Product Information
The Deadly Truth chronicles the complex interactions between disease and the peoples of America from the pre-Columbian world to the present. Grob's ultimate lesson is stark but valuable: there can be no final victory over disease. The world in which we live undergoes constant change, which in turn creates novel risks to human health and life. We conquer particular diseases, but others always arise in their stead. In a powerful challenge to our tendency to see disease as unnatural and its virtual elimination as a real possibility, Grob asserts the undeniable biological persistence of disease. Diseases ranging from malaria to cancer have shaped the social landscape--sometimes through brief, furious outbreaks, and at other times through gradual occurrence, control, and recurrence. Grob integrates statistical data with particular peoples and places while giving us the larger patterns of the ebb and flow of disease over centuries. Throughout, we see how much of our history, culture, and nation-building was determined--in ways we often don't realize--by the environment and the diseases it fostered. The way in which we live has shaped, and will continue to shape, the diseases from which we get sick and die. By accepting the presence of disease and understanding the way in which it has physically interacted with people and places in past eras, Grob illuminates the extraordinarily complex forces that shape our morbidity and mortality patterns and provides a realistic appreciation of the individual, social, environmental, and biological determinants of human health.Product Identifiers
PublisherHarvard University Press
ISBN-139780674017573
eBay Product ID (ePID)87183237
Product Key Features
SubjectMedicine
Publication Year2005
Number of Pages368 Pages
Publication NameThe Deadly Truth: a History of Disease in America
LanguageEnglish
TypeTextbook
AuthorGerald N. Grob
FormatPaperback
Dimensions
Item Height225 mm
Item Width146 mm
Additional Product Features
Country/Region of ManufactureUnited States
Title_AuthorGerald N. Grob