Abstract
Fungal infections or mycoses are the great neglected diseases of medical history.1 There are numerous histories of viral, bacterial and protozoan infections, for all times and all places, but very few studies of those caused by fungi. Why? It cannot be because of prevalence. Historical sources and contemporary epidemiological investigations show that fungal infections were and are ubiquitous in human and animal populations. Everyone in Britain and the United States in the last half a century would have heard of, if not suffered from, athlete’s foot or thrush. In the first half of the twentieth century, children feared the school nurse finding ringworm on their scalp and having to endure, not only the pains of X-ray depilation or having their shaven head painted with gentian violet, but also exclusion from school and the shame of being stigmatised as ‘unclean’.2
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Homei, A., Worboys, M. (2013). Introduction. In: Fungal Disease in Britain and the United States 1850–2000. Science, Technology and Medicine in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137377029_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137377029_1
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