A pathbreaking history of how participants in the slave trade influenced the growth and dissemination of medical knowledge As the slave trade brought Europeans, Africans, and Americans into contact, diseases were traded along with human lives. Manuel Barcia examines the battle waged against disease, where traders fought against loss of profits while enslaved Africans fought for survival. Although efforts to control disease and stop epidemics from spreading brought little success, the medical knowledge generated by people on both sides of the conflict contributed to momentous change in the medical cultures of the Atlantic world.

A pathbreaking history of how participants in the slave trade influenced the growth and dissemination of medical knowledge As the slave trade brought Europeans, Africans, and Americans into contact, diseases were traded along with human lives. Manuel Barcia examines the battle waged against disease, where traders fought against loss of profits while enslaved Africans fought for survival. Although efforts to control disease and stop epidemics from spreading brought little success, the medical knowledge generated by people on both sides of the conflict contributed to momentous change in the medical cultures of the Atlantic world.

“The bard of biological weapons captures the drama of the front lines.”—Richard Danzig, former secretary of the navy The first major bioterror event in the United States-the anthrax attacks in October 2001-was a clarion call for scientists who work with “hot” agents to find ways of protecting civilian populations against biological weapons. In The Demon in the Freezer, his first nonfiction book since The Hot Zone, a #1 New York Times bestseller, Richard Preston takes us into the heart of Usamriid, the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland, once the headquarters of the U.S. biological weapons program and now the epicenter of national biodefense. Peter Jahrling, the top scientist at Usamriid, a wry virologist who cut his teeth on Ebola, one of the world’s most lethal emerging viruses, has ORCON security clearance that gives him access to top secret information on bioweapons. His most urgent priority is to develop a drug that will take on smallpox-and win. Eradicated from the planet in 1979 in one of the great triumphs of modern science, the smallpox virus now resides, officially, in only two high-security freezers-at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and in Siberia, at a Russian virology institute called Vector. But the demon in the freezer has been set loose. It is almost certain that illegal stocks are in the possession of hostile states, including Iraq and North Korea. Jahrling is haunted by the thought that biologists in secret labs are using genetic engineering to create a new superpox virus, a smallpox resistant to all vaccines. Usamriid went into a state of Delta Alert on September 11 and activated its emergency response teams when the first anthrax letters were opened in New York and Washington, D.C. Preston reports, in unprecedented detail, on the government’ s response to the attacks and takes us into the ongoing FBI investigation. His story is based on interviews with top-level FBI agents and with Dr. Steven Hatfill. Jahrling is leading a team of scientists doing controversial experiments with live smallpox virus at CDC. Preston takes us into the lab where Jahrling is reawakening smallpox and explains, with cool and devastating precision, what may be at stake if his last bold experiment fails.

Wage-Earning Slaves is the first systematic study of coartación, a process by which slaves worked toward purchasing their freedom in installments, long recognized as a distinctive feature of certain areas under Spanish colonial rule in the nineteenth century. Focusing on Cuba, this book reveals that instead of providing a “path to manumission,” the process was often rife with obstacles that blocked slaves from achieving liberty. Claudia Varella and Manuel Barcia trace the evolution of coartación in the context of urban and rural settings, documenting the lived experiences of slaves through primary sources from many different archives. They show that slave owners grew increasingly intolerant and abusive of the process, and that the laws of coartación were not often followed in practice. The process did not become formalized as a contract between slaves and their masters until 1875, after abolition had already come. Varella and Barcia discuss how coartados did not see an improvement in their situation at this time, but essentially became wage-earning slaves as they continued serving their former owners. The exhaustive research in this volume provides valuable insight into how slaves and their masters negotiated with each other in the ever-changing economic world of nineteenth-century Cuba, where freedom was not always absolute and where abuses and corruption most often prevailed.

An account of the 1878 yellow fever epidemic documents how it killed more than 18,000 people in the American South, tracing its particularly catastrophic impact in Memphis, Tennessee, while noting the heroic efforts of people who remained behind to help.

“Extremely interesting . . . Young people interested in medicine or scientific discovery will find this book engrossing, as will history students” (School Library Journal). [He had] a fever that hovered around 104 degrees. His skin turned yellow. The whites of his eyes looked like lemons. Nauseated, he gagged and threw up again and again . . . Here is the true story of how four Americans and one Cuban tracked down a killer, one of the word’s most vicious plagues: yellow fever. Journeying to fever-stricken Cuba in the company of Walter Reed and his colleagues, the reader feels the heavy air, smells the stench of disease, hears the whine of mosquitoes biting human volunteers during surreal experiments. Exploring themes of courage, cooperation, and the ethics of human experimentation, this gripping account is ultimately a story of the triumph of science. “[A] powerful exploration of a disease that killed 100,000 U.S. citizens in the 1800s.” —Kirkus Reviews Includes photos

Did food poisoning cause the Black Plague, the Salem witch-hunts, and other significant events in human history? In this pathbreaking book, historian Mary Kilbourne Matossian argues that epidemics, sporadic outbursts of bizarre behavior, and low fertility and high death rates from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries may have been caused by food poisoning from microfungi in bread, the staple food in Europe and America during this period. "A bold book with a stimulating thesis. Matossian's claims for the role of food poisoning will need to be incorporated into any satisfactory account of past demographic trends."--John Walter, Nature "Matossian's work is innovative and original, modest and reasoned, and opens a door on our general human past that historians have not only ignored, but often did not even know existed."--William Richardson, Environmental History Review "This work demonstrates an impressive variety of cross-national sources. Its broad sweep also reveals the importance of the history of agriculture and food and strengthens the view that the shift from the consumption of mold-poisoned rye bread to the potato significantly contributed to an improvement in the mental and physical health of Europeans and Americans."--Naomi Rogers, Journal of American History "This work is a true botanical-historical tour de force."--Rudolf Schmid, Journal of the International Association of Plant Taxonomy "Intriguing and lucid."--William K. Beatty, Journal of the American Medical Association