More Than Hot (Johns Hopkins Biographies of Disease) Book PDF, ePub eBook

Join our eBook service for unlimited books & audiobooks. Get a free 7 day subscription! ↓↓↓↓↓


Book Descriptions:

Christopher Hamlin’s magisterial work engages a common experience—fever—in 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, both an important way 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 fevers—chiefly malaria—and a North where fever, now merely a symptom, was so medically trivial as to be transformed into a familiar motif of popular culture.

A senior historian of science and medicine, Hamlin shares stories from individuals—some eminent, many forgotten—who exemplify aspects of fever: reflections of the fevered, for whom fevers, and especially the vivid hallucinations of delirium, were sometimes transformative; of those who cared for them (nurses and, often, mothers); and of those who sought to explain deadly epidemic outbreaks. Significant also are the arguments of the reformers, for whom fever stood as a proxy for manifold forms of injustice.

Broad in scope and sweep, Hamlin’s study is a reflection of how the meanings of diseases continue to shift, affecting not only the identities we create but often also our ability to survive.

More Than Hot (Johns Hopkins Biographies of Disease) by Christopher Hamlin

From reader reviews:

Alfredo Dunn:

Nowadays reading books become more and more than want or need but also be a life style. This reading practice give you lot of advantages. Associate programs you got of course the knowledge the particular information inside the book that will improve your knowledge and information. The data you get based on what kind of reserve you read, if you want drive more knowledge just go with education books but if you want experience happy read one having theme for entertaining like comic or novel. Often the More Than Hot (Johns Hopkins Biographies of Disease) is kind of guide which is giving the reader unpredictable experience.

Josue Denson:

Is it a person who having spare time in that case spend it whole day by simply watching television programs or just lying down on the bed? Do you need something new? This More Than Hot (Johns Hopkins Biographies of Disease) can be the respond to, oh how comes? A fresh book you know. You are therefore out of date, spending your time by reading in this brand new era is common not a nerd activity. So what these books have than the others?

Hector Duggan:

You can obtain this More Than Hot (Johns Hopkins Biographies of Disease) by look at the bookstore or Mall. Only viewing or reviewing it may to be your solve difficulty if you get difficulties for ones knowledge. Kinds of this e-book are various. Not only simply by written or printed but in addition can you enjoy this book by simply e-book. In the modern era similar to now, you just looking because of your mobile phone and searching what your problem. Right now, choose your own personal ways to get more information about your publication. It is most important to arrange yourself to make your knowledge are still change. Let's try to choose appropriate ways for you.

Lorenzo Maskell:

Reading a reserve make you to get more knowledge from this. You can take knowledge and information from your book. Book is written or printed or illustrated from each source that will filled update of news. In this particular modern era like at this point, many ways to get information are available for you. From media social similar to newspaper, magazines, science guide, encyclopedia, reference book, new and comic. You can add your understanding by that book. Ready to spend your spare time to open your book? Or just searching for the More Than Hot (Johns Hopkins Biographies of Disease) when you desired it?