Samuel K. Cohn Jr. Epidemics

Samuel K. Cohn Jr. opens chapter 1 of Epidemics: Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS with his framing questions: “Does the historical record confirm the conclusion of historians, social scientists, and public intellectuals: that epidemic disease normally provoked social and ethical tensions, with violence and blaming towards ‘others’? Did this violence intensify when diseases were mysterious, that is, mostly before the ‘laboratory revolution’ of the late nineteenth century?” (7). His journey through 2,600 years of the global history of societal reactions to epidemic disease concludes in the negative. Relying on primary texts and newspaper accounts rather than secondary scholarship, Cohn challenges commonly held assumptions about that relationship. Different diseases sparked different societal responses, and these need to be studied in relation to larger contemporary social contexts. His work is revisionist and provocative, and one hopes it will stimulate much discussion among experts in the many fields it touches.

Ancient history · Compassion · Criminology · Plague (disease) · Political science · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Medicine · Psychology · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies · Virology · Yersinia bacterium, plague, ectoparasites research