Global History of Health

Through this assignment, you will become familiar with primary sources and how to critically assess them to draw conclusions about disease in the global history of humankind. Original historical documents serve as a key source of information for understanding health in the past. To make inferences about the past from these documents, research must carefully analyze, compare, and contrast different types of sources. In this assignment, you will pretend to be a historian hired by a university research team to investigate historical primary sources related to a specific infectious disease as part of an international collaborative project focused on the global history of infectious disease.
Choose one of the following infectious diseases listed below:
-Leprosy
-Malaria
-Smallpox
-Syphilis (also called ‘yaws’ or ‘treponematosis’)
-Tuberculosis (also called ‘consumption’)
-Yellow fever (also called ‘yellow jack’ or ‘yellow plague’)

Use the World Digital Library https://www.wdl.org/en/ to search for three primary source documents that mention the disease you chose in Step 3. Find passages of text that provide historical information about the disease. Look specifically for excerpts that describe beliefs about the disease, descriptions of the effects of the disease, and/or response to and treatments for the disease.