Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
  • Cited by 7
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
March 2023
Print publication year:
2023
Online ISBN:
9780511732386

Book description

Parasites have been infecting humans throughout our evolution. When complex societies developed, the greater population density provided new opportunities for parasites to spread. In this interdisciplinary volume, the author brings his expertise in medicine, archaeology and history to explore the contribution of parasites in causing flourishing past civilizations to falter and decline. By using cutting edge methods, Mitchell presents the evidence for parasites that infected the peoples of key ancient civilizations across the world in order to understand their impact upon those populations. This new understanding of the archaeological and historical evidence for intestinal worms, ectoparasites, and protozoa shows how different cultures were burdened by contrasting types of diseases depending upon their geographical location, endemic insects, food preferences and cultural beliefs.

Reviews

‘This volume … challenges us to think about these civilizations without macroparasites - what would they be like day-to-day? How would their histories be different? Thinking in this way, it becomes easy to see the tremendous social and biological impacts that macroparasites had, and continue to have, on humans of the past and present.’

Sophie K. Joseph Source: The Quarterly Review of Biology

Refine List

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
×

Contents

  • 1 - Introduction
    pp 1-9

Metrics

Altmetric attention score

Full text views

Total number of HTML views: 0
Total number of PDF views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

Book summary page views

Total views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between #date#. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

Usage data cannot currently be displayed.