The monograph ('Epidemics and Healthcare: a Historical Perspective') examines epidemics and infectious diseases, health crises and the development of healthcare between the Middle Ages and the 20th century in the area of present-day Slovenia and parts of Croatia from various perspectives. The texts collected in the book re-evaluate the current understanding of epidemics in Slovenian historiography, complement and improve the knowledge of the topics from the perspective of the social history of medicine, and some of them, as a result of completely new insights and approaches, establish new starting points for future historical research on epidemics and healthcare.

In thirteen chapters, historians and an art historian present newly researched topics such as plague epidemics in 17th-century Carniola and Styria, plague paintings in medieval mural painting in Slovenia, environmental-historical perspectives on the cordon sanitaire in the Military Frontier, the situation of the elderly during the cholera epidemics of the 19th century, and the spread of malaria between the two world wars. Several chapters present the health situation during the wars, namely during the First World War among refugees in Austria-Hungary and in the city of Ljubljana, old-age debility as a cause of death in Pula between 1910 and 1915, and the organisation of partisan healthcare, with an emphasis on the Slovenian Central Military Partisan Hospital during the WWII. Last but not least, illness and the body as metaphor are discussed in the chapter on the pre-modern political thought of the early 18th-century Carniola nobleman Franz Albert Pelzhoffer.