Agents of apocalypse : epidemic disease in the colonial Philippines / Ken De Bevoise.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

De Bevoise, Ken, 1943-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Epidemiology--Philippines.

Epidemiology.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (289 p.)

Edition:

Course Book

Place of Publication:

Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c1995.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

As waves of epidemic disease swept the Philippines in the late nineteenth century, some colonial physicians began to fear that the indigenous population would be wiped out. Many Filipinos interpreted the contagions as a harbinger of the Biblical Apocalypse. Though the direct forebodings went unfulfilled, Philippine morbidity and mortality rates were the world's highest during the period 1883-1903. In Agents of Apocalypse, Ken De Bevoise shows that those "mourning years" resulted from a conjunction of demographic, economic, technological, cultural, and political processes that had been building for centuries. The story is one of unintended consequences, fraught with tragic irony. De Bevoise uses the Philippine case study to explore the extent to which humans participate in creating their epidemics. Interpreting the archival record with conceptual guidance from the health sciences, he sets tropical disease in a historical framework that views people as interacting with, rather than acting within, their total environment. The complexity of cause-effect and agency-structure relationships is thereby highlighted. Readers from fields as diverse as Spanish, American, and Philippine history, medical anthropology, colonialism, international relations, Asian studies, and ecology will benefit from De Bevoise's insights into the interdynamics of historical processes that connect humans and their diseases.

Contents:

Front matter

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

Map of Asia and the East Indies, 1875

Map of Philippine Provinces and Principal Islands, 1890

INTRODUCTION. Dimensions of the Crisis

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1. Probability of Contact

CHAPTER 2. Susceptibility

PART TWO

CHAPTER 3. Venereal Disease: Evolution of a Social Problem

CHAPTER 4. Smallpox: Failure of the Health Care System

CHAPTER 5. Beriberi: Fallout from Cash Cropping

CHAPTER 6. Malaria: Disequilibrium in the Total Environment

CHAPTER 7. Cholera: The Island World as an Epidemiological Unit

CONCLUSION. Intervention and Disease

Abbreviations used in the Notes

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [247]-265) and index.

ISBN:

1-4008-1558-4

1-4008-0157-5

1-282-75201-4

9786612752018

1-4008-2142-8

1-4008-1137-6

OCLC:

700688641