Author: Mark Nathan Cohen Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 9780300050233 Category : Medical Languages : en Pages : 300
Book Description
Civilized nations popularly assume that "primitive" societies are poor, ill, and malnourished and that progress through civilization automatically implies improved health. In this provocative new book, Mark Nathan Cohen challenges this belief. Using evidence from epidemiology, anthropology, and archaeology, Cohen provides fascinating evidence about the actual effects of civilization on health, suggesting that some aspects of civilization create as many health problems as they prevent or cure. " This book] is certain to become a classic-a prominent and respected source on this subject for years into the future. . . . If you want to read something that will make you think, reflect and reconsider, Cohen's Health and the Rise of Civilization is for you."-S. Boyd Eaton, Los Angeles Times Book Review "A major accomplishment. Cohen is a broad and original thinker who states his views in direct and accessible prose. . . . This is a book that should be read by everyone interested in disease, civilization, and the human condition."-David Courtwright, Journal of the History of Medicine "Deserves to be read by anthropologists concerned with health, medical personnel responsible for communities, and any medical anthropologists whose minds are not too case-hardened. Indeed, it could provide great profit and entertainment to the general reader."-George T. Nurse, Current Anthropology "Cohen has done his homework extraordinarily well, and the coverage of the biomedical, nutritional, demographic, and ethnographic literature about foragers and low energy agriculturists is excellent. The subject of culture and health is near the core of a lot of areas of archaeology and ethnology as well as demography, development economics, and so on. The book deserves a wide readership and a central place in our professional libraries. As a scholarly summary it is without parallel."-Henry Harpending, American Ethnologist
Author: Dorothy Porter Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1134637187 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 384
Book Description
This book examines the social, economic and political issues of public health provision in historical perspective. It outlines the development of public health in Britain, Continental Europe and the United States from the ancient world through to the modern state. It includes discussion of: * pestilence, public order and morality in pre-modern times * the Enlightenment and its effects * centralization in Victorian Britain * localization of health care in the United States * population issues and family welfare * the rise of the classic welfare state * attitudes towards public health into the twenty-first century.
Author: John Farndon Publisher: Hungry Tomato ® ISBN: 1541518802 Category : Juvenile Nonfiction Languages : en Pages : 35
Book Description
Take an enthralling journey from the Stone Age onward, and see how our ancestors became great builders and rulers. They grew food, discovered metals, made tools, and invented writing. You will see a mighty civilization in Egypt, wise Chinese philosophy, Maya culture in Central America, the colossal Roman Empire, and much more. Illustrated maps let you compare what is happening across the globe at various moments in time. While the Santorini volcano was wiping out the Minoan civilization, flushing toilets were being invented in the Indus Valley (Pakistan). The Greeks held the earliest Olympic Games while the Zapotec built pyramids in Mexico. Find out where it all started!
Author: David R. Montgomery Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520933168 Category : Nature Languages : en Pages : 299
Book Description
Dirt, soil, call it what you want—it's everywhere we go. It is the root of our existence, supporting our feet, our farms, our cities. This fascinating yet disquieting book finds, however, that we are running out of dirt, and it's no laughing matter. An engaging natural and cultural history of soil that sweeps from ancient civilizations to modern times, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations explores the compelling idea that we are—and have long been—using up Earth's soil. Once bare of protective vegetation and exposed to wind and rain, cultivated soils erode bit by bit, slowly enough to be ignored in a single lifetime but fast enough over centuries to limit the lifespan of civilizations. A rich mix of history, archaeology and geology, Dirt traces the role of soil use and abuse in the history of Mesopotamia, Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, China, European colonialism, Central America, and the American push westward. We see how soil has shaped us and we have shaped soil—as society after society has risen, prospered, and plowed through a natural endowment of fertile dirt. David R. Montgomery sees in the recent rise of organic and no-till farming the hope for a new agricultural revolution that might help us avoid the fate of previous civilizations.
Author: Adrienne Rose Bitar Publisher: Rutgers University Press ISBN: 0813589665 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 315
Book Description
Diet books contribute to a $60-billion industry as they speak to the 45 million Americans who diet every year. Yet these books don’t just tell readers what to eat: they offer complete philosophies about who Americans are and how we should live. Diet and the Disease of Civilization interrupts the predictable debate about eating right to ask a hard question: what if it’s not calories—but concepts—that should be counted? Cultural critic Adrienne Rose Bitar reveals how four popular diets retell the “Fall of Man” as the narrative backbone for our national consciousness. Intensifying the moral panic of the obesity epidemic, they depict civilization itself as a disease and offer diet as the one true cure. Bitar reads each diet—the Paleo Diet, the Garden of Eden Diet, the Pacific Island Diet, the detoxification or detox diet—as both myth and manual, a story with side effects shaping social movements, driving industry, and constructing fundamental ideas about sickness and health. Diet and the Disease of Civilization unearths the ways in which diet books are actually utopian manifestos not just for better bodies, but also for a healthier society and a more perfect world.
Author: David Oates Publisher: [Oxford] : Elsevier Phaidon ISBN: Category : History Languages : en Pages : 166
Book Description
Joan Oates - along with her late husband, David - first revived excavations at Tell Brak in northern Syria in the 1970s. Those excavations showed signs that civilizations existed in Syria 6,000 years ago, challenging long-held beliefs and changing the current theoretical framework about Earth's first societies.
Author: Mayson Kirby Publisher: Scientific e-Resources ISBN: 1839472774 Category : Languages : en Pages : 328
Book Description
The History of Civilizations traces the history of man in this vast region from the Palaeolithic beginnings to circa 700 B.C. when the foundations for the formation of the great Empire were laid. Many different elements must come together before a human community develops to the level of sophistication commonly referred to as civilization. The first is the existence of settlements classifiable as towns or cities. This requires food production to be efficient enough for a large minority of the community to be engaged in more specialized activities-such as the creation of imposing buildings or works of art, the practice of skilled warfare, and above all the administration of a centralized bureaucracy capable of running the machinery of state. Despite the major role played by Central Asia in shaping the history of the past and of today, this vast region, stretching from the Caspian Sea to Mongolia and western China, had not been studied as a whole cultural entity in time and space. This multi-volume History of Civilizations of Central Asia, published in English, is the first attempt to present a comprehensive picture of the cultures that flourished and vanished at the heart of the Eurasian continent from the dawn of civilization to the present day. The book is an engaging and thought-provoking philosophical account that demonstrates that critical inquiry is an ongoing process with strains of continuity and evolution of Civilizations.
Author: W. F. Bynum Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1136110364 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 1833
Book Description
This is a comprehensive work of reference which covers all aspects of medical history and reflects the complementary approaches to the discipline. 72 essays are written by internationally respected scholars from many different areas of expertise.
Author: Carl Johan Calleman Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1591432421 Category : Body, Mind & Spirit Languages : en Pages : 430
Book Description
How the global mind drives the evolution of both consciousness and civilization • Explains how our brains receive consciousness from the global mind, which upgrades human consciousness according to a pre-set divine time frame • Reveals how the Mayan Calendar provides a blueprint for these consciousness downloads throughout history • Examines the mind shift in humans and the development of pyramids and civilization in ancient Egypt, Sumer, South America, and Asia beginning in 3115 BCE In each culture the origins of civilization can be tied to the arising of one concept in the human mind: straight lines. Straight and perpendicular lines are not found in nature, so where did they come from? What shift in consciousness occurred around the globe that triggered the start of rectangular building methods and linear organization as well as written language, pyramid construction, mathematics, and art? Offering a detailed answer to this question, Carl Calleman explores the quantum evolution of the global mind and its holographic resonance with the human mind. He examines how our brains are not thinking machines but individual receivers of consciousness from the global mind, which creates holographic downloads to adjust human consciousness to new cosmological circumstances. He explains how the Mayan Calendar provides a blueprint for these downloads throughout history and how the global mind, rather than the individual, has the power to make civilizations rise and fall. He shows how, at the beginning of the Mayan 6th Wave (Long Count) in 3115 BCE, the global mind gave human beings the capacity to conceptualize spatial relations in terms of straight and perpendicular lines, initiating the building of pyramids and megaliths around the world and leading to the rise of modern civilization. He examines the symbolism within the Great Pyramid of Giza and the pyramid at Chichén Itzá and looks at the differences between humans of the 6th Wave in ancient Egypt, Sumer, South America, and Asia and the cave painters of the 5th Wave. He reveals how the global mind is always connected to the inner core of the Earth and discusses how the two halves of the brain parallel the civilizations of the East and West. Outlining the historical, psychological, geophysical, and neurological roots of the modern human mind, Calleman shows how studying early civilizations offers a means of understanding the evolution of consciousness.
Author: Mark Nathan Cohen
Author: Dorothy Porter
Author: John Farndon
Author: David R. Montgomery
Author: Adrienne Rose Bitar
Author: David Oates
Author: 
Author: Mayson Kirby
Author: W. F. Bynum
Author: Carl Johan Calleman