IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB296469942

’17, ’18, ’19: religion and science in three pandemics, 1817, 1918, and 2019 (2020)

Journal of Global History
Volume: 15
Issue: 3
Pages: 434-443

DOI: 10.1017/S1740022820000315

URI: http://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-global-history/article/17-18-19-religion-and-science-in-three-pandemics-1817-1918-and-2019/489659C0DA31C7F3E3B8B84374319BEC

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Public health Medicine and society Medicine and culture Pandemics Biomedicine Science and religion 21st century 20th century, early 19th century

Recognizing that serious pandemics call forth explanations which go to the heart of beliefs about why natural disasters occur, this article examines three pandemics over the last 200 years (cholera from 1817, Spanish influenza in 1918–19, and COVID-19) to establish whether such explanations have changed significantly over time and, if so, why. What it finds is that this period saw a watershed in which the dominance of traditional religious explanations declined in many parts of the world in the face of the ascent of explanations based on biomedical science. Tracking this momentous change across several faiths and regions globally makes it possible to put into telling historical perspective the stances taken by faith-based communities in response to the current COVID-19 pandemic.

...More

Citation URI

http://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB296469942/

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Monica H. Green; (2020)
Emerging Diseases, Re-Emerging Histories (/isis/citation/CBB050271628/)

Book Vittorio Alessandro Sironi; (2021)
Le maschere della salute: Dal Rinascimento ai tempi del coronavirus (/isis/citation/CBB761112821/)

Book Honigsbaum, Mark; (2014)
A History of the Great Influenza Pandemics: Death, Panic and Hysteria, 1830--1920 (/isis/citation/CBB001550988/)

Book Amir A. Afkhami; (2019)
A Modern Contagion: Imperialism and Public Health in Iran's Age of Cholera (/isis/citation/CBB370933514/)

Thesis Laura F. Goffman; (2019)
Medical Frontiers: Health, Empire, and Society in the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula, 1862-1959 (/isis/citation/CBB632148734/)

Book Katherine Mason; (2016)
Infectious Change: Reinventing Chinese Public Health After an Epidemic (/isis/citation/CBB907982802/)

Article Brian Dolan; (2020)
It Wasn't Supposed to Be a Coronavirus: The Quest for an Influenza A(h5n1)-Derived Vaccine and the Limits of Pandemic Preparedness (/isis/citation/CBB603005256/)

Article M. Kemal Temel; (2020)
The 1918 “Spanish Flu” Pandemic in the Ottoman Capital, Istanbul (/isis/citation/CBB539750154/)

Book Carlo Caduff; (2015)
The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events in a Public Culture of Danger (/isis/citation/CBB736184954/)

Article Michael P. Kelly; Federica Russo; (2021)
The epistemic values at the basis of epidemiology and public health (/isis/citation/CBB856188518/)

Book Jacques Pépin; (2021)
The Origins of AIDS (/isis/citation/CBB084551418/)

Article Harrison, Henrietta; (2012)
Rethinking Missionaries and Medicine in China: The Miracles of Assunta Pallotta, 1905--2005 (/isis/citation/CBB001202139/)

Article Siddharth Chandra; Julia Christensen; Shimon Likhtman; (2020)
Connectivity and seasonality: the 1918 influenza and COVID-19 pandemics in global perspective (/isis/citation/CBB309984269/)

Article Geoffrey W. Rice; (2020)
How reminders of the 1918–19 pandemic helped Australia and New Zealand respond to COVID-19 (/isis/citation/CBB418629553/)

Thesis Tian, Xiaoli; (2011)
Relocating Science: Medical Missions and Western Medicine in Nineteenth-Century China (/isis/citation/CBB001567287/)

Book Susan Reynolds Whyte; (2014)
Second Chances: Surviving AIDS in Uganda (/isis/citation/CBB067997002/)

Chapter Rossella Maspoli; (2021)
Evolution, role and potential of public baths in the post-Fordist western city (/isis/citation/CBB415929509/)

Chapter Legg, Stephen; (2013)
Planning Social Hygiene: From Contamination to Contagion in Interwar India (/isis/citation/CBB001214656/)

Book Jones, Esyllt Wynne; Fahrni, Magdalena; (2012)
Epidemic Encounters: Influenza, Society, and Culture in Canada, 1918--20 (/isis/citation/CBB001213552/)

Article Hayes, Nick; Doyle, Barry M.; (2013)
Eggs, Rags and Whist Drives: Popular Munificence and the Development of Provincial Medical Voluntarism between the Wars (/isis/citation/CBB001202086/)