Infection, Contagion, and Public Health in Late Medieval and Early Modern German Imperial Towns

Kinzelbach, Annemarie

doi:10.1093/jhmas/jrj046

Cited by 28 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…This may be related to the fact that, unlike Spencer, Smith was concerned with the infectious aspects of disease, rather than with its contagious effects in society. While in previous centuries infection and contagion were equally used to describe diseases (Kinzelbach ), historian François Delaporte () has showed that these two medical schools of the 19th century develop two different views of public health. Following him, while contagionists viewed diseases as spread by contact and recommended creating boundaries, infectionists returned to the origin point of an epidemic and aimed to restore the circulation of life around that place by cleaning habitats or killing animals.…”

Section: William Robertson Smith and Bovine Tuberculosis: Participatimentioning

confidence: 99%

A Genealogy of Animal Diseases and Social Anthropology (1870–2000)

Keck

2018

Med Anthropol Q

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Culling, vaccinating, and monitoring animals are the three main techniques used in contemporary veterinary public health to manage animal diseases that can be transmitted to humans. Each technique is underpinned by different ontological understandings of how microbes figure in relations between humans and animals. Therefore, animal diseases are not only a question for an applied anthropology but also involve the theoretical core of the discipline: that is, understanding how social causality emerges out of physical causality. To defend this argument, the article describes what Herbert Spencer wrote about foot-and-mouth disease; what William Robertson Smith thought about sacrifice in the context of bovine tuberculosis; how Emile Durkheim took vaccination for smallpox as a metaphor for the pathologies of the social; and what Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote about mad cow disease. The conceptions of the social in the writing of these four authors are analyzed through their understanding of the risk of transmission of animal diseases to humans, moving from prevention to precaution to preparedness.

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Section: William Robertson Smith and Bovine Tuberculosis: Participatimentioning

confidence: 99%

A Genealogy of Animal Diseases and Social Anthropology (1870–2000)

Keck

2018

Med Anthropol Q

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“…23 February 2009). Others saw the wilderness itself as hazardous for humans, with disease-carrying insects, polio-infested water, and lurking snakes, evoking a deeply rooted, Euro-American cultural model that associates swampland with ill health (Kinzelbach, 2006). In a more passive role, the wetlands occasionally provided shelter for homeless people or mischievous teenagers, who also posed a threat to passers-by.…”

Section: 'The Endangered Species Is People'mentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward Empathic Agonism: Conflicting Vulnerabilities in Urban Wetland Governance

Horowitz

2013

Environ Plan A

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Critics of attempts to achieve consensus through Habermasian 'communicative rationality' dismiss this as unachievable due to participants' selfishness and irrationality, and the inevitability of power relations. Instead, Mouffe advocates 'agonistic pluralism', a dynamic process of continual debate grounded in mutual respect. In this paper I argue that, for this to succeed, we need to recognize and embrace the role of emotion in moral reasoning. Here, I examine a dispute over wetland management in suburban New Jersey. Each side articulated distinct understandings of what was and was not vulnerable, backed by emotional appeals partly based in self-interest but that also encompassed care and concern for others. Each side accused the other of being irrational and immoral, drawing 'moral microboundaries' between them. I conclude that participants in a public debate may not simply be pursing self-serving goals, nor might open communication resolve their differences. Instead, each may be deeply convinced that he or she is advocating the most rational and moral course of action. This questions the very notion of a unitary, potentially agreed-upon 'common good' and instead challenges us to attempt to grasp each other's moral worlds, and in particular the emotional bases of these, through the seeming oxymoron that I term 'empathic agonism'.

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“…The reference to the crisis is very precise in the following passage: ''The word 'panic' has been used, like the word 'cholera', as if something in the air occasioned it, or it arose from some cause over which mankind has no power; and as naturally do merchants calculate on periodical panics as physicians do on cholera appearing in the fruit season (Anonymous 1, 1836, p. 16). Overstone also explicitly referred to the return of periods of excitement and of distress, comparing the consequences of the state of currency with that of the atmosphere: 50 On the medical explanations, see, e.g., Nutton (1990,) Hamlin (1992, and Kinzelbach (2006).…”

Section: Bad Atmosphere Vs Contagionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Crises as a Disease of the Body Politick. A Metaphor in the History of Nineteenth-Century Economics

Besomi¹

2011

J Hist Econ Thought

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This paper examines the use of the medical metaphor in the early theories of crises. It first considers the borrowing of medical terminology and generic references to disease, which, notwithstanding their relatively trivial character, illustrate how crises were originally conceived as disturbances (often of a political nature) to a naturally healthy system. Then it shows how a more specific metaphor, the fever of speculation, shifted the emphasis by treating prosperity as the diseased phase, to which crises are a remedy. The metaphor of the epidemic spreading of the disease introduced the theme of the cumulative character of both upswing and downswing, while the similitude with intermittent fevers accounted for the recurring nature of crises. Finally, the paper examines how the medical reflections on the causality of diseases contributed to the epistemology of crises theory, and reflects on the metaphysical shift accompanying the transition from the theories of crises to the theories of cycles.Doctor Garth, in his admirable poem of the Dispensary, says;-''Even health for want of change becomes disease.'' This is the case with nations sunk in prosperity. (William Playfair 1805, p. 17)

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Infection, Contagion, and Public Health in Late Medieval and Early Modern German Imperial Towns

Cited by 28 publications

References 13 publications

A Genealogy of Animal Diseases and Social Anthropology (1870–2000)

A Genealogy of Animal Diseases and Social Anthropology (1870–2000)

Toward Empathic Agonism: Conflicting Vulnerabilities in Urban Wetland Governance

Crises as a Disease of the Body Politick. A Metaphor in the History of Nineteenth-Century Economics

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