by Sean Martin
363 Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 140.
364 Waller, The Discovery of the Germ, 186.
365 http://sussexhistoryforum.co.uk/index.php?topic=7811.0;wap2 Accessed 2 March 2015.
366 Kenneth F Kiple and Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas, ‘Typhus, Ships and Soldiers’, in Kiple, PPP, 108.
367 http://www.influenzaarchive.org/cities/city-newyork.html#Accessed 4 March 2015.
368 Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939) is one of the few works of fiction about the pandemic.
369 Quoted in Dobson, Disease, 176.
370 Mark Honigsbaum, Living with Enza (London: Macmillan, 2009), xiii. The Times, 18 December 1918.
371 Honigsbaum, 41.
372 Honigsbaum, 22.
373 Honigsbaum, 46.
374 Honigsbaum, 47.
375 Honigsbaum, 50.
376 Niall Johnson, Britain and the 1918–19 Influenza Pandemic: A Dark Epilogue (London: Routledge, 2006), 192.
377 ID Mills, ‘The 1918–1919 Influenza Pandemic – The Indian Experience’. Indian Economic and Social History Review 23:1–40, 1986, 35–6. Quoted in Hays, 387.
378 Johnson, 206.
379 Nikiforuk, The Fourth Horseman, 152.
380 Nikiforuk, 152.
381 Crawford, Deadly Companions, 204.
382 Dobson, Disease, 172.
383 Dobson, Disease, 174.
384 Thomas Randolph writing to Sir William Cecil, November 1562. Quoted in Charles Creighton, A History of Epidemics in Britain, Volume II, 308.
385 Alfred Crosby, ‘Influenza: In the Grip of Grippe’, Kiple, PPP, 149.
386 Alfred Crosby, ‘Influenza: In the Grip of Grippe’, Kiple, PPP, 149.
387 FB Smith, ‘The Russian Influenza in the United Kingdom, 1889–1894’, Social History of Medicine, 8 (1): 55–73, 64. Quoted in Johnson, 137.
388 Honigsbaum, 9.
389 John M Barry, The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, 396–397.
390 See Gina Kolata, Flu, Ch 10.
391 See Honigsbaum, 17–32.
392 Nikiforuk, The Fourth Horseman, 154.
393 Honigsbaum, xiv.
394 Quoted in Joanne Reilly, Belsen: The Liberation of a Concentration Camp (London: Routledge, 1998), 24.
395 Reilly, 46.
396 Arthur Allen, The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl (New York: WW Norton, 2014), 14.
397 Kenneth F Kiple and Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas, ‘Typhus, Ships and Soldiers’, in Kiple, PPP, 109.
398 K David Patterson, ‘Typhus and its Control in Russia, 1870–1940’, Medical History, 1993, 37: 361–381, 361.
399 Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History, 301.
400 Kenneth F Kiple and Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas, ‘Typhus, Ships and Soldiers’, in Kiple, PPP, 109.
401 Garrett, The Coming Plague, 30.
402 Garrett, 32.
403 Garrett, 30.
404 Garrett, 36.
405 JG Farrell, The Lung (London: Corgi, 1968), 56.
406 Alastair Cooke, Letter from America, 18 April 1955. Quoted in Gareth Williams, Paralysed with Fear: The Story of Polio, 209.
407 Garrett, 30.
408 World Health Organization, Resolution WHA33.3, 8 May 1980.
409 Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 48.
410 Shilts, 48.
411 Shilts, 48.
412 Dobson, Disease, 192. Also quoted in Shilts, 40.
413 Crawford, Virus Hunt, 4.
414 Peter Piot, 121.
415 Crawford, Virus Hunt, 35–36.
416 Piot, 122.
417 Piot, 131.
418 Piot et al (1984), ‘Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome in a heterosexual population in Zaire’, The Lancet ii: 65–69. The same issue also included another paper – Van de Perre et al (1984) – on AIDS in Rwanda.
419 Crawford, Virus Hunt, 38.
420 Crawford, Virus Hunt, 38.
421 Even that wasn’t his real name, which was Arne Vidar Røed; ‘Arvid Noe’ was an anagram derived from this.
422 1984 figures, Dobson, Disease, 197. Crawford (2013:7) puts the 1984 US figures at 6993 with 3342 deaths.
423 Crawford, Virus Hunt, 8.
424 Dobson, Disease, 193.
425 http://espn.go.com/classic/biography/s/Ashe_Arthur.html Accessed 10 March 2015.
426 Ed Hooper, Slim: A Reporter’s Own Story of AIDS in East Africa (London: The Bodley Head, 1990), 20.
427 Ed Hooper, Slim, 20–21.
428 Ed Hooper, Slim, 26.
429 See Crawford, Virus Hunt, 202–204.
430 See Crawford, Virus Hunt, 133–149, for an account of the OPV theory and its demise. The original article, by Tom Curtis, appeared in Rolling Stone in 1992, issue 626, 54–60. Another early proponent of the theory was Ed Hooper, in his follow-up to Slim, The River: A Journey back to the Source of HIV and AIDS (Little, Brown, 1999).
431 Crawford, Virus Hunt, 165.
432 Crawford, Virus Hunt, 166.
433 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-29442642 Accessed 3 October 2014. The paper the BBC article reports is Oliver G Pybus, Philippe Lemey, et al, ‘The Early Spread and Epidemic Ignition of HIV-1 in Human Populations’, Science 3 October 2014: Vol. 346 no. 6205, pp. 56–61. DOI: 10.1126/science.1256739.
434 Dobson, Disease, 200–201.
435 John Iliffe, The African AIDS Epidemic: A History (Oxford: James Currey Ltd, 2006), 159.
436 Quoted in Iliffe, The African AIDS Epidemic, 25.
437 Garrett, The Coming Plague, 33.
438 Dobson, Disease, 243.
439 Dobson, Disease, 247.
440 Dobson, Disease, 234.
441 Joel D Howell, ‘Concepts of Heart-Related Diseases’, in CWHHD, 92.
442 Dobson, Disease, 240.
443 Dobson, Disease, 240.
444 Dobson, Disease, 240.
445 Dobson, Disease, 239.
446 Joel D Howell, ‘Concepts of Heart-Related Diseases’, in CWHHD, 92.
447 Joel D Howell, ‘Concepts of Heart-Related Diseases’, in CWHHD, 94.
448 Joel D Howell, ‘Concepts of Heart-Related Diseases’, in CWHHD, 94.
449 Tattersall, Diabetes: The Biography, 9.
450 Tattersall, Diabetes: The Biography, 9.
451 Tattersall, Diabetes: The Biography, 12.
452 Tattersall, Diabetes: The Biography, 14.
453 Tattersall, Diabetes: The Biography, 14.
454 Tattersall, Diabetes: The Biography, 18.
455 The full text can be read online at https://archive.org/details/ondiabetesandit00campgoog
456 Tattersall, Diabetes: The Biography, 179.
457 EP Joslin, LI Dublin and HH Marks, ‘Studies in Diabetes mellitus: III. Interpretation of the variations in diabetes incidence’, American Journal of the Medical Sciences, 189 (1935), 163–93. Quoted in Tattersall, 179.
458 E Bulmer, ‘The Menace of Obesity’, British Medical Journal 1 (1932), 1024–26. Quoted in Tattersall, 180.
459 Robert Saundby, ‘Diabetes mellitus’, Medical Annual (Bristol, 1897), 675. Quoted in Tattersall, 178.
460 CL Bose, ‘Discussion on Diabetes in the Tropics’, British Medical Journal 2 (1907), 1051–64, quoted in Tattersall, 179.
461 CL Bose, quoted in Tattersall, 179.
462 Sander L Gilman, Obesity: The Biography (OUP, 2010), ix.
463 Sander L Gilman, Obesity: The Biography (OUP, 2010), ix.
464 Umberto Eco, Faith in Fakes (Vintage, 1998), 257.
465 Gilman, Obesity: The Biography, xv.
466 In John Wycliffe’s translation of the Bible, we read ‘But eschew thou unholy and vain speeches, for why those profit much to unfaithfulness, and the word of them creepeth as a canker’. (2 Timothy 2:16–17)
467 See, among others, Francis Barrett, The Magus, Book II (London: 1801); H Stanley Redgrove, Alchemy Ancient and Modern (London: 1922).
468 See Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladi
es: A Biography of Cancer, 92.
469 See Rock Brynner and Trent Stephens, Dark Remedy: The Impact of Thalidomide and its Revival as a Vital Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
470 See Valerie Steele, The Corset: A Cultural History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), Ch 3, ‘Dressed to Kill: The Medical Consequences of Corsetry.’
471 Clive Bates and Andy Rowell, Tobacco Explained: The Truth about the Tobacco Industry… in its own words, available from the World Health Organization: http://www.who.int/tobacco/media/en/TobaccoExplained.pdf.
472 Laurie Garrett, Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World out of Balance, (Penguin: 1994), 53.
473 Laurie Garrett, The Coming Plague, 55.
474 Garrett, The Coming Plague, 75–76.
475 Garrett, The Coming Plague, 78.
476 Garrett, The Coming Plague, 82.
477 Garrett, The Coming Plague, 82.
478 Garrett, The Coming Plague, 83.
479 Garrett, The Coming Plague, 103–104.
480 Garrett, The Coming Plague, 111.
481 Garrett, The Coming Plague, 124.
482 David Quammen, Ebola: The Natural and Human History (London: The Bodley Head, 2014), 24.
483 Quammen, Ebola, 24.
484 Quammen, Ebola, 32.
485 See, for instance, J Michael Fay’s study of gorillas detailed in Quammen, Ebola, Ch 1.
486 For more on the 1976 Sudan outbreak, see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2395561/
487 Quammen, Ebola, 27.
488 Quammen, Ebola, 41.
489 Quammen, Ebola, 42.
490 Quammen, Ebola, 111.
491 See the World Health Organization’s Ebola Situation Report of 11 March 2015.
492 Quammen, Ebola, 107.
493 Quammen, Ebola, 41.
494 Karlen, Plague’s Progress, 6.
495 Dobson, Disease, 221.
496 Nathan Wolfe, The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age (Penguin, 2013), 82.
497 Thomas Abraham, Twenty-First Century Plague: The Story of SARS (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 2.
498 Andrew Nikiforuk, Pandemonium: Bird Flu, Mad Cow Disease, and Other Biological Plagues of the 21st Century (Toronto: Viking Canada, 2006), 5.
499 Nikiforuk, Pandemonium, 6.
500 William McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, 13–21.
501 Karlen, Plague’s Progress, 6. The list is selective.
502 Sally Davies, The Drugs Don’t Work (Penguin, 2013), 45. Davies notes that over one million people died of TB in 2010.
503 Michael Shnayerson and Mark Plotkin, The Killer Within, 165.
504 Hugh Pennington, ‘Don’t Pick Your Nose’, in London Review of Books, Vol. 27 No. 24, 15 December 2005, 29–31.
505 Nikiforuk, Pandemonium, 235.
506 Hugh Pennington, ‘Don’t Pick Your Nose’, in London Review of Books, Vol. 27 No. 24, 15 December 2005, 29–31.
507 Davies, The Drugs Don’t Work, xii.
508 See Martin J Blaser, Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics is Fueling our Modern Plagues (New York: Henry Holt/London: Oneworld Publications, 2014).
509 James Le Fanu, The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine (London: Abacus, 2011), 465–466.
510 Davies, The Drugs Don’t Work, x.
511 See, amongst others, Steven Salzberg, ‘Anti-Vaccine Movement Causes Worst Measles Epidemic In 20 Years’, Forbes, 1 February 2015.
512 Dr Jolyon M Medlock and Steve A Leach, PhD, ‘Effect of climate change on vector-borne disease risk in the UK’. The Lancet, published Online: 23 March 2015. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S1473–3099(15)70091–5
513 Dr Jolyon M Medlock and Steve A Leach, PhD, ‘Effect of climate change on vector-borne disease risk in the UK’. The Lancet, published Online: 23 March 2015. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S1473–3099(15)70091–5
514 Roxanne Khamsi, ‘Were “cursed” rams the first biological weapons?’, New Scientist, 26 November 2007.
515 See David Willman, The Mirage Man: Bruce Ivins, the Anthrax Attacks, and America’s Rush to War (Bantam, 2011).
516 Thomas Abraham, Twenty-first Century Plague: The Story of SARS, 143.
517 Thomas Abraham, Twenty-first Century Plague: The Story of SARS, 143.
518 Andrew Nikiforuk, Pandemonium, 267.
519 Nikiforuk, Pandemonium, 268.
520 Davies, The Drugs Don’t Work, 46–50.
521 AncientBiotics: ‘A medieval remedy for modern day superbugs?’ http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/news/pressreleases/2015/march/ancientbiotics-a-medieval-remedy-for-modern-day-superbugs.asp. Accessed 8 April 2015.
522 Of course, it’s wrong to think of myths as happening ‘back then’. They are timeless and ongoing. As Sallust said, ‘These things never happened, but are, always.’
Glossary of Diseases
An A-Z of the major diseases mentioned in the book
AIDS: Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, first identified 1981. Thought to have originated in chimpanzees in West Africa, it causes the immune system to collapse, making the body vulnerable to diseases not usually fatal. Initially portrayed in the media as a ‘gay plague’, it became apparent that the disease could be transmitted via heterosexual intercourse, blood transfusions and from mother to baby.
Amebiasis: Deadly parasitic disease causing dysentery and diarrhoea, often transmitted by the faecal-oral route.
Anthrax: Affects primarily cattle, sheep and goats. Humans can become infected through contact with animals or animal products, although can’t spread it from person to person. Robert Koch’s and Louis Pasteur’s work on anthrax played a crucial part in the development of germ theory. The Biblical plagues of Egypt might have included anthrax; Virgil describes the disease in The Georgics. During World War Two and the Cold War, anthrax was considered for use as a biological weapon.
Arthritis: One of the oldest known diseases, causing pain and stiffness in the joints. Traces have been found in human bones dating from 3500 BC (in its rheumatoid form). We have fifth century BC descriptions from Hippocrates for the more common form, osteoarthritis. The ancient Greeks believed the disease to have been divine retribution for the destruction of the Temple of Ashkelon by the Scythians in the seventh century BC.
Asclepia: Temples built in ancient Greece dedicated to the god of medicine, Asclepius. Rituals at Asclepia involved incubation, or temple sleep. The patient would sleep before an image of the god, and hope they would either be made well during the night by Asclepius, or be given the cure in a dream. People came to Asclepia seeking cures from blindness, paralysis, edema, tapeworms, abdominal abscesses, lice, headaches, wounds sustained in battle, infertility, gout, even baldness.
Avian influenza: Bird flu (H5N1) broke out in China in 1996, causing the culling of over a million birds. Influenza is notorious for being able to mutate. H5N1 is linked to the Spanish Flu of 1918, the deadliest pandemic of all time, and the next pandemic is expected to be a form of bird flu.
Bats: Bats are vectors (or the carriers) of many diseases – including Ebola, it is suspected, and Marburg virus. Other bat diseases include Hendra virus, SARS, Nipah, Rabies, Duvenhage and Kyasanur Forest virus.
Beriberi: Caused by a deficiency of thiamine, or vitamin B1, it produces swelling of the legs, arms, and face. The nerves and cardiovascular system may also be affected. Known since antiquity in China and Japan, where it is described in some of the world’s oldest medical texts. The name derives from the Sinhalese word for weakness.
Bronchitis: Known since antiquity, where the Chinese text Yueh Ling (Monthly Ordinances) refers to it as a disease particularly prevalent in summer months.
BSE: Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, otherwise known as mad cow disease, first appeared in the UK in 1984. BSE is a neurodegenerative condition that is thought to have been caused by feeding cows the brains and spinal cords of sheep. Dubbed ‘high-tech cannibalism’, its human form is variant CJD. Both human and bovine forms cause the rapid ons
et of dementia and death, and are incurable.
Cancer: ‘Canker’ first appeared in the English language in the fourteenth century, although records of tumours that ‘eat’ date back to the second millennium BC in Egyptian papyri. Cancer saw a rise in the twentieth century, although this could be the result of improvements in methods of detection. It is now one of the world’s major killers.
Carrión’s disease: Discovered by conquistadores in the sixteenth century, Carrión’s disease is a New World disease with a very old provenance: it seems to have been represented on pieces of pre-Columbian Peruvian pottery known as huacos. Originating in the Andes, it is a parasitic condition that can cause fever and anaemia and can lead to unsightly boils known as ‘Peruvian warts’.
Cattle plague (rinderpest): Although it does not affect humans, cattle plague has a long history of causing devastation in human communities, causing loss of livelihood, famine and the diseases that follow in its wake, such as typhus.
Chagas’ disease: Like Carrión’s disease, Chagas’ disease was unknown in the Old World. Similar to sleeping sickness, it seems to have originated in northeastern Brazil and evolved independently. It is at least two thousand years old: mummies from the Tarapaca Valley in northern Chile have revealed Chagas’ signature digestive tract problems, and it remains endemic in parts of Chile to this day.
Chicken pox: Common childhood disease in many parts of the world, chickenpox is caused by a virus that remains latent within the body and can reappear in later life as shingles.
Cholera: Probably endemic in India since time immemorial. The nineteenth century saw a succession of cholera pandemics that killed millions. The first outbreak in the UK in 1832 was heralded by an official day of national penance and prayer in an attempt to try and stop the disease from reaching British shores. It is caused by a bacterium, and John Snow discovered it was transmitted by dirty water. Cholera was eradicated in Britain with the invention of Victorian sewerage systems.
Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever: Tick-borne virus first identified in the Crimea in 1944, later in the Congo (1969), although an account from twelfth century Tajikistan may be the same disease. Symptoms include fever, back, joint and stomach pain, red spots on the palate, vomiting and bleeding and bruising, mood swings and changes in sensory perception. Fatality rates can be anywhere from 9 to 50 per cent.
