Cholera is a frightening disease. Victims are wracked by stomach cramps and suffer intense diarrhoea. Death can come within hours. Though now seeming a distant memory in Europe, which suffered several epidemics in the 19th century before John Snow identified the link with water, cholera is still a serious threat in many parts of the world--Zimbabwe is a recent example. Snow's discovery was one of the great breakthroughs of epidemiology and a wonderful story from the history of science. Later came the discovery of the culprit organism--Cholera vibrio--understanding of its life cycle, and the development of a vaccine. But the problem of cholera has not disappeared. This book tells the story of cholera, and looks at both the medical success in the West, and the different attitudes to the disease in countries in which it is prevalent as opposed to those in which it put in a temporary appearance. Unlike other books on cholera, which focus on the experience of particular countries, Christopher Hamlin's account draws together the experiences from various countries, both those that were colonies and those that were not. Cholera: the biography is part of the Oxford series, Biographies of Diseases, edited by William and Helen Bynum. In each individual volume an expert historian or clinician tells the story of a particular disease or condition throughout history - not only in terms of growing medical understanding of its nature and cure, but also shifting social and cultural attitudes, and changes in the meaning of the name of the disease itself.

Cholera: The Biography (Biographies of Diseases)

Hamlin, Christopher

History

Oxford University Press

What Becomes of Pollution?: Adversary Science and the Controversy on the Self-Purification of Rivers in Britain, 1850-1900 (Routledge Library Editions: Pollution, Climate and Change)

Originally published in 1987, this volume examines the ideals and realities of river use in 19th Century Britain and the failure of legal and technological remedies for river pollution. It deals with the involvement of scientists, particularly chemists, in pollution inquiries and considers the effects on the normal workings of the scientific community of scientists' participation in the adversary forums in which water and sewage policy was made. It discusses 19th ideas of decomposition, disease causation and purification and examines the gap between the abilities of science and the needs of society that developed as the existence of water-borne disease became increasingly clear. It also deals with the politicization of water bacteriology and the emergence of a technology of biological sewage treatment from a political context.

Business & Money

Economics

Routledge

The 1830s and 1840s are the formative years of modern public health in Britain, when the poor law bureaucrat Edwin Chadwick conceived his vision of public health through public works and began the campaign for the construction of the kinds of water and sewerage works that ultimately became the standard components of urban infrastructure throughout the developed world. This book first explores that vision and campaign against the backdrop of the great "condition-of-England" questions of the period, of what rights and expectations working people could justifiably have in regard to political participation, food, shelter and conditions of work. It examines the ways Chadwick's sanitarianism fit the political needs of the much-hated Poor Law Commission and of Whig and Tory governments, each seeking some antidote to revolutionary Charitism. It then reviews the Chadwickians' efforts to solve the host of problems they met in trying to implement the sanitary idea: of what responsibilities central and local units of government, and private contractors, were to have; of how townspeople could be persuaded to embark on untried public technologies; of where the new public health experts were to come from; and of how elegant technical designs were to be fitted to the unique social, political and geographic circumstances of individual towns. Rejecting the view that Chadwick's program was a simple response to an obvious urban problem Professor Hamlin argues that at the time a "public health" focusing narrowly on sanitary public works represented a retreat of public medicine from involvement with the great social issues of the Industrial Revolution. In exploring the views of medical men who were critical of Chadwick, Hamlin suggests the parameters of a public health that might have been, in which concern for health and well-being becomes the foundation of a public medicine that is a principal guarantor of social justice. This book offers modern public heatlh professionals elements of a forgotten professional heritage that might be useful in responding to the bewildering range of health problems we now confront.

Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick: Britain, 1800–1854 (Cambridge Studies in the History of Medicine)

Medical Books

Administration & Medicine Economics

Cambridge University Press

This book reviews the polarized state of agricultural controversy, examines recent prevalent ideologies in agriculture in the United States and describes images and assumptions frequently used in writings on agriculture. Characteristic ideologies are systematically compared and evaluated, with emphasis on demystifying the predominant policy positions. The authors discuss how these ideologies are expressed in the context of a policy hearing or embedded in research agendas for agriculture.

Deep Disagreement In U.s. Agriculture: Making Sense Of Policy Conflict

Shepard, Philip T

Westview Press

A conceptual and cultural history of fever, a universally experienced and sometimes feared symptom.
Winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of the Choice ACRL
Christopher Hamlin’s magisterial work engages a common experience―fever―in all its varieties and meanings. Reviewing the representations of that condition from ancient times to the present, More Than Hot is a history of the world through the lens of fever. The book deals with the expression of fever, with the efforts of medical scientists to classify it, and with fever’s changing social, cultural, and political significance. 
Long before there were thermometers to measure it, people recognized fever as a dangerous, if transitory, state of being. It was the most familiar form of alienation from the normal self, a concern to communities and states as well as to patients, families, and healers. 
The earliest medical writers struggled for a conceptual vocabulary to explain fever. During the Enlightenment, the idea of fever became a means to acknowledge the biological experiences that united humans. A century later, in the age of imperialism, it would become a key element of conquest, both an important way of differentiating places and races, and of imposing global expectations of health. Ultimately the concept would split: "fevers" were dangerous and often exotic epidemic diseases, while "fever" remained a curious physiological state, certainly distressing but usually benign. By the end of the twentieth century, that divergence divided the world between a global South profoundly affected by fevers―chiefly malaria―and a North where fever, now merely a symptom, was so medically trivial as to be transformed into a familiar motif of popular culture.
A senior historian of science and medicine, Hamlin shares stories from individuals―some eminent, many forgotten―who exemplify aspects of fever: reflections of the fevered, for whom fevers, and especially the vivid hallucinations of delirium, were sometimes transformative; of those who cared for them (nurses and, often, mothers); and of those who sought to explain deadly epidemic outbreaks. Significant also are the arguments of the reformers, for whom fever stood as a proxy for manifold forms of injustice. 
Broad in scope and sweep, Hamlin’s study is a reflection of how the meanings of diseases continue to shift, affecting not only the identities we create but often also our ability to survive.

More Than Hot: A Short History of Fever (Johns Hopkins Biographies of Disease)

Historical Study & Educational Resources

Johns Hopkins University Press

Behind the Stained Glass: A History of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Crane Hill Publishers

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Books by Hamlin, Christopher