration; syphilis and nonsexual diseases in Europe’s connection with Asia; cholera in India during British rule; and malaria in the Atlantic Basin during the eras of slavery and Social Darwinism. This book will become the standard account of the way diseases—arising through chance, through reckless environmental change engineered by man, or through a combination of each—were interpreted in Western Europe and in the colonized world, and offers an interesting historical perspective for a world dealing with the spread of COVID-19.

Disease and Medicine in World History is a concise introduction to diverse ideas about diseases and their treatment throughout the world. Drawing on case studies from ancient Egypt to present-day America, Asia and Europe, this survey discusses concepts of sickness and forms of treatment in many cultures.Sheldon Watts shows that many medical practices in the past were shaped as much by philosophers and metaphysicians as by university-trained doctors and other practitioners.Subjects covered include:Pharaonic Egypt and the pre-conquest New Worldthe evolution of medical systems in the Middle Easthealth and healing on the Indian subcontinentmedicine and disease in Chinathe globalization of disease in the modern worldthe birth and evolution of modern scientific medicine.This volume is a landmark contribution to the field of world history. It covers the principal medical systems known in the world, based on extensive original research. Watts raises questions about globalization in medicine and the potential impact of infectious diseases in the present day.