Atlas of Epidemic Britain: A Twentieth-Century Picture

摘要

This book, as its title implies, maps infectious disease data in the twentieth century, largely within England, Scotland, and Wales, but occasionally straying into a wider geographical area and into the twenty-first century. The focus is largely on infectious epidemics in humans. The authors make the slightly ambitious claim that this might be considered a continuation of Charles Creighton's classic History of Epidemics in Britain (2 vols., Cambridge, 1891-4). In the present work, after a slightly congested opening chapter (containing a lot of the basic ideas and terminology), chapter 2 surveys epidemic mortality in the British Isles and Europe over the twentieth century, highlighting a threefold division into emerging diseases (e.g., influenza, pneumonia, respiratory infections, poliomyelitis), retreating diseases (e.g., anthrax, diphtheria, typhoid), and secularly varying emerging/retreating diseases (e.g., malaria, brucellosis). Chapter 3 concentrates on the extinction of the 'old plagues', specifically bubonic and pneumonic plague, malaria, smallpox, cholera and typhus fever in the period up to 1945.