Mortality

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The following is Carol Blue’s afterword to her husband Christopher Hitchens’ book Mortality, out in September from Twelve. Entire families, in fact, perished. It’s like you have your neighbours now in the street or subdivision where you live and then after the pandemic several houses in your neighbourhood would become empty, all their previous dwellers having been taken to the hospital, then to the morgue for cremation. One chronicler had written about having buried his wife and their five children, all victims of the plague, with his own hands (it is not clear if he also died afterwards). The Great Plague is one of the most compelling events in human history, even more so now, when the notion of plague—be it animal or human—has never loomed larger as a contemporary public concern The day I found out that Christopher Hitchens had died was the day I felt as if someone from my own family had perished.

Mortality - StatPearls - NCBI Epidemiology Morbidity And Mortality - StatPearls - NCBI

Far more seriously, The Great Mortality spends a good amount of time on the rise of anti-Semitism that followed the path of the plague. Pegged as scapegoats, pogroms broke out all over Europe, leading to the expulsion or murder of countless Jews. As Kelly points out, these pogroms were unrivaled until the 1930s.

StatPearls [Internet].

From an etymological perspective, the word “epidemiology” can be divided into the Greek roots “epi,”“demos,” and “logos,” which respectively mean “upon,”“people,” and “the study of.”Historically, epidemiology has focused on population-level factors regarding communicable infectious diseases, but it has evolved to include non-communicable infectious diseases, chronic diseases, infant health, and environmental and behavioral health.Today, it is a wide-encapsulating umbrella thatencompassesany health-related issues that may influence the overall health of a population, such as environmental exposures, injuries, natural disasters, and terrorism, to name a few. It is a multifaceted branch of medicine,fundamentally guided by systematic scientific inquiry via ratios, probabilities, and other statistical calculations, focusing on the incidence, distribution, and factors concerning diseases and health outcomes within a specific population.

Mortality - Cambridge Scholars Publishing Malady and Mortality - Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Sunspots are over-implicated in scientific literature as the cause of decadally repeating phenomena. He should have included that caveat when invoking sunspots. A book on the dark subject of death that lightens the load with straight shots of clarity, honesty, and a form of wisdom. For those who loved the cultural critic Hitchens as a voice of truth that perfectly balanced logic and wit, fear not the potentials for emotional devastation in this discourse on his own process of death from esophageal cancer. It’s short enough to be read in one sitting and contains no self-pity. He gave me some courage about my own mortality. Hitchens is full frontal here, he is witty and he is honest and clever and his whole take on ‘living dyingly’ makes the journey more personal. He is a master at his craft, of including you in the story, you are not bored or even sympathetic in that false sense that you think you know what he is going through. He makes you laugh as he talks about reading reactions to his illness, how the zealots actually relish: For me, his humanistic writing outshines his reasoning, judging from his brief foray in this book into debate over religion and his argument that what doesn't kill you doesn't make you stronger. He ignored rather than integrated information or circumstances that didn't support his conclusions.After all, it combined two of my nerdiest obsessions: Late Middle Ages history and Y. pestis, my favorite bacteria. (I'm a microbiology nerd- and besides, everyone should have a favorite bacteria.) Though he gives it a lesser name, Hitchens appears to have been afflicted by PTSD after his investigation into waterboarding. "I have the ... right, if not duty, to be ... ashamed of the official policy of torture adoped by a government whose citizenship papers I had only recently taken out", he wisely concedes. His essay about what it means to a writer to lose his voice is included in this book. His malady was esophageal cancer. urn:lcp:mortality00hitc:epub:ef0b943b-140e-49a7-a8cb-bdf8eb5925ec Extramarc University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (PZ) Foldoutcount 0 Identifier mortality00hitc Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t4tj2kr9v Invoice 1315 Isbn 9781455502752 The plague that devastated Asia and Europe in the 14th century has been of never-ending interest to both scholarly and general readers. Many books on the plague rely on statistics to tell the story: how many people died; how farm output and trade declined. But statistics can’t convey what it was like to sit in Siena or Avignon and hear that a thousand people a day are dying two towns away. Or to have to chose between your own life and your duty to a mortally ill child or spouse. Or to live in a society where the bonds of blood and sentiment and law have lost all meaning, where anyone can murder or rape or plunder anyone else without fear of consequence.

Immortality Key, The: The Secret History of the Religion with Immortality Key, The: The Secret History of the Religion with

Claim that Y. pestis can elude human and flea antigens. First, I think he means antibodies (the bacterial material constitutes the antigens in this scenario), however, it is just possibly a reference to human leucocyte antigen proteins (which are also not antigens in this scenario--to my limited understanding, they function to present foreign antigens to the immune system), in which case, he should have specified HLA proteins. (For the human case. Not sure what the fleas have in this department.) Either way, how is this "evasion" accomplished? A detailed technical description isn't needed, but it is a big claim and he should have dropped a specific citation. Once you've read this book, you'll be glad you didn't live in the period 1347 - 1450 when the population of Europe probably halved as did China's during a similar period. Florence in Italy had 120,000 citizens in 1330 but only 37,000 in 1450. Christopher Eric Hitchens was an English-born American author, journalist, and literary critic. He was a contributor to Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, World Affairs, The Nation, Slate, Free Inquiry and a variety of other media outlets. Hitchens was also a political observer, whose best-selling books — the most famous being God Is Not Great — made him a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits. He was also a media fellow at the Hoover Institution. Ch. 2: Lady Margaret Bellenden has difficulty in finding enough willing servants to fulfil her obligation to send a prescribed number to the wappen-schaw (muster). This account got me to thinking again if I would submit to chemo and radiation in this situation, given the kind of harm those treatments do and the additional suffering they inflict.As promised on the cover, the focus is on the people dealing with this unprecedented catastrophe. Utilizing extant records, Kelly will start at a location, such as Messina or Genoa, and follow an individual or two as they deal with the outbreak. Providing effective, sometimes gripping mini-arcs, Kelly’s approach does a fine job of establishing the enormity of the disaster by homing in on the specifics. I realize that these may seem like small complaints, but I have high expectations for a nonfiction book. I have a hard time with it because I went to this book to learn, and I have difficulty trusting an author's research and expertise on a topic when he cannot bother to understand the meaning of the word "literally".