Plagues in World History (Exploring World History)

257 Pages·2011·1.38 MB·English

by  John Aberth

Plagues in World History
Exploring World History
Series Editors
John McNeill, Georgetown University
Jerry Bentley, University of Hawai‘i
As the world grows ever more closely linked, students and general readers alike
are appreciating the need to become internationally aware. World history offers
the crucial connection to understanding past global links and how they influence
the present. The series will expand that awareness by offering clear, concise
supplemental texts for the undergraduate classroom as well as trade books that
advance world history scholarship.
The series will be open to books taking a thematic approach—exploring com-
modities such as sugar, cotton, and petroleum; technologies; diseases and the
like; or regional—for example, Islam in Southeast Asia or east Africa, the Indian
Ocean, or the Ottoman Empire. The series sees regions not simply as fixed geo-
graphical entities but also as evolving spatial frameworks that have reflected and
shaped the movement of people, ideas, goods, capital, institutions, and informa-
tion. Thus, regional books would move beyond traditional borders to consider
the flows that have characterized the global system.
Edited by two of the leading historians in the field, this series will work to syn-
thesize world history for students, engage general readers, and expand the
boundaries for scholars.
Plagues in World History
by John Aberth
Smuggling: Contraband and Corruption in World History
by Alan L. Karras
The First World War: A Concise Global History
by William Kelleher Storey
Insatiable Appetite: The United States and the Ecological
Degradation of the Tropical World
by Richard P. Tucker
Plagues in World History
John Aberth
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
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Copyright © 2011 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Aberth, John, 1963–
Plagues in world history / John Aberth.
p. cm. — (Exploring world history)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7425-5705-5 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4422-0796-7 (electronic)
1. Epidemics—History. 2. Communicable diseases—History. I. Title.
RA649.A24 2011
614.4—dc22 2010029028
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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
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Contents
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 Plague 19
Chapter 2 Smallpox 73
Chapter 3 Tuberculosis 89
Chapter 4 Cholera 101
Chapter 5 Influenza 111
Chapter 6 AIDS 135
Conclusion 179
Notes 185
Bibliography 215
Index 233
About the Author 244
v

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Introduction
Why study disease? It’s not a very pleasant subject to contemplate. The pages of its
history are full of suffering and death. Its comings and goings often seem arbitrary
and simply inexplicable, the bane of most historians. There is no happy ending.
And yet . . . there is something about plagues that fascinates. For those with
morbid minds, the spectacle of mass death is mesmerizing in its capacity to inspire
fear, panic, viciousness, and cruelty. But for those of us who hold out some hope
for humanity, there is also to be found—even in a time of plague—kindness,
generosity, courage, and heroism. Truly, an epidemic tempers a society, subjecting
it to trials either to which it must succumb or over which it must triumph. There
is no middle ground with plague. It is the litmus test of civilizations.
Obviously, for our purposes, plagues and disease will be used interchangeably.
Even though “plague” does refer to a specific disease,1 which will be a main focus
of this book, the origins of the term can be traced back to the Latin word plaga,
meaning a “blow” or “wound.”2 While in the classical context of the Latin lan-
guage plague might be associated with a misfortune or disaster of some kind, it
was not necessarily associated with disease; this only seems to have emerged dur-
ing the late Roman Empire, when the Church issued a definitive Latin “Vulgate”
edition of the Old and New Testaments, largely through the labors of St. Jerome,
by 405 C.E. In this new context, plague naturally came to mean a “blow” from
on high, such as when the Hebrew God struck down every firstborn male in
Egypt, as recounted in the Book of Exodus. But this idea, if not the term, for
plague was a common inheritance from the ancients, all of whom viewed disease
as naturally emanating from the gods. Like the Hebrews, the Greeks could
1
2 y Introduction
conceive of disease as a punishment or test for humans, with perhaps the most
famous example being Apollo using his silver bow to rain down plague upon the
Greeks, after Agamemnon had insulted his priest, Chryses, in the opening pages
of Homer’s epic poem The Iliad. But in older Egyptian and Mesopotamian cul-
tures, the reasons for the gods sending down disease could also be rather myste-
rious and unfathomable.
The history of disease, of course, is very old. It goes right back to the very begin-
nings of humanity, when men and women first became aware of the pain and
suffering caused by abnormal conditions, such as the invasion of their bodies by
other organisms. Ever since they evolved from apes, humans were infected by the
same diseases that afflicted their primate ancestors and that were caused by mi-
crobes that originated and adapted to their hosts millions of years ago. Some of
these “heirloom” infections include herpes, hepatitis, and yellow fever, all caused
by viruses, as well as malaria, caused by a plasmodium. Later, when humans be-
came hunters, other diseases passed to them from animals when they ate raw or
partially cooked meats. For instance, Paleolithic man may have suffered from a
variety of bacterial diseases, including anthrax, brucellosis, tularemia, and glanders,
as a result of the microbes being present in the wild game they hunted.3
However, the opportunities for disease causation and spread are thought to
have increased dramatically with the advent of settled agriculture at the dawn of
the Neolithic period in c. 8000 B.C.E. Maintaining close and regular contact
with domesticated animals, not to mention with other humans, as well as creating
stagnant reservoir pools such as irrigation ditches and accumulating large amounts
of human waste, perhaps within contaminating distance of drinking supplies,
opened a new chapter in the disease history of humankind by allowing illnesses
to become endemic, or perpetually present, in the artificial microbe pools thus
created. Chronic diseases that could thrive even in small populations and that
were associated with the new, man-made environments include tuberculosis,
schistosomiasis, and typhoid fever. However, some “density-dependent” diseases,
such as measles or smallpox, that may have originated in Neolithic man’s new-
found relationship with domesticated animals nonetheless had to wait until hu-
man populations became large enough to sustain them, which could not have
happened much before 3000 B.C.E. Other ills that are caused by dietary deficien-
cies also increased at this time, despite the fact that more and steadier supplies of
food were now available, since this was offset by a decline in the variety of foods
that had formerly been consumed under more nomadic circumstances.4
Eventually, trade, war, migrations, and other activities that brought distant hu-
man populations together were also to add to this disease environment, of which
illnesses like plague and influenza were to be the primary beneficiaries. Early hu-
mans also made efforts to counteract or compensate for disease-ridden conditions
Introduction y 3
by designing sewer systems, imposing unclean food taboos, or setting up social
barriers between disparate populations or “castes,” such as were distinctive features
of ancient civilizations in India and Palestine (Hebrew culture). Yet, such efforts
may have had mixed success. For example, the impressive sewer systems uncovered
in the urban environments of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, part of the Indus River
valley civilization in India dating to around 2600 B.C.E., even boasts individual
household latrines connecting to the underground drains. It would seem obvious
that this was part of an effort to contain waste contamination and protect freshwa-
ter drinking supplies, but one should not discount the possibility that it was
equally motivated by a desire to efficiently collect waste for use as fertilizer, in
which case the likelihood of contracting disease would only increase.5
Toward the end of the Neolithic period, we begin to accumulate other evi-
dence of the impact of disease upon human societies aside from the archaeo-
logical. Our most valuable sources now become the written records that first
make their appearance around 3000 B.C.E. Perhaps the earliest descriptions of
and references to disease can be found in ancient Mesopotamian literature. The
epic poem Gilgamesh, written down around 2000 B.C.E. but recounting events
that apparently occurred several centuries earlier, tells of how the hero’s friend,
Enkidu, contracts a debilitating illness that confines him to his bed for twelve
days until he dies. The identity of the disease that kills Enkidu is never made
clear, for its symptoms are not described; we know only that it causes Enkidu
great pain and that he ascribes it to the curse of the gods in retribution for slay-
ing the Bull of Heaven. However, further details as to what this illness may have
entailed are supplied by the “Poem of the Righteous Sufferer,” part of the Meso-
potamian wisdom literature dating to the Babylonian period during the first half
of the third millennium B.C.E. Like Enkidu, the “Babylonian Job” lies prostrate
in his bed, although his condition is more fully described: He has become deaf,
blind, and dumb; a stiffness has taken over his limbs; and his flesh has become
emaciated and inflamed. All this is accompanied by a headache, intestinal dis-
tress, and discharge of phlegm; at its worst, the disease forces the patient to spend
“the night in my dung like an ox” and wallow “in my excrement like a sheep.” If
the disease has come from the gods, the sufferer remains mystified as to why,
since he has performed all of the usual rituals, libations, prayers, and other ob-
servances in honor of his deities. Like the later biblical Job, however, the sufferer
is eventually redeemed by the Babylonian god Marduk, who restores him to his
former health and happiness.
From the almost equally ancient Egyptian culture comes the first recorded
medical literature in history, the medical or surgical papyri, the oldest of which
perhaps dates to the time of Imhotep in the 2600s B.C.E., even though the
manuscript itself was not written down until about a thousand years later. In