Built on 50-years of data in the Isis Bibliography of the History of Science.
The search for a "Patient Zero"--Popularly understood to be an epidemic's first infected case--has been key to media coverage of major infectious disease outbreaks for more than three decades. Yet the term itself did not exist before the emergence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. How did this idea so swiftly exert a strong grip on the popular consciousness? In Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic, Richard A. McKay demonstrates how this seemingly new concept drew upon centuries-old ideas--and fears--about contagion and social disorder. McKay presents a carefully documented account of the life of Ga�tan Dugas, a gay man whose skin cancer diagnosis in 1980 took on very different meanings as the epidemic developed and who gained widespread posthumous infamy when he was incorrectly identified as Patient Zero of the North American outbreak. McKay shows how public health investigators inadvertently created the term amid their early research into the emerging health crisis; how an ambitious journalist dramatically amplified the idea in his determination to reframe national debates about AIDS; and how many individuals grappled with the notion of Patient Zero--adopting, challenging and redirecting its powerful meanings--as they tried to make sense of and respond to the first fifteen years of an unfolding epidemic in Canada and the United States. With important insights for our interconnected age, Patient Zero untangles the complex process by which individuals and groups create meaning and allocate blame when faced with new disease threats.--Page 4 of cover.
We've just published Vol. 113 of the IsisCB. you can check it out here: https://t.co/OCsWrUcDFf.
IsisCB now uses subject tags and citation metadata to generate recommendations for other citations you might be interested in. You'll find these recommendations alongside any citation record.
Our new interface provides users with more information in a more intuitive format, putting the relationships between scholarship, scholars, and subjects front and center.
The new playground tools provide users with interactive data visualizations that allow you to see and make meaning from our database of citations, concepts, people, places, historians, time periods and the rich connections between them.
IsisCB Explore is an open access discovery service. Opened in 2015, it utilizes citation data in the Isis Bibliography dataset to power a robust search engine. Using Explore, you can discover publications, people, and concepts in all areas of history of science, technology, and medicine. The project is funded by the History of Science Society and the University of Oklahoma. It was also the recipient of a major grant through the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in 2014.
IsisCB Explore enables users to search for citations, authors, editors, publisher, journals, and concepts using a dataset of over 220,000 citations to historical works across more than four decades of research in the field. The content is updated daily, so users always have the most up-to-date resources in the field.
The innovative design works through a relational network graph of the data based on two record types: citations (the bibliographic entries that have been classified and indexed) and authorities (the identity records for subjects, categories, authors, contributors, publishers, journals, places, people, and institutions).
All of our source code is at GitHub. Our data is open for use following the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.