|
(The wrong kind of) gonorrhea in antiquity / Rebecca Flemming -- "Poxt and clapt together" : sexual misbehavior in early modern cases of venereal disease / Olivia Weisser -- Bioarchaeological contributions to understanding the history of treponemal disease / Charlotte Roberts and Rebecca Redfern -- A Long-standing evolutionary history between Chlamydia trachomatis and humans : visible, ocular, and invisible genital variants / Ian N. Clarke and Hugh R. Taylor -- Chlamydia : a disease without a history / Michael Worboys -- Population decline in Island Melanesia : Aphrodisian cultural practices, sexually transmitted infections, and low fertility / Tim Bayliss-Smith -- Community infertility in Papua New Guinea : uncovering the role of gonorrhea / Roy F.R. Scragg -- Fertility, STIs, and sexual behavior in early and mid-twentieth century East Africa / Shane Doyle -- "A wise provision of nature for the prevention of too many children" : evidence from the Australian colonies / Janet McCalman and Rebecca Kippen -- "The archenemy of fertility" : gonorrhea and infertility : Germany 1870-1935 / Christina Benninghaus -- Fecundity in a world of scourges : venereal diseases, criminal abortion, and acquired infertility in France, circa 1880-1950 / Fabrice Cahen and Adrien Minard -- Revealing the hidden affliction : how much infertility was due to venereal disease in England and Wales on the eve of the Great War? / Simon Szreter and Kevin Schürer. "A multidisciplinary group of prominent scholars explores the historical relationship between sexually transmitted infections and infertility. Untreated gonorrhea and chlamydia cause infertility in a proportion of women and men. Unlike the much-feared venereal disease of syphilis--"the pox"--gonorrhea and chlamydia are often symptomless, leaving victims unaware of the threat to their fertility. Science did not unmask the causal microorganisms until the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their effects on fertility in human history remain mysterious. This is the first volume to address the subject across over 2,000 years of human history. Following a synoptic editorial introduction, Part 1 explores the enigmas of evidence from ancient and early modern medical sources. Part 2 addresses fundamental questions about when exactly these diseases first became human afflictions, with new contributions from bioarcheology, genomics, and the history of medicine, producing surprising new insights. Part 3 presents studies of infertility and its sociocultural consequences in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Africa, Oceania, and Australia. Part 4 examines the quite different ways the infertility threat from STIs was perceived--by scientists, the public, and government--in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany, France, and Britain, concluding with a pioneering empirical estimate of the infertility impact in Britain. Simon Szreter is Professor of History and Public Policy, University of Cambridge, and Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge"--
|
