Fungal Disease in Britain and the United States 1850-2000

This book is open access under a CC BY license. The narrative of 20th-century medicine is the conquering of acute infectious diseases and the rise in chronic, degenerative diseases. The history of fungal infections does not fit this picture. This book charts the path of fungal infections from the mid 19th century to the dawn of the 21st century.

“Fungal Disease is a significant introduction to the history of medical mycology with a variety of case studies in two nations. The authors provide strong arguments for the necessity of including fungal diseases within the wider historiography of medicine.” (Rosemary Wall, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 90 (4), 2016)“Homei and Worboys have used the history of fungal disease to cleverly extend this dynamic to the social level, examining the conditions that have promoted the apparent emergence of fungal diseases … . With respect to specialisation, the authors nicely problematise expected natural histories of inevitable differentiation and specialisation. … we should be grateful to the manner in which the authors have turned our attention to these microbes and diseases all around us.” (Scott H. Podolsky, Medical History, Vol. 59 (3), 2015)

Aya Homei is a Wellcome Trust Fellow at the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester, UK. She is currently working on a new book, Family Planning, Health Promotion and Global Medicine, 1945-1995: The Activities of Japanese Health Campaigners around the World (forthcoming).Michael Worboys is Director of the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, UK. He works on the history of infectious diseases and has recently published, with Neil Pemberton, Rabies in Britain: Dogs, Disease and Culture, 1830-2000 (Palgrave 2012).