Justus Friedrich Carl Hecker was a German physician and medical writer, whose research focused on the history of epidemics, in a broad sense of the term that included pandemics like the Black Death as well as the group of social phenomena known as dancing mania. The Epidemics of the Middle Ages comprises three of his works -- The Black Death, The Dancing Mania, and The Sweating Sickness -- translated by the English epidemiologist Benjamin Guy Babington. Despite what the name of the book may suggest, the events it describes are not limited to the Middle Ages...