Boyarkina S.I. (2020) Social structuring of epidemic (un) well-being in the history of Western European societies of the XIV - XX centuries. Medical Anthropology and Bioethics, 2 (20).

Текст статьи на сайте журнала URL: http://www.medanthro.ru/?page_id=4975 (дата обращения 15.02.2021)

Abstract

An interdisciplinary study is devoted to investigating the maintaining epidemic threats in European countries. Historical analysis of epidemics that caused the mass death of Europeans from the period of centralized states formation in the late Middle Ages to the period of epidemic well-being growth, which began from the end of the nineteenth century, allows us to analyze the factors of their emergence and spreading, the preceding and subsequent social changes, and formulate assumptions about the reasons for maintaining the risks of epidemic disasters in modern developed countries. As a result of the study, it was revealed that social evolution was accompanied by changing the epidemic trends, the dynamic of which was determined by the social and structural-institutional changes that took place. Political and economic processes, influencing all spheres of society, predetermined the most epidemically significant events of public life: the regulation of migration and urbanization, the development of the sanitary and communal and material environment, social institutions responsible for the formation of accessible channels of status mobility, social protection and health protection, changing individual patterns of attitude to health and health-related practices. At the same time, as the history of European societies shows, these factors are not able to completely exclude epidemics from the societies’ life; becoming a moderator of epidemic processes, they predispose to the disappearance of some and the emergence of other infectious agents, correct the evolutionary paths of pathogens development that become increasingly adapted to living in the people’s world. The emergence of infectious agents adapted to the anthropogenic influences creates the prerequisites for uncontrolled epidemic outbreaks, which, in the context of the social relations globalization and spreading the effects of intra-country social determinants of epidemics far beyond their borders, leads to the formation of a global socio-epidemic threats network endangering the world community well-being.