A Short History of Disease
Page 27
Hippocrates stressed the importance of diet, exercise, and the airs, waters and places in which we live, for maintaining good health. Health was a matter of balance, and disease appeared as a consequence of living out of balance. Hippocrates was revolutionary in his simplicity. He may have been wrong on the four humours, but he was right in broad stroke terms about so much else. Similarly, the cures for some of our modern ailments could lie in other ancient sources. As I was completing this book, a team from the University of Nottingham claimed to have found a cure for MRSA in Bald’s Leechbook. The recipe, originally for an eye salve, involves onions, garlic, wine and cow’s bile that has been ‘astonishingly’ effective against the superbug in laboratory tests.521
Perhaps we will somehow maintain a better balance between health and disease through a combination of Hippocrates’ advice, further research into old texts, and a greater emphasis on open source – rather than corporate – research and drug repurposing. (As we’ve seen from Bald’s apparent cure for MRSA, the drugs in question don’t have to be modern, expensive or synthesised in a laboratory.)
Meanwhile, in high security vaults, supposedly extinct diseases continue to slumber. One such dweller in the vaults is smallpox. Although officially eradicated in 1980, the disease now spends its leisure hours in Fort Detrick, Maryland, and elsewhere. Pandora’s Box has moved underground, and gone high-tech. Let’s hope it’s never opened again. Once, back in the age of myth, was enough.522
Notes
1 Keith Weller Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam (Berkeley, 1983), 183.
2 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: OUP, 1989), vol. IV, 763.
3 Robert P Hudson, ‘Concepts of Disease in the West’, in The Cambridge World History of Human Disease (hereafter CWHHD), 45.
4 Robert P Hudson, ‘Concepts of Disease in the West’, in CWHHD, 45.
5 David Leeming, The Oxford Companion to World Mythology, (Oxford, New York: OUP, 2005), 307.
6 43 Vendidad Far II, 3–41, from SGF Brandon, Creation Legends of the Ancient Near East (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1963), 48.
7 Richard Heinberg, Memories and Visions of Paradise (Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1990), 43.
8 Dorothy H Crawford, The Invisible Enemy: A Natural History of Viruses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 8.
9 Dorothy H Crawford, The Invisible Enemy, 18.
10 Dorothy H Crawford, Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped Our History (Oxford University Press, 2007), 15.
11 Mary Ellen Snodgrass, World Epidemics: A Cultural Chronology of Disease from Prehistory to the Era of SARS (Jefferson, NC; McFarland and Company, 2003), 9.
12 See Tony Waldron, Paleopathology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
13 Charlotte Roberts & Keith Manchester, The Archaeology of Disease (1983) (Stroud: The History Press. Third edition, 2010), 13.
14 Charlotte Roberts & Keith Manchester, The Archaeology of Disease, 13.
15 Charlotte Roberts & Keith Manchester, The Archaeology of Disease, 14.
16 Arno Karlen, Plague’s Progress: A Social History of Man and Disease (London: Cassell, 1996), 32.
17 Mary Ellen Snodgrass, World Epidemics: A Cultural Chronology of Disease from Prehistory to the Era of SARS (Jefferson, NC; McFarland and Company, 2003), 9.
18 Dorothy H Crawford, Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped Our History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 48.
19 Arno Karlen, Plague’s Progress, 19.
20 Dorothy H Crawford, Deadly Companions, 31.
21 Arno Karlen, Plague’s Progress, 31.
22 Paul S Martin, Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 1–3.
23 Arno Karlen, Plague’s Progress, 20.
24 Arno Karlen, Plague’s Progress, 20.
25 Arno Karlen, Plague’s Progress, 27–28.
26 Historian Yuval Noah Harari has argued that the agricultural revolution brought more woes than just disease: ‘Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers. Hunter-gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways, and were less in danger of starvation and disease. The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.’ Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (London: Harvill Secker, 2014), 79.
27 Hershkovitz et al (2008), ‘Detection and Molecular Characterization of 9000–Year-Old Mycobacterium tuberculosis from a Neolithic Settlement in the Eastern Mediterranean’. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0003426
28 Helen Bynum, Spitting Blood: The History of Tuberculosis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 7–8. Dates for the first settlement of the Americas vary, and these are approximate.
29 See Roberts & Manchester, The Archaeology of Disease, Ch 19.
30 Theya Molleson and Peter Andrews, ‘The Human Remains’. Çatalhöyük 1997 Archive Report. http://www.catalhoyuk.com/archive_reports/1997/ar97_12.html
31 David Quammen, Ebola: The Natural and Human History (London: The Bodley Head, 2014), 85.
32 Alfred W Crosby, ‘Smallpox’, in CWHHD, 1009.
33 Naomi Hamilton, ‘Burials and Grave Goods’, Çatalhöyük 1998 Archive Report. http://www.catalhoyuk.com/archive_reports/1998/ar98_15.html
34 Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 35.
35 Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 36.
36 The writer Bruce Chatwin had a theory that settlement brought with it more than just disease: ‘Gradually the idea for a book began to take shape. It was to be a wildly ambitious and intolerant work, a kind of “Anatomy of Restlessness” that would enlarge on Pascal’s dictum about the man sitting quietly in a room. The argument, roughly, was as follows: that in becoming human, man had acquired, together with his straight legs and striding walk, a migratory ‘drive’ or instinct to walk long distances through the seasons; that this ‘drive’ was inseparable from his central nervous system; and, that, when warped in conditions of settlement, it found outlets in violence, greed, status-seeking or a mania for the new. This would explain why mobile societies such as the gypsies were egalitarian, thing-free and resistant to change; also why, to re-establish the harmony of the First State, all the great teachers – Buddha, Lao-tse, St Francis – had set the perpetual pilgrimage at the heart of their message and told their disciples, literally, to follow The Way.’ Bruce Chatwin, The Anatomy of Restlessness, 12–13.
37 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/7530678/Biblical-plagues-really-happened-say-scientists.html. Accessed 27 February 2014. See also Siro Trevisanato, The Plagues of Egypt. Barbara J Sivertsen, in The Parting of the Sea, argues that the account of the plagues in Exodus conflates different events several centuries apart.
38 http://www.nbcnews.com/id/43979556/ns/technology_and_science-science/#.Tji4qqjgW5M. Accessed 26 August 2014.
39 Snodgrass, World Epidemics: A Cultural Chronology of Disease from Prehistory to the Era of Sars (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co, 2003), 10.
40 http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/sbe42/. Accessed 27 August 2014.
41 William McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, 49–50.
42 Possible motives – and much more – discussed in John Byron, Cain and Abel in Text and Tradition: Jewish and Christian Interpretations of the First Sibling Rivalry (Leiden: Brill, 2011).
43 Hesiod, Works and Days, in Hesiod and Theognis, trans. Dorothea Wender (Harmondsworth
: Penguin, 1973), 62.
44 John F Nunn, Ancient Egyptian Medicine, 103.
45 Nunn, 104.
46 Reuven Yaron, Eshnunna Code, 79.
47 Ernest S Tierkel, ‘Canine Rabies’, in The Natural History of Rabies, Vol II, 123.
48 Owsei Temkin, The Falling Sickness: A History of Epilepsy from the Greeks to Modern Neurology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2nd ed., 1971), 3–4.
49 John F Nunn, Ancient Egyptian Medicine, 24.
50 John F Nunn, Ancient Egyptian Medicine, 26.
51 Nunn, 32.
52 Nunn, 105.
53 Nunn, 68.
54 Nunn, 69.
55 Nunn, 69.
56 Nunn, 89.
57 Nunn, 33.
58 Nunn, 33.
59 Nunn, 61.
60 A number of other papyri contain gynaecological material, such as the Kahun Papyrus; Carlsberg VIII, which is mainly gynaecological and obstetrical; and Ramesseum papyri III, IV and V. These contain information on the eyes, gynaecology and the diseases of children. It’s the best preserved, and possibly earliest, medical pap. See Nunn, 39–40.
61 Nunn, 33.
62 Nunn, 33.
63 Nunn, 64.
64 Nunn, 81.
65 Nunn, 81.
66 Nunn, 75.
67 Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, 121
68 Andrew Nikiforuk, The Fourth Horseman, 29.
69 Nunn, 83.
70 These, and many more examples, can be found at http://archive.org/stream/incubationorcur00hamigoog/incubationorcur00hamigoog_djvu.txt. Accessed 24.09.14.
71 Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, 53.
72 Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, 53–4.
73 For more on the diseases thought to be represented in Hippocratic writings, see Pappas et al (2007) ‘Infectious disease in the age of Hippocrates’, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1201971207002123. Accessed 17.09.14.
74 Angela Ki Che Leung, ‘Diseases of the Pre-Modern Period in China’, CWHHD, 354.
75 Angela Ki Che Leung, ‘Diseases of the Pre-Modern Period in China’, CWHHD, 346.
76 Leung, CWHHD, 354.
77 William McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, 269–72.
78 Walter Scheidel, ‘Disease and Death’, in Paul Erdkamp (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Rome, 51.
79 Scheidel, 51.
80 Scheidel, 52.
81 Susan Mattern (2013), The Prince of Medicine: Galen in the Roman Empire, 126.
82 For more on Rome’s population, see Erdkamp, The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Rome, Ch 2.
83 Walter Scheidel, ‘Disease and Death’, 45–59, in The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Rome, 53.
84 Mattern (2013), The Prince of Medicine: Galen in the Roman Empire, 118.
85 Mattern (2013), The Prince of Medicine: Galen in the Roman Empire, 119.
86 Mattern (2013), The Prince of Medicine: Galen in the Roman Empire, 119.
87 A Ascenzi et al (1996), ‘The Roman Mummy of Grottarossa’, in Human Mummies: A Global Survey of their Status and the Techniques of Conservation, ed. K Spindler et al, 205–218. Vienna: Springer.
88 Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, trans. Robert Graves, rev. James B Rives (Penguin, 2007), 278.
89 Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, trans. Robert Graves, rev. James B Rives (Penguin, 2007), 277.
90 Scheidel, 54.
91 Pliny the Elder, The Natural History. Trans. John Bostock and HT Riley. London: Taylor and Francis, 1855.
92 Pliny the Elder, The Natural History. Trans. John Bostock and HT Riley. London: Taylor and Francis, 1855.
93 Galen, Methodus medendi 5.12, quoted in RJ Littman and ML Littman, ‘Galen and the Antonine Plague’, The American Journal of Philology, Vol. 94, No. 3 (Autumn, 1973), 243–255, 246.
94 Littman and Littman, 250.
95 Scheidel, 52.
96 David E Stannard, ‘Disease, Human Migration and History’, CWHHD, 37.
97 Pontius the Deacon, The Life and Passion of Cyprian, Bishop and Martyr (c. 260), from http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf05.iv.iii.html. Accessed 11 October 2014.
98 William H McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, 113.
99 Mark 9:17–27; Matthew 17:14–8; Luke 9:38–43.
100 Porter, Greatest Benefit to Mankind, 84.
101 EM Forster, review of Revd. Father J Faivre’s Canopus, Menouthis, Aboukir. Egyptian Mail, 29 December 1918. Quoted in Dominic Montserrat, ‘Carrying on the Work of the Earlier Firm: Doctors, Medicine and Christianity in the Thaumata of Sophronius of Jerusalem’, in Health in Antiquity, ed. Helen King, 230.
102 The forerunners of hospitals were ancient Egyptian temples, where people sought the help of the gods in recovering their health. Perhaps the earliest recorded hospitals were those built in Sri Lanka in the fourth century BC at Mihintale. Hospitals also existed in northern India by the first or second centuries AD, and the Buddhist monk and traveller Fa Xian (337 – c. 422) wrote of visiting them in the fourth century AD.
103 David M Wagner, Jennifer Klunk, Michaela Harbeck, et al, ‘Yersinia pestis and the Plague of Justinian 541–543 AD: A Genomic Analysis’, The Lancet Infectious Diseases, Volume 14, Issue 4, April 2014, 319–326. http://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(13)70323-2/abstract. Accessed 14 October 2014.
104 Lester K Little, ‘Life and Afterlife of the First Plague Pandemic’, in Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541–750, ed. Lester K Little (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 9.
105 Paul Slack, Plague: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2012), 18.
106 Quoted in Little, Plague and the End of Antiquity, 7.
107 Quoted in Little, Plague and the End of Antiquity, 7.
108 Amir Harrak, ed. and trans., The Chronicle of Zuqnin, Parts III and IV, AD 488–775 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1999), 30.
109 Paul Slack, Plague: A Very Short Introduction, 56.
110 Paul the Deacon, Historia Langobardorum 2.4, p. 74. Quoted in John Maddicott, ‘Plague in Seventh-Century England’, in Little, Plague and the End of Antiquity, 197–8.
111 Jean Durliat’s influential essay, ‘La Peste du Vle siecle: Pour un nouvel examen des sources byzantines’, (1989) questioned reliance on literary sources. Peter Sarris, ‘Bubonic Plague in Byzantium: The Evidence of Non-Literary Sources’, in Little (ed.), Plague and the End of Antiquity, 125.
112 Hugh N Kennedy, ‘Justinianic Plague in Syria and the Archaeological Evidence’, in Little (ed.), Plague and the End of Antiquity, 95.
113 Sarris, in Little (ed.), Plague and the End of Antiquity, 127.
114 McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, 123.
115 The Chronicle of Zuqnin, Parts III and IV, AD 488–775, ed. and trans. Amir Harrak (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1999), 170–171.
116 The Chronicle of Zuqnin, ed. and trans. Harrak, 171.
117 The Chronicle of Zuqnin, ed. and trans. Harrak, 172.
118 The Chronicle of Zuqnin, ed. and trans. Harrak, 172.
119 Arno Karlen, Plague’s Progress, 78.
120 Karlen, 79.
121 ML Cameron, Anglo-Saxon Medicine, 5.
122 Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, II.15, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, 182–5. Quoted in Cameron, 5–6.
123 ML Cameron, Anglo-Saxon Medicine, 6
124 ML Cameron, Anglo-Saxon Medicine, 10.
125 ML Cameron, Anglo-Saxon Medicine, 11.
126 ML Cameron, Anglo-Saxon Medicine, 12.
127 ML Cameron, Anglo-Saxon Medicine, 15.
128 ML Cameron, Anglo-Saxon Medicine, 24.
129 ML Cameron, Anglo-Saxon Medicine, 38.
130 ML Cameron, Anglo-Saxon Medicine, 47.
131 Stephen Pollington, Leechcraft: Early English Charms, Plant-lore and Healing (Hockwold-cum-Wilton: Anglo-Saxon Books, 2000), 454.
132 Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. Bertram Colgrave and RAB Mynors
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 461.
133 McNeill, 123.
134 John Maddicott, ‘Plague in Seventh-Century England,’ in Little (ed.), Plague and the End of Antiquity, 171.
135 Bede, Historical Works Vol I, 485.
136 Charles Creighton, A History of Epidemics in Britain, Vol. I, 15.
137 Frederick Cartwright and Michael Biddiss, Disease and History, 3.
138 McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, 124.
139 John C Snyder, ‘The Typhus Fevers’, in Viral and Rickettsial Infections of Man, ed. Thomas M Rivers, (Philadelphia, London and Montreal: JB Lippincott, 1948), 463.
140 Snyder, ‘The Typhus Fevers’, 464.
141 Quoted in Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History (London: Penguin, 2000), 242. Snyder (1948) cites the 1083 outbreak with caution, stating that the ‘first medical record which is sufficiently clear to identify typhus fever’ is the 1546 description by Fracastorius. Snyder (1948), 462.
142 Creighton, Vol. I, 9.
143 Creighton, Vol. I, 9.
144 Creighton, Vol. I, 9.
145 Creighton, Vol. I, 11.
146 Later in the Middle Ages, another St Anthony also became identified with the disease, St Anthony of Padua (1195–1231), who had a reputation as a healer.
147 LSD can be extracted from the basic ergot alkaloid.
148 Ergot poisoning has been suggested as the cause of the witch craze in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. See Kiple, ‘Ergotism’, in Kiple (ed.), Plague, Pox & Pestilence, 34–5. Given the prevalence of religious mania in the seventeenth century, one wonders if America could have been founded by religious extremists tripping out of their minds on infected rye, hallucinating the apocalypse. Surely it couldn’t still be going on, could it?
149 Kenneth F Kiple, ‘Ergotism’, in Kiple (ed.), Plague, Pox and Pestilence, 32.
150 John S Haller, ‘Ergotism’, CWHHD, 719.
151 Carole Rawcliffe, Leprosy in Medieval England, 1.
152 Carole Rawcliffe, Leprosy in Medieval England, 1.
153 Margaret Cox and Charlotte Roberts, Health and Disease in Britain, 267.
154 Nikiforuk, The Fourth Horseman, 31.