This title offers a uniquely interdisciplinary look at health, disease, treatment, and plagues throughout human history.From the Athenian flu pandemic and the Black Death to AIDS, this extensive two-volume set offers a sociocultural, historical, and medical look at infectious diseases and their place in human history from Neolithic times to the present. Nearly 300 entries cover individual diseases (such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, Ebola, and SARS); major epidemics (such as the Black Death, 16th-century syphilis, cholera in the nineteenth century, and the Spanish Flu of 1918-19); environmental factors (such as ecology, travel, poverty, wealth, slavery, and war); and historical and cultural effects of disease (such as the relationship of Romanticism to Tuberculosis, the closing of London theatres during plague epidemics, and the effect of venereal disease on social reform).Editor Joseph P. Byrne, together with an advisory board of specialists and over 100 scholars, research scientists, and medical practitioners from 13 countries, has produced a uniquely interdisciplinary treatment of the ways in which diseases pestilence, and plagues have affected human life. Primary source sidebars, over 70 illustrations, a glossary, and an extensive print and non-print bibliography round out the work.Entries include: Astrology and Medicine; Bio-terrorism; Black Death Flagellants; Corpses; Disease in the Pre-Columbian Americas; Ectoparasites; Folk Medicine; Hippocrates; Leprosy; Measles, Efforts to Eradicate; Mary Mallon; Napoleonic Wars; Personal Hygiene and Epidemic Disease; Quacks; and, Third Plague Pandemic in Africa.