Introduction

Not infrequently, disease has informed the trajectory of human history over the world. Epidemics have always struck terror in society and have left dramatic impact. Human society has always been overwhelmed by the devastating blow of bacteriological invasions all the way from Periclean Athens through Black Death in the fourteenth century in Europe to sub-Saharan Africa in the twentieth century. Diseases have indeed had such a compelling effect on the contemporary society that Western historiography in the past three decades has brought to bear the notion of ‘social construction’ of disease in its accounts and sought to explicate how people of the West understood, coped with, and tried to prevent various infectious diseases in their several ways.