Epidemics and Social History*

IN recent years the study of the development of English society has shown a shift of emphasis away from political and even economic problems towards those of a social and demographic nature. This shift of interest means that there is now being written more academic history which is of direct concern to the medical historian than ever before. Unfortunately medical historians themselves often seem unaware of much of the work that is being done and certainly have played but little part in this process of change. The history of disease, however, is so important in the study of the history of society that it cannot be ignored, and consequently workers in other fields have begun to look at medical history. Mr. Razzell, for example, recently attempted to revise the history of inoculation and vaccination, and his essay did not meet with much approval in the discussion that followed in this journal.1 That repudiation of his medical ideas, however, does not necessarily invalidate other parts of his main thesis on population growth which appeared elsewhere,2 although it does illustrate how difficult it is for one person to handle material from such different fields. One is thus reminded of a plea made more than ten years ago for co-operation between students of society and those of medicine,3 and it is, therefore, an encouraging sign to see that an historical demographer and a medical historian have recently joined forces to bring out a reprint of Charles Creighton's A History of Epidemics in Britain. It must be rare for an historical work published seventy years ago to be of sufficient value to warrant a complete and unaltered reprint, and it is even more unusual that such a reprint should be of a work dealing with problems of epidemiology that had hardly been studied scientifically at the time of original publication. For the truth is that Creighton, who was born one hundred and twenty years ago, never came to believe in the modern germ-theory of disease and his explanations of the causes of the epidemics in British history are almost without exception wrong! The editors nevertheless have no doubts that this reprint is justified. In the first place it has always been acknowledged that this was a work of a scope that has hardly been rivalled, and the amount of labour involved was such that no one else has attempted to write a history of British epidemics more in line with modem medical thought. There have admittedly been attempts to apply modern medical klowledge to the history of