We couldn’t do the research we do without the input, collaboration, and past work of others. This page provides a Bibliography that we regularly update with key readings for the history of preindustrial public health. Other Other Resources include adjacent projects, research groups and networks, and email lists that we highly recommend you keep a pulse on. Their focus is wide, ranging from Health Humanities more broadly, to highly specific and time-sensitive research projects like ours. Please enjoy.
A Bibliography of the History of Public Health in Pre-Industrial Societies
This is a list of secondary sources with direct bearing on the history of public health before c. 1750. It is predominantly European and Mediterranean, although we are gradually expanding the geographical coverage of studies concerning population-level, preventative interventions in pre-modernity. Wherever possible, we added links to works that are freely and fully available online, that is, they neither hide behind pay walls nor require membership or any other form of (pre)registration to be accessed.
Our bibliography is open to crowdsourced input. You can have access to the dynamically updateable bibliography here. All users have commenting privileges – please make additions or comments as you see fit.
Other Resources
AncientBiotics
Guardian article on the work of AncientBiotics here.
Australasian Health & Medical Humanities Network
A network of humanities scholars concerned with the social and cultural aspects of health and medicine.
EpiMedDat
An emerging wiki-based project for understanding the complexity of epidemics 1100-1500, based on literary sources. It already has and will continue to have great use for enriching public health history.
Historien.ne.s de la santé
Health Historian gathers information about the history of medicine and medical science, the history of health practices and the history of the body to provide researchers with unique access to works, projects and achievements in the field of the history of medicine and health.
Geographies of Health Reading Group
In the Geographies of Health Reading Group addresses a wide variety of topics concerning health and wellbeing. Specific attention is paid to the relation between health and place.
Medica
Medica: The Society for the Study of Healing in the Middle Ages.
The Medieval Medicine Email List
A forum for scholars of medicine in the medieval period: medmed@mlist.is.ed.ac.uk (send an email to register). Run by the University of Edinburgh.
Medieval Urban Health- From Individual to Public Responsibility, AD 1000-1600
This project seeks to generate new empirical knowledge and methods essential to understanding how and why health and sickness developed from an individual concern to public responsibility.
