Writings from various time periods that explore instances of mass illness--and the human response. These sources include biblical and poetic accounts of divinely-sent plagues and rituals of religious expiation, classical and early medieval descriptions of historical plagues, and stylized, allegorical representations of plagues in literature. These readings offer rich, diachronic perspectives on epidemic illnesses, a problem which was particularly vexing in the ancient world, and which is scantily addressed in the Hippocratic Corpus.
