39 pages • 1 hour read
William H. McneillPlagues and Peoples
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1976A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Chicken Pox and Measles
Little is known of the earliest diseases afflicting humankind. The records that exist—when they exist—are unscientific, and often attribute acute symptoms in ways that obscure their origins to modern specialists. Nevertheless, such diseases are recorded in the human body in the form of hard-won resistance over time. A disease such as chicken pox may once have been as devastating as other diseases that are transferable from human-to-human hosts, such as tuberculosis and influenza; yet now, it is a disease that almost exclusively affects young children and the elderly. It has the extraordinary latent effect of lying dormant in human bodies for decades, reemerging in the elderly as shingles. In so doing, McNeill writes, “the virus neatly solves the problem of maintaining an unbroken chain of infection within small human communities” (68). This endemic quality defines many of the diseases with which humanity has learned to live.
Measles is another such endemic childhood disease. Scholars in McNeill’s day (there is contemporary debate on the subject), bolstered by the writings of the Persian physician Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi (850–923), speculated measles first hit Rome with devastating results in the second century A.D. The Antonine plague, as it was called, halted the spread of the Roman Empire and set the stage for its eventual diminishment. As the disease spread and took root in a global community of civilized humanity, however, it was reduced—like chickenpox—to an endemic childhood disease. Even before modern vaccination, the disease’s impact was never again so potent as to destroy empires.
Smallpox
In his Preface, McNeill writes that the “World Health Organization actually succeeded in eliminating smallpox from the face of the earth in the same year this book was published” (9-10), putting, in 1976, a capstone to one of the deadliest diseases known to humanity.
Diseases with characteristics like smallpox (fever, vomiting, extensive lesions, and eventual death) have been described throughout written history, beginning in the thousand year spread of civilization from the Yellow to the Yangtze rivers in the last millennium B.C. In 430-429 B.C., a smallpox-like disease ravaged ancient Athens, and Thucydides wrote that the disease killed off a quarter of the Athenian land army.
Wherever smallpox was first introduced to a virgin civilization, it killed with devastating results, and there were no more dramatic results of smallpox’s destructive power than in the first introduction of Spanish conquistadors into the mainland of the Americas. “The first encounter came in 1518, when smallpox reached Hispaniola and attacked the Indian population so virulently that Bartolme de Los Casas believed that only a thousand survived,” McNeill writes (215). The demographic fallout was near total, destroying 90% of the Aztec peoples by 1658 before wreaking the same result upon the Incans a few years later.
Bubonic Plague
The movement of Pasturella Pestis across the Eurasian steppe underscores one of McNeill’s original arguments. Scholars of an earlier time believed that the medieval incidence of the plague that began in 1346 came by way of international shipping routes to the seaports of Europe. If this were so, McNeill argues, then it would have behaved much as it had during the Justinian Plague of the fifth century, rapidly burning through populations before disappearing for lack of a sustaining infrastructure of host bodies. By contrast, the plague of 1346 took root in Europe and never let go, remaining a threat for centuries after.
The difference, McNeill argues, was rats. Since 1921, it has been clear that Pasturella Pestis transfers to humans from rats by way of lice. In rats, the plague is far less severe a nuisance; they thrive despite the disease, providing a steady infrastructure of bodies in which the disease may lie dormant, infecting human societies on a recurring basis. It is therefore likely that rats took hold in the land routes and settlement outposts formed by the Mongol empire in the centuries leading up to the first incidence of medieval European plague:
What probably happened between 1331 and 1346 therefore, was that as plague spread from caravanserai to caravanserai across Asia and eastern Europe, and moved thence into adjacent human cities wherever they existed, a parallel movement into underground rodent “cities” of the grasslands also occurred (176).
Cholera
As Cholera reached its apex in the early 19th Century, so did human advances in scientific methods and medical practices. No disease before so rapidly and horribly killed, nor was any disease so closely observed by people with scientific classification systems to hand. Cholera usually spread through contaminated water, often through shared water supplies in poor urban areas still using medieval sewage and communal well infrastructure. The results swiftly dehydrated the victim, sending them into a dayslong cycle of living death before killing them.
The biological science of cholera was slow to advance, with the incorrect “miasma” theory holding sway (often among learned scientists usually too privileged to be personally affected by the disease’s ravages) over the more accurate germ theory of disease. However, starting with John Snow’s early demographic research into the spread of cholera in a single London neighborhood, the disease was soon seen as an infrastructural problem. This led to the creation, first in London then increasingly in other cities, of modernized sewage and waterworks. Efforts to ameliorate the effects of cholera on the poor through housing and labor reform had multiple salutatory health and economic effects. Education also played a role, with the widespread dissemination of knowledge pertaining to the boiling of water in places where modern sewage was not affordable.
By the time the germ theory of disease was accepted, and a vaccine was invented in 1893, only after a generation of fruitless theoretical setbacks, political life had been reworked to study and reduce the effects of cholera. It is from these infrastructural and municipalized results that the general movement of modern industrial life from a rural to an urban emphasis became possible.
