Parts of what today is Germany were shockingly depopulated. In a region stretching from Berlin to northeast France, many rural areas lost four out of five of their people to wounds, hunger, or disease, or because of migration to safer areas. In Germany as a whole, a third of all the townsfolk and two-fifths of the peasants died.
EVEN DEADLIER THAN war and famine in the 1600s was pestilence (by which we mean not only epidemics but also common illnesses). Earlier, in the Middle Ages, the worst of the epidemic diseases had been plague. Now a mafia of diseases fed on crowds of people: not only plague, but smallpox, dysentery, and particularly typhus.
We know today that body lice can spread typhus. Typically a victim is infected when he or she scratches skin where an infected louse has left its feces. Typhus microbes in the feces penetrate the body, and as their toxin multiplies the victim has a sudden headache and a fever. Often she or he is then enfeebled, covered by a rash, then in shock, coughing, breathless, then delirious, comatose, and dead.
Typhus broke out anywhere that lice could thrive: in prisons, ships, and battle zones — any place where people lived in crowds, and where they rarely changed their clothes, and huddled under filthy straw or blankets. In 1586 typhus struck a law court in the English town of Exeter. Local people later traced the path the disease had taken. First, soldiers had thrown captured foreign sailors, sick with typhus, in the castle jail. The sailors infected other prisoners, Englishmen awaiting trials, and some of them died. Then the remaining English prisoners, even though they were so sick they couldn’t stand, were put on trial. Bailiffs helped some of these prisoners to walk to the courtroom, wheeled some of them in barrows, and carried others in their arms. Naturally, the bailiffs then fell ill. During and after the trial typhus felled the judge and jurors, and from the courtroom it spread to the population at large.
Europeans knew very well that diseases always threatened them. For centuries children have danced to the English nursery rhyme that goes
Ring-a-ring o’roses
A pocket full of posies,
Ashes! Ashes!
We all fall down.
The subject of this poem is plague. A red ring on the body was a symptom of it; people carried posies (in this case meaning herbs) to ward it off; and they burned trash (hence ashes) to counteract its evil vapors. Just the same, “all fall down.”
People died by thousands during major epidemics but would also die in ordinary times from humble curses such as dysentery and obscure “sweats” and “fevers.” A good source of information on causes of death is the London Bills of Mortality, which were weekly reports of burials in London churches. During the 1600s the compilers of these bills began to specify the cause of death. They were not expert diagnosticians (no one was), and probably they often confused one disease with another. But the bills provide a rough idea of the causes of death in one large city. During the quarter-century from 1661 to 1686 the bills blamed nearly two-fifths of all deaths on epidemic diseases such as plague, typhus, smallpox, measles, and “gripping of the guts,” meaning dysentery. But they blamed a larger amount, three-fifths of all deaths, on ailments that were always there: childhood illnesses, tuberculosis, and diseases of old age.
Poverty, dirt, and ignorance account for much of the loss of life. Towns and cities grew like mushrooms and turned into toadstools, and streets were paved with garbage, mud, and dung. Families crowded into one or two rooms and got their water from dirty wells and rivers. An English coal miner told an investigator that the men’s “legs and bodies are as black as your hat.” And he said, “I do not think it usual for the lasses [in the mines] to wash their bodies; my sisters never wash themselves.” As fast as cities killed their residents, country people poured in to take their places as scullery maids, stable boys, apprentices, laborers, and prostitutes. Many of these would also die of the diseases of the cities.
Dirt and trash were everywhere. An Italian artist once explained in a handbook how to ready a wooden panel for painting. Rub it with a fine powder made from chicken bones, he said, “and the older they are the better.” And where would one find such bones? Take them, he wrote, “just as you find them under the dining table.”
The writer Tobias Smollett once gave this picture of the milk that was sold on the streets of Edinburgh, Scotland. It was, he said, “carried through the streets in open pails, exposed to foul rinsings discharged from doors and windows, spittle, snot and tobacco quids, from foot passengers; overflowings from muck carts, spatterings from coach wheels, dirt and trash chucked into it by roguish boys for the joke’s sake, the spewings of infants, who have slobbered in the tin cup measure, which is thrown back in that condition among the milk, for the benefit of the next customer; and, finally, the vermin [fleas and lice] that drops from the rags of the nasty drab that vends this precious mixture, under the respectable denomination of milkmaid.”
Dirt and squalor weren’t found only in the cities. A well-known scholar, Desiderius Erasmus, described the typical country inn in Germany. “When you have taken care of your horse you come into the Stove Room, boots, baggage, mud, and all, for that is a common room for all comers…. In the Stove Room you pull off your boots, put on your shoes, and, if you will, change your shirt…. One combs his head [for lice?], another…belches garlic…. In my opinion nothing is more dangerous than for so many to draw in the same vapor…not to mention the farting, the stinking breaths…and without doubt many have the Spanish or, as it is called, the French pox [syphilis], though it is common to all nations.”
Doctors weren’t much help. Like everyone, they knew plenty about rats, fleas, and lice but not how they spread disease, and they knew nothing about viruses and bacteria. They had only a few drugs that could help, such as digitalis (for the heart) and mercury (heaps of which they prescribed for syphilis, constipation, and too many other things). The Italian writer Giovanni Casanova maintained that “more people die at the hands of doctors than are cured by them.” When Charles II of England had a stroke in 1685, officials called in all the well-known London doctors. They bled a pint of blood, applied hot iron to his head, and made him drink a potion made from skulls. He died.
With famine, dirt, disease, and ignorance against them it’s no wonder that so many died so young. John Colet, an English scholar, was the oldest child of a wealthy businessman. He had twenty-one younger brothers and sisters, and all of them died before he reached the age of thirty-two. His contemporary, the German artist Albrecht Dürer, was one of eighteen children, and only three of them, it seems, reached adult years. A wealthy English couple, Edward and Judith Gibbon, produced seven babies, six boys and a girl. They named all the boys Edward in the hope that at least one would survive and carry on this name, which was a tradition in the family. The five younger boys died in infancy. The oldest barely survived a number of childhood illnesses, grew up, and wrote a famous history of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
The story of one particular peasant family illustrates the dire effects of “ordinary” diseases. The family, whose name was Zuzek, lived on a rocky plateau in what is now northeastern Italy, and in the early 1800s they were poor. They lived in a small stone house surrounded by thirteen other houses on the side of a hill, and they worked thirteen little plots of rocky land. A tax collector reported that the people of their village were “poorly nourished, but strong, and able to bear up under the toil of the farm.”
In 1800 Tomaz Zuzek married Marina Gabrovic, and in the next seventeen years they had eleven children. Eight of the eleven died within a year of birth. In his funeral register, the local priest recorded the causes of these deaths, or what the family told him were the causes. Three died of “weakness,” two of “ordinary” causes, one of “swollen throat,” and two of what may have been tuberculosis or some other wasting disease. Marina, their mother, died at thirty-six, soon after giving birth to her last child. She died during a famine, which may have contributed to her death.
Two of the daughters grew up and left the village, a
nd one son, Matija, reached adult years and inherited the house and land. At the age of eighteen he married another eighteen-year-old, Marijana, and this couple proceeded to have twelve children. Eight of these died within a matter of days or at most a year, and one lived only to twelve. The priest recorded these causes of death: “premature birth,” “weakness,” “natural,” “weakness,” “pneumonia,” “scarlet fever,” “ordinary,” “dysentery,” and “consumption.” Four of the twelve children reached adult years, but one of them died at twenty-one of tuberculosis. Matija died at forty-two of typhoid fever, leaving Marijana, also forty-two, pregnant with their last child.
Altogether, these two couples had a total of twenty-three children, and of these only six lived past the age of twenty-one. Many births, many early deaths. From the standpoint of the survival of our species, their story is actually positive. Four parents left behind them six children who might themselves have children.
And that brings this story to the early 1800s. By now our species had lived through countless rounds of rise and fall. We had increased in spite of famine, war, and pestilence, and now we humans numbered about a billion. But we had only begun the global surge of population that has lasted till today.
Chapter 12
We discover who we are and where we live.
NOT SO LONG AGO, our beliefs about our place in the grand scale of things were lofty and satisfying. Or at least, Europeans’ notions were. And that is the important thing, because it was Europeans who were going to find out who we are and where we really live.
Europeans had inherited their understanding of the universe from ancient astronomers, and especially from Ptolemy, an Egyptian who did his work while the Roman Empire flourished. Ptolemy summed up what scientists of his time believed about the universe in a book that later became known as the Almagest, “the greatest compilation.”
As Ptolemy explained it, the universe was made up of earth, at the very center, and the sun, the moon, five planets, and the stars. Only earth was made of solid, heavy matter; the others out of something weightless. Around the earth, which didn’t move, the others endlessly circled, each of them fastened to an invisible, forever-spinning globe. These globes were concentric — one inside the other, like Chinese boxes. The moon was on the smallest globe, nearest to the earth. Mercury’s globe enclosed the moon’s, Venus’s globe enclosed Mercury’s, and then came the sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, each one on its globe. All the stars were fastened to a single globe, the eighth.
The older view of the universe
As the centuries passed after Ptolemy, Christians decided that beyond the globe of stars was the realm of God. It was his angels who kept the globes revolving and forever bearing the heavenly bodies in perfect circles around the earth.
Ptolemy’s picture of the universe was satisfying because it fitted with what everyone could see, or thought they did. The earth indeed appeared to stay inert, and the heavenly bodies did appear to rise and set each day or night, as if they were circling around us. To most people this was obvious, just common sense, and the earth-centered explanation of the universe became the widely accepted one.
Not only was this view commonsensical, it was also pleasant to believe that we were at the center of all God’s creation, and that the heavens circled around us, and that the sun, moon, and stars shone only to give us light. The whole conception made us feel important, as if we mattered.
The idea that the heavens circled earth fitted nicely with another pleasing European, or Christian, belief: namely, that human beings are a special creation of God. Our understanding of this matter came mostly from the two creation stories at the beginning of the Bible. In one of these stories, God first creates the fish, the birds, and the “cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth.” Then, separately, he creates men and women “in his own image, in the image of God,” and he gives them “dominion” over the other living things. In the second creation story he first creates Adam, or man, in a special way, breathing “into his nostrils the breath of life.” And then he creates Eve, again in a special way, shaping her out of Adam’s rib. But he simply “forms” the animals and birds, and brings them to Adam so that he may name them.
Both these stories taught that animals and humans were created separately. Animals were one thing; humans another. What’s more, humans were superior, and they were the deity’s chief concern. So taught the Bible, the word of God. And, just as with Ptolemy’s picture of the earth-centered universe, this notion of a separate, special creation was one that humans willingly believed. No one needed to convince the humblest farmer that he was better than his ox.
PTOLEMY’S TEACHING about an earth-centered universe reigned for nearly 1,400 years. Popes, professors, painters, and poets learned it when they went to school and later taught it to the following generations. Even the plowman, who knew that he was better than his ox, probably also believed, if he thought about it, that the land he plowed stood still and the sun was circling around it.
The earth-centered universe was not so elegant and simple as it sounds. Rather, it was quite complex, and this is why. The ancient scientists, Ptolemy and others, had noticed that when they observed the planets against the background of the “fixed” or fastened stars, the planets were not always where they should be if they moved around the earth in simple circles. Mars, especially, often seemed to go in the wrong direction, so much so that the ancient Egyptians called it “who travels backward.” What’s more, the planets sometimes moved quite fast and sometimes slowly, and they were sometimes bright and sometimes dim.
To account for such anomalies, the old astronomers had come up with far-fetched explanations. Here is one example: they decided that each planet was fastened not directly to the globe that carried it around the earth, but rather to a smaller globe, called an epicycle, that was fastened to the bigger globe. (Remember: all these globes, large and small, were transparent.) This epicycle, carrying the planet, rotated independently, and sometimes in an opposite direction from the main globe. That, the astronomers explained, is why the planets sometimes seemed to go in the wrong direction.
Then it turned out that one epicycle per planet was not enough. To account for all the wrong places in which planets were to be found, the astronomers had to imagine that some of the planets were fastened to epicycles fastened to other epicycles that in turn were fastened to the globes. When someone explained this system to a medieval king in central Spain, he said, “If the Lord Almighty had consulted me before embarking upon Creation, I should have recommended something simpler.”
In the early 1500s, while Machiavelli was exploring politics and Magellan was sailing around the world, a Pole named Nicholas Copernicus began to rethink the earth-centered universe. As a young man, he had studied Church law and medicine in Italy, and had also heard some lectures on astronomy. Back home again, he became an assistant to a bishop, his uncle. He also served the bishop as a personal physician, thought up schemes to reform the local currency, and painted his self-portrait. For a while he had a mistress, which (since he served a bishop) got him into trouble.
Meanwhile, purely as a hobby, Copernicus studied the motions of the stars and planets. For half a century, from his early years in Italy until he lay upon his deathbed, he pondered the ancient view of the universe. He was a conservative man, and he accepted much of Ptolemy’s view, even with its troublesome epicycles.
The universe of Copernicus
Copernicus decided, however, that we should make one major change in our view of the universe, a change that was literally earth-shaking. Our earth, Copernicus decided, was really just another planet circling the sun. It was not the earth but the sun that stood still at the center of the universe, while earth was out on sphere number three. And why did Copernicus reach this daring conclusion? Did he have some startling data about the movements of the planets? No, in fact he hardly ever did any stargazing at all. He had only made a brilliant or a lucky guess.
Copernicus was only sugges
ting what he thought was a better explanation of the same data that Ptolemy and others had used. At first he seems to have believed that putting the sun at the center, instead of the earth, had the advantage of reducing the number of epicycles needed to explain what he called “the entire ballet of the planets.” He liked the simpler picture because he had learned from ancient Plato that truth is always simple. In fact, however, it turned out that Copernicus needed more epicycles to explain the movements of the planets around the sun, not fewer; about fifty, instead of forty. Nevertheless, he thought the sun-centered universe was simpler and more elegant than the earth-centered one.
Copernicus wrote a book about his ideas called On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, but for years he wouldn’t publish it. He permitted it to go to the printer only when he was near death, and according to tradition he saw the published book only the day he died in 1543. Probably he had hesitated to publish his theory because he was afraid of ridicule.
The Human Story Page 21
