This volume is a collection of chapters that deal with issues of health, hygiene and eugenics in Southeastern Europe to 1945, specifically, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece and Romania. Its major concern is to examine the transfer of medical ideas to society via local, national and international agencies and to show in how far developments in public health, preventive medicine, social hygiene, welfare, gender relations and eugenics followed a regional pattern. This volume provides insights into a region that has to date been marginal to scholarship of the social history of medicine.

A major, path-breaking work, History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning is Nancy G. Siraisi's examination into the intersections of medically trained authors and history in the period 1450 to 1650. Rather than studying medicine and history as separate disciplinary traditions, Siraisi calls attention to their mutual interaction in the rapidly changing world of Renaissance erudition. Far from their contributions being a mere footnote in the historical record, medical writers had extensive involvement in the reading, production, and shaping of historical knowledge during this important period. With remarkably detailed scholarship, Siraisi investigates doctors' efforts to explore the legacies handed down to them from ancient medical and anatomical writings and the difficult reconciliations this required between the authority of the ancient world and the discoveries of the modern. She also studies the ways in which sixteenth-century medical authors wrote history, both in their own medical texts and in more general historical works. In the course of her study, Siraisi finds that what allowed medical writers to become so fully engaged in the writing of history was their general humanistic background, their experience of history through the field of medicine's past, and the tools that the writing of history offered to the development of a rapidly evolving profession. Nancy G. Siraisi is one of the preeminent scholars of medieval and Renaissance intellectual history, specializing in medicine and science. Now Distinguished Professor Emerita of History at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and a 2008 winner of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, she has written numerous books, including Taddeo Alderotti and His Pupils (Princeton, 1981), which won the American Association for the History of Medicine William H. Welch Medal; Avicenna in Renaissance Italy (Princeton, 1987); The Clock and the Mirror (Princeton, 1997); and the widely used textbook Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine (Chicago, 1990), which won the Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize from the History of Science Society. In 2003 Siraisi received the History of Science Society's George Sarton Medal, in 2004 she received the Paul Oskar Kristellar Award for Lifetime Achievement of the Renaissance Society of America, and in 2005 she was awarded the American Historical Association Award for Scholarly Distinction. "A fascinating study of Renaissance physicians as avid readers and enthusiastic writers of all kinds of history: from case narratives and medical biographies to archaeological and environmental histories. In this wide-ranging book, Nancy Siraisi demonstrates the deep links between the medical and the humanistic disciplines in early modern Europe." ---Katharine Park, Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Professor of the History of Science, Harvard University "This is a salient but little explored aspect of Renaissance humanism, and there is no doubt that Siraisi has succeeded in throwing light onto a vast subject. The scholarship is wide-ranging and profound, and breaks new ground. The choice of examples is fascinating, and it puts Renaissance documents into a new context. This is a major book, well written, richly learned and with further implications for more than students of medical history." ---Vivian Nutton, Professor, The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, University College London, and author of From Democedes to Harvey: Studies in the History of Medicine "Siraisi shows the many-dimensioned overlaps and interactions between medicine and 'history' in the early modern period, marking a pioneering effort to survey a neglected discipline. Her book follows the changing usage of the classical term 'history' both as empiricism and as a kind of scholarship in the Renaissance before its more modern analytical and critical applications. It is a marvel of erudition in an area insufficiently studied." ---Donald R. Kelley, Emeritus James Westfall Thompson Professor of History, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and Executive Editor of Journal of the History of Ideas

The History of American Homeopathy traces the rise of lay practitioners in shaping homeopathy as a healing system and its relationship to other forms of complementary and alternative medicine in an age when conventional biomedicine remains the dominant form. Representing the most current and up-to-date history of American homeopathy, readers will benefit from John S. Haller Jr.'s comprehensive explanation of complementary medicine within the American social, scientific, religious, and philosophic traditions.

Foreword by Clyde Barker and Thomas E. Starzl. The first book of its kind, A History of Organ Transplantation examines the evolution of surgical tissue replacement from classical times to the medieval period to the present day. This volume will be useful to undergraduates, graduate students, scholars, surgeons, and the general public. Both Western and non-Western experiences as well as folk practices are included.

Incurable and Intolerable looks at the history of incurable illness from a variety of perspectives, including doctors, patients, families, religious counsel, and policy makers. This compellingly documented history illuminates the physical, emotional, social, and existential consequences of chronic disease and terminal illness, and offers an original look at the world of palliative medicine, politics, religion, and charity. Jason Szabo encourages a more careful scrutiny of today's attitudes, policies, and practices surrounding "imminent death" and its effects on society.

Infectious Ideas is a comparative analysis of how Muslim and Christian scholars explained the transmission of disease in the premodern Mediterranean world. How did religious communities respond to and make sense of epidemic disease? To answer this, historian Justin K. Stearns looks at how Muslim and Christian communities conceived of contagion, focusing especially on the Iberian Peninsula in the aftermath of the Black Death. What Stearns discovers calls into question recent scholarship on Muslim and Christian reactions to the plague and leprosy. Stearns shows that rather than universally reject the concept of contagion, as most scholars have affirmed, Muslim scholars engaged in creative and rational attempts to understand it. He explores how Christian scholars used the metaphor of contagion to define proper and safe interactions with heretics, Jews, and Muslims, and how contagion itself denoted phenomena as distinct as the evil eye and the effects of corrupted air. Stearns argues that at the heart of the work of both Muslims and Christians, although their approaches differed, was a desire to protect the physical and spiritual health of their respective communities. Based on Stearns's analysis of Muslim and Christian legal, theological, historical, and medical texts in Arabic, Medieval Castilian, and Latin, Infectious Ideas is the first book to offer a comparative discussion of concepts of contagion in the premodern Mediterranean world.

Dehner examines the wide disparity in national and international responses to influenza pandemics, from the Russian flu of 1889 to the swine flu outbreak in 2009. He chronicles the technological and institutional progress made along the way and shows how these developments can shape an effective future policy.

Black soldiers in the American Civil War were far more likely to die of disease than were white soldiers. In Intensely Human, historian Margaret Humphreys explores why this uneven mortality occurred and how it was interpreted at the time. In doing so, she uncovers the perspectives of mid-nineteenth-century physicians and others who were eager to implicate the so-called innate inferiority of the black body. In the archival collections of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, Humphreys found evidence that the high death rate among black soldiers resulted from malnourishment, inadequate shelter and clothing, inferior medical attention, and assignments to hazardous environments. While some observant physicians of the day attributed the black soldiers' high mortality rate to these circumstances, few medical professionals—on either side of the conflict—were prepared to challenge the "biological evidence" of white superiority. Humphreys shows how, despite sympathetic and responsible physicians' efforts to expose the truth, the stereotype of black biological inferiority prevailed during the war and after.