Contagion: Perspectives from Pre-Modern Societies PDF
Preview Contagion: Perspectives from Pre-Modern Societies
R o u t le d g (cid:90)(cid:90)(cid:90)(cid:17)(cid:85)(cid:82)(cid:88)(cid:87)(cid:79)(cid:72)(cid:71)(cid:74)(cid:72)(cid:17)(cid:70)(cid:82)(cid:80) e Contagion Contagion Perspectives from Pre-Modern Societies Edited by Lawrence I. Conrad and Dominik Wujastyk First published 2000 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA , Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group an informa business Copyright © The editors and authors, 2000 The authors have asserted their moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Contagion: Perspectives from Pre-Modern Societies. 1. Communicable diseases-History. 2. Communicable diseases-Social aspects-History. 3. Medicine, Ancient. I. Conrad, Lawrence I., 1949- II. Wujastyk, Dominik. 306. 4’ 61’ 0901 US Library of Congress Control Number: 00-104025 Designed and typset with Tj3C at the Wellcome Institute for this History of Medicine. ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-0258-3 (hbk) Contents Preface vii Introduction ix I CHINA 1 1 Epidemics, Weather, and Contagion in Traditional Chinese Medicine Shigehisa Kuriyama 3 2 Dispersing the Foetal Toxin of the Body: Conceptions of Smallpox Aetiology in Pre-modern China Chia-Feng Chang 23 3 The Threatening Stranger: Kewu in Pre-Modern Chinese Paediatrics Christopher Cullen 39 II INDIA 53 4 Notions of “Contagion” in Classical Indian Medical Texts Rahul Peter Das 35 5 Does Ancient Indian Medicine Have a Theory of Contagion? Kenneth G. Zysk 79 v VI III MIDDLE EAST and EUROPE 97 6 Old Testament “Leprosy”, Contagion and Sin Elinor Lieber 99 7 Did the Greeks Have a Word for It? Vivian Nutton 137 8 A Ninth-Century Muslim Scholars Discussion of Contagion Lawrence I. Conrad 163 9 Contagion and Leprosy: Myth, Ideas and Evolution in Medieval Minds and Societies Fran^ois-Olivier Touati 179 Contributors 203 Index 205 Prefa ce The papers in this volume were originally presented at a conference on con tagion in pre-modern societies held at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in 1993. Since then, the papers have been substantially revised for publication. A goal of that conference was to explore a key concept in medical history across the boundaries not only of time, but also of culture and language. This goal remains central to the present volume. Historians are, by definition, professionally concerned with negotiating the pathways of past time, to which medical historians must add a specifically medical insight. But all too often the apparent otherness of cultural and linguistic difference presents a barrier which is not negotiated, and many histories claiming gen erality in reality focus on small, bounded parts of the “western” world, and exclude relevant data which happens to be recorded in non-European lan guages. It is therefore a source of special satisfaction to be able to present this volume, in which the history of an important medical concept is genuinely chased down in all parts of the globe, and through sources produced in many classical and modern languages from both East and West. This effort has in volved the collaboration of historians with exceptionally wide-ranging skills in languages and in cultural studies, and has been an enriching experience for all concerned with the preparation of this book. It is the pleasant duty of the editors to acknowledge the assistance of Mohsina Somji in preparing the typescript of this volume. We would also like to thank Barbara Hird, registered indexer of the Society of Indexers, for preparing the index with such care and precision. Vll Introduction ‘Contagion’ - even today the word conjures fears of serious disease, of un controllable outbreaks of drug-resistant bacteria, of viruses like Ebola and HIV. Older terrors such as malaria, cholera, and even tuberculosis, are still extremely dangerous and continue to kill people in large numbers. The pro gress of the biomedical sciences is shadowed by the parallel process of adapta tion and mutation amongst pathogens, so that the threat of new outbreaks of contagious disease remains a very present one. Popular treatments of conta gion in fiction, printed and film, today attract mass audiences, as they have at least since the fourteenth century, when Boccaccio framed his Decameron as tales told while in refuge from a devastating plague, which he did not hesitate to describe in gory detail. The idea of contagion clearly retains the power to fascinate and terrify. Contagious disease was an even greater threat to past generations of man kind all over the world. Diseases like bubonic plague, smallpox, syphilis, tuberculosis, cholera, and influenza, which are today preventable or treatable in varying degrees, killed adults and children in vast numbers. Although the biomedical sciences provide the dominant contemporary explanatory model for contagious disease, broadly speaking in terms of germ theory, there re mains a certain cognitive dissonance in the minds of many people outside the medical establishment. When AIDS first emerged as a global health prob lem, there was no shortage of irrational voices claiming that the disease was a punishment for an immoral lifestyle. In some ways this echoed the theolo gical debates which surrounded the discovery of smallpox vaccination at the end of the eighteenth century. At that time many opposed vaccination on the grounds that disease was a just punishment for sin. Today, popular beliefs about disease causation are by no means always closely aligned with the cur rent medical orthodoxy. In early 1999, Glen Hoddle, coach of the England football team, was widely vilified in the press, and subsequently obliged to resign, for publicly stating his belief that disease and disability were attribut- IX
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