This is an essay written for submission to the science journal *Nature* in 2016. It was rejected, and since it was in response to a piece that originally appeared in *Nature*, I saw no reason to attempt to place it elsewhere. I am posting it now (January 2024), because it has become newly relevant to understand the London 6330 genome as…[Read more]

This is an initial “take” on the research design and implications of the findings announced, in pre-print, of the new aDNA Yersinia pestis genomes retrieved by Jiang et al. 2024 from the 7th-century mass burials under the collapsed hippodrome at Gerasa/Jerash, Jordan. The significance of this study lies not simply in presenting 8 new genomes fro…[Read more]

This is a Twitter essay on the history of leprosy, to commemorate World Leprosy Day, 29 January 2023. I’ve chosen for my theme this year the “bookend” discoveries of the two known species of bacteria that cause leprosy: that is, the discovery of Mycobacterium leprae by Armauer Hansen 150 years ago, and the discovery of Mycobacterium lepromatosis…[Read more]

This the revised draft of my essay, “The Pandemic Arc: Expanded Narratives in the History of Global Health,” which was written for a planned special issue of the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Science. The essay has been formally accepted, but has yet to undergo editing until the remaining submissions come in. Since this will no…[Read more]

This study presents my second major attempt to make historical sense out of the new evidence emerging from phylogenetics and paleogenetics about the proliferation of Yersinia pestis (the bacterium that causes plague) in late medieval Eurasia and Africa. My first attempt, “Putting Africa on the Black Death Map: Narratives from Genetics and H…[Read more]

This was an invited blogpost for the now-defunct blog on History of Medicine, REMEDIA. Published in 2015, the blogpost documents the revival and then transformation of written traditions in European surgical writing, at a time when a substantial corpus of new medical works were being absorbed from the Islamic world. The general barrenness of the…[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.”

A new type of evidence exists now to document the history of infectious diseases in the past. But this evidence consists of millions of molecular fragments that have to be retrieved and analyzed by palaeobiologists, not historians. How do historians–who are accustomed to working with written documents–learn to assess a new kind of evidence? This…[Read more]

Beyond the texts on women’s medicine associated with the name of a 12th-century female medical practitioner from Salerno named Trota (or the title, “Trotula”), the most widely circulated texts were those deriving from the ancient Greek *Gynecology* of Soranus (2nd century CE). In particular, the Latin translation/adaptation by Muscio (or Mustio),…[Read more]

Because there was so much confusion on the Internet about who/what “Trotula” was, in 2005 I drew up a short Fact Sheet summarizing the scholarly question about this medieval European author/text, whose influence was so central to the history of gynecology and obstetrics. I’ve updated the document periodically since then. This version dates from 21…[Read more]

The present bibliography was originally prepared for a webinar sponsored by the Medieval Academy of America in May 2020. The present version includes all citations added as of 30 August 2023. The Bibliography covers the Black Death as traditionally defined (the plague pandemic that struck western Eurasia and North Africa between 1346 and 1353) but…[Read more]