1. Introduction Paul Slack; 2. Epidemic, ideas and classical Athenian society James Longrigg; 3. Disease, dragons and saints: the management of epidemics in the Dark Ages Peregrine Horden; 4. Epidemic disease in formal and popular thought in early Islamic Society Lawrence I. Conrad; 5. Plague and perceptions of the poor in early modern Italy Brian Pullan; 6. Dearth, dirt and fever epidemics: rewriting the history of British 'public health', 1780–1850 John V. Pickstone; 7. Epidemics and revolutions: cholera in nineteenth-century Europe Richard J. Evans; 8. Hawaiian depopulation as a model for the Amerindian experience A. W. Crosby; 9. Plague panic and epidemic politics in India, 1896–1914 Rajnarayan Chandavarkar; 10. Plagues of beasts and men; prophetic responses to epidemic in eastern and southern Africa Terence Ranger; 11. Syphilis in colonial East and Central Africa: the social construction of an epidemic Megan Vaughan; 12. The early years of AIDS in the United Kingdom 1981–6: historical perspectives Virginia Berridge; Index.