Ebook: Interdisciplinary Public Health Reasoning and Epidemic Modelling: The Case of Black Death

If you want to achieve something, if you want to write a book, paint a picture, be sure the center of your existence is somewhere else and that it’s solidly grounded; only then will you be able to keep your cool and laugh at the attacks that are bound to come. ” P. Feyerabend This is a book about interdisciplinary public health reasoning and epidemic m- th elling, in general, and the study of the infamous 14 century AD Black Death d- aster, in particular. We focus on the intellectual context in which epidemic mod- ling takes place, in a way that accounts for the present-day interdisciplinary and multicultural trends in scientific inquiry. Like most scientific fields, public health research defines itself based on knowledge, which raises serious epistemic and cognitive issues. Therefore, we maintain that for public health modellers to fu- tion in an often complex environment, they should be aware of the divergent c- ceptions of knowledge and the technological changes that these imply, the mul- ple sources of information commonly available and their reliability, the different styles of thinking adopted by the disciplines involved, and the importance of - veloping sound interdisciplinary knowledge integration skills.

This book introduces a novel synthetic paradigm of public health reasoning and epidemic modelling, and then implements it in the study of the infamous 14^th century AD Black Death disaster that killed at least one-fourth of the European population.

The book includes the most complete collection of interdisciplinary information sources available about the Black Death epidemic, each one systematically documented, tabulated, and analyzed. It also presents, for the first time, a series of detailed space-time maps of Black Death mortality, infected area propagation, and epidemic centroid paths throughout the 14^th century AD Europe. Preparation of the maps took into account the uncertain nature of the data and integrated a variety of interdisciplinary knowledge bases about the devastating epidemic. These maps provide researchers and the interested public with an informative and substantive description of the Black Death dynamics (temporal evolution, local and global geographical patterns, etc.), and can help one discover an underlying coherence in disease distribution that was buried within reams of contemporary evidence that had so far defied quantitative understanding. The book carefully analyzes the findings of synthetic space-time modelling that enlighten considerably the long-lasting controversy about the nature and origins of the Black Death epidemic. Comparisons are made between the spatiotemporal characteristics of Black Death and bubonic plague, thus contributing to the debate concerning the Black Death etiology. Since Black Death had grave societal, public health, and financial effects, its rigorous study can offer valuable insight into these effects, as well as into similar effects that could result from potential contemporary epidemics.