episode-header-image

Oct 2021

58m 53s

Plagues of our past

IMMEDIATE MEDIA

About this episode

From when our ancestors first mastered fire to the rise of modern cities, humanity’s progress has been accompanied by a revolving door of parasites, bacteria and viruses, wreaking havoc on our health. Kyle Harper, author of Plagues Upon the Earth, discusses the sprawling history of infectious disease.

(Ad) Kyle Harper is the author of Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History (Princeton, 2021). Buy it now from Amazon:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Plagues-upon-Earth-Princeton-Economic/dp/069119212X/?tag=radtim01-21&ascsubtag=radiotimes-social-viewingguide

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Up next

How Julius Caesar's funeral drama fuelled the mob

The assassination ofJulius Caesar is one of the most infamous plots of the ancient world, but the dictator's death wasn't the only moment in his life and afterlife marked by political machinations. Speaking to Emily Briffett, Jessica Clarke reveals how careful curation and stage ... Show More

The dark side of Samuel Pepys

Samuel Pepys is well-known for his brilliantly evocative diary, which gives an unsurpassed insight into daily life in Restoration London. However, it turns out Pepys also had a sinister side. Something that has been overlooked or ignored in his diaries for centuries, is that Pepy ... Show More

Margaret Tudor: life of the week

Margaret Tudor was the daughter of a king, the sister of a king, and the wife of a king. But she was a political power player in her own right, carefully balancing family loyalties to both the crown of England and the crown of Scotland. She also left an extraordinary legacy of co ... Show More

Recommended Episodes

From a plague in Athens during the Peloponnesian War in 430 BCE, to another in 540 that wiped out half the population of the Roman empire, down through the Black Death in the Middle Ages and on through the 1918 flu epidemic (which killed between 50 and 100 million people) and thi ... Show More

How to Survive Plague and War in the Middle Ages

Throughout history, there have been plenty of hugely destructive, catastrophic moments. And yet somehow the human race managed to live on until today. So how did people in the Medieval period find ways to survive, for example, a siege of their city, or a natural disaster, or plag ... Show More

From Acts of Parliament to unethical clinical studies to legendary symphonies (possibly) - syphilis has stained many different areas of history.To find out what this disease is, what it does to the body and how treatments of it and the people who have it have changed, Kate spoke ... Show More

146. Disease vs. the rise of civilisation

The way we die has been utterly transformed. There have been around 10,000 generations of human beings, but only in the last 3 or 4 have infectious diseases not been an expected and accepted cause of death. What drove the most deadly infectious diseases? Was technological progres ... Show More

The Eradication of Diseases

Subscribe to the podcast! https://podfollow.com/everythingeverywhere/ The largest single killer of human beings throughout history has been disease. With the advent of modern medicine and the understanding of how bacteria, viruses, and parasites work, we’ve made enormous strides ... Show More

Introducing Tides of History

History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme, said Mark Twain. From the fall of the Roman Empire to the rise of the modern world: history ebbs and flows over the centuries, driven by great tides of economic, social, political, religious, and cultural change that shape the wo ... Show More

Bone, Stone, and Genome: Understanding Humanity's Deep Past

Welcome to a new season of Tides of History! Over the next year, we'll be traveling from the very origins of our species through the peopling of the planet, the Ice Age, and then to the beginnings of agriculture, cities, metalworking, and states. Today, we cover our deepest past, ... Show More

Listen to millions of songs and podcasts on Anghami