Events at Stanford
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22:48 Jan 13, 2022
Date: Thursday, January 20, 2022. 4:30 PM. Location: zoom "A 700-Year Erasure: Recovering the Story of Plague at the Fall of Baghdad (1258)" How can a pandemic be "lost"? In the midst of our own modern pandemic, the idea that a pandemic could be invisible to contemporaries, or lost to the historical record seems hard to fathom. Yet the field of History of Medicine is only now wrestling with how much remains unknown about the histories of infectious diseases. The new field of palaeogenetics is transforming our ability to investigate the past at a molecular level. Findings in the field of plague studies have been particularly spectacular. But this work by scientists also forces historians to return to their documentary record to see why they had missed stories that now seem so obvious. The story of the role of plague in the Mongol conquest of Baghdad was retrieved not by geneticists, but by historians. Yet the reasons the story was lost in the first place offer an opportunity for historians to reflect on how w...