Overview
- Explores for the first time the social, cultural and medical history of human corpses and burials comparatively
- Offers insight into an international selection of epidemics from the fourteenth century to the present day
- Reveals findings of interest to historians, archaeologists, anthropologists and public health experts
- Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras
Part of the book series: Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern History (MBSMH)
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Table of contents (10 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
This edited volume draws historians and anthropologists together to explore the contested worlds of epidemic corpses and their disposal. Why are burials so frequently at the center of disagreement, recrimination and protest during epidemics? Why are the human corpses produced in the course of infectious disease outbreaks seen as dangerous, not just to the living, but also to the continued existence of society and civilization? Examining cases from the Black Death to Ebola, contributors challenge the predominant idea that a single, universal framework of contagion can explain the political, social and cultural importance and impact of the epidemic corpse.
Reviews
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Christos Lynteris is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, UK, and Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded research project Visual Representations of the Third Plague Pandemic. He is the author of The Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China (Palgrave, 2012) and Ethnographic Plague (Palgrave, 2016).
Nicholas H. A. Evans is a Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics, UK. His work focuses on understanding the comparative and historical nature of doubt and uncertainty, and he was a member (2014-17) of the Visual Representations of the Third Plague Pandemic project at the University of Cambridge.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Histories of Post-Mortem Contagion
Book Subtitle: Infectious Corpses and Contested Burials
Editors: Christos Lynteris, Nicholas H A Evans
Series Title: Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern History
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62929-2
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-62928-5Published: 11 January 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-87431-9Published: 04 June 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-62929-2Published: 13 December 2017
Series ISSN: 2947-9142
Series E-ISSN: 2947-9150
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVII, 230
Number of Illustrations: 8 b/w illustrations
Topics: History of Science, World History, Global and Transnational History, History of Medicine