Public Health in Crisis

Epidemics and pandemics undermine societies and highlight the vulnerability of relations people have created to the land, other species, and each other. This book presents fragments of disease management in the Mediterranean from the 15th-century onwards and in the Aegean Archipelago in the last two centuries. From religious to medical approaches to the Bubonic Plague, through the creation of lazarettos, to the famine in occupied Syros, to ghost ships drifting on the Mediterranean: citizens are forced to avoid citizens. Public health in crisis: confinement versus mobility, awakening memories of totalitarian regimes.

96 pages, 102 x 162 mm
illustrations color and b/w
language English
1st print fall 2020
2nd print fall 2021
3rd print spring 2024
contents
Impending Arrivals
by Dimitra Kondylatou & David Bergé
Cruises to Nowhere
Covid-19 stricken Ships
Ghost Ships drifting on the Mediterranean

Suspended Arrivals
by Dimitra Kondylatou & David Bergé
Le Corbusier Confined
Venice, Lazaretto and Black Death

Confined Spaces by Dimitra Kondylatou
Religious versus Medical Approaches to the Plague
Public Health and Public Order
Architectures of Control
The Lazaretto at Syros

Confinement and Totalitarianism, Famine in Occupied Syros
by Nicolas Lakiotakis

Panic Room. Waiting Room. Island.
by Hülya Ertas

edited by
Dimitra Kondylatou
David Bergé

Supported by excellent images, this volume oscillates between modern and ancient history in its demonstration of epidemics’ cyclical nature.
It lays bare the fragility of human life and futile claims of progress and modernity: the scientific and industrial world we live in will not, and cannot, save us.
— Charlotte Malterre-Barthes in The Avery Review, 2021

The production of the first print of this book was supported by Goethe-Institut Athen.