In 1998, molecular geneticists first announced that they had retrieved fragments of the genetic material of Yersinia pestis from sites that had historically been associated with outbreaks of pestilencia. That announcement was in fact followed by a decade of debate about what constituted good methods in the emerging field of palaeogenetics.…[Read more]

Psychoactive plants could be described as attractive topics for the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology, and equally they have been of singular interest in popular culture for decades. Perhaps because these are situated within an area that many may view as socially unacceptable, and certainly in some cultures, as illegal, they make an…[Read more]

This is the abstract and bibliography of works cited for an invited talk presented at the University of North Carolina – Greensboro on 9 November 2023. It was part of the Department of Biology’s Ashby Dialogue Series, devoted to the topic “Emergent Pathogens and Globalization: Past and Present.”

This document lays out a series of points in regard to a recently posted pre-print on the history of plague in late medieval and early modern Europe: Marcel Keller et al., “A Refined Phylochronology of the Second Plague Pandemic in Western Eurasia.” I am a historian of medicine and I am presenting these as historical questions. I have written it…[Read more]

This blogpost summarizes findings presented at a talk at Erfurt University on 16 May 2023, in the series KFG “Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formation,” Global Exchange: Trade, Knowledge, and Religion. In this blogpost we present our key argument that rigorous correlation between archaeological, genomic, and documentary evidence dem…[Read more]

This article explores how public health was transformed in Egypt soon after its occupation by Great Britain in 1882. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the Egyptian state had invested substantially in health to boost the nation’s economic and military strength, and, especially after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, to address E…[Read more]

The field of infectious disease history has been transformed in the past decade in large part because of fortuitous developments in several adjacent fields, most importantly genetics. The medieval period (ca. 500 to ca. 1500) has proved particularly important for these developments, not simply because it is now the earliest period from which whole…[Read more]

The “Spanish influenza” pandemic that struck Egypt in fall 1918 resulted in the death of eleven out of every one thousand people. Despite the mass suffering caused by the pandemic, it has been largely ignored by historians. I describe how the Egyptian public health service was unprepared for a major health crisis because resources were red…[Read more]

Over two percent of the Egyptian population perished during World War I due to starvation, malnutrition, and disease. Although technically neutral, Egypt was the staging ground for British and Dominion troops fighting the campaign against the Ottoman Empire. The prioritization of military needs led to government recruitment of civilian…[Read more]