More than hot : a short history of fever / Christopher Hamlin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hamlin, Christopher, 1951- author.

Series:

Johns Hopkins biographies of disease

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Fever.

Epidemics--History.

Epidemics.

History.

Public health--History.

Public health.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

xii, 383 pages ; 22 cm.

Place of Publication:

Baltimore, Maryland : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.

Summary:

Christopher Hamlin's magisterial work engages a common - 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, and important way both 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 - - a North where fever, now merely a symptom, was so medically trivial as to be transformed into a familiar motif of popular culture. Historian of science and medicine Christopher Hamlin shares stories from - eminent, many - exemplify aspects of fever. Significant also are the arguments of the reformers, for whom fever stood as a proxy for manifold forms of injustice. Book jacket.

Contents:

Chapter 1 More Than Hot 1

Part I The Fevers of Classical Medicines 17

Chapter 2 Words 23

Chapter 3 Books 54

Part II Fever as Social 89

Chapter 4 Communities 93

Chapter 5 Selves 125

Part III Fever Becomes Modern 165

Chapter 6 Facts 167

Chapter 7 Naming the Wild 206

Chapter 8 Numbers and Nurses 250

Part IV Fever, Modern and Post-Modern 281

Chapter 9 Machines, Mothers, Sex, and Zombies 285.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781421415024

142141502X

OCLC:

866859970