How do people cope on a day-to-day basis with experiences of infectious diseases?

In this episode of Body Politics, we answer this question with the help of Dr Georgia McWhinney, an historian at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Dr McWhinney is an historian of the First World War (1914-1918), the conflict that defined politics and society for much of the twentieth-century. Her work recovers the strategies that the conflict's soldiers came up with to, if not cure, then contend with debilitating diseases - like typhus and trench foot - that plagued as many as 95% of them as they sat in mud-filled, rat-infested trenches, waiting to face their enemies.

This 'vernacular medicine' as she calls it represented ordinary people living with disease during one of modern history's most chaotic, destructive moments, and the ways in which they attempted to cope with the environment in which they found themselves.