69. Cf. Robert Tignor, Public Health Administration in Egypt Under British Rule, 1882–1914 (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1960), p. 87. The last important outbreak, in 1835, reached Alexandria from Syria, and then traveled up the Nile.
70. In Persia, for example, plague outbreaks are reported between 1500 and 1800 as follows:
1535 in Gilan only.
1571–75 General outbreak. This coincided with a similarly general plague in the Mediterranean.
1595–96 General, including also Iraq.
1611–17 Plague coming from east via Afghanistan.
1666 Coincided with Great Plague of London.
1684–86 General and severe plague.
1725
1757
1760–67 Severe and general plague.
1773–74 General plague, also affecting Iraq. Coincided with plague in Moscow.
1797
Data derived from Cyril Elgood, Medical History of Persia and the Eastern Calif ate (Cambridge, 1951) and Sticker, op. cit. Both depend on J. D. Tholozan, Histoire de la Peste Bubonique en Perse, en Mésopotamie et au Caucase (Paris, 1874), which I have been unable to see. Tholozan was a French doctor, interested in cures; how reliable his data may be I cannot tell.
Appropriate search of earlier Persian and Arabic texts would probably establish a similar pattern of plague in Iran from 1346; and if epidemic patterns from about that date differ from earlier recorded disease experience, the hypothesis here advanced would find important confirmation. But no one has tried to search Persian materials with this question in mind; and since many of the relevant texts have not even been printed, the task will not be easy.
71. My rendition of the French translation of Muhammad ibn Isma’il al-Bukhari Sahih, available as El Bokhari, Les Traditions Islamiques, O. Houdas, trans. [Publications de l’école des langues orientales vivantes], 4th series, VI (Paris, 1914), Titre lxxxvi, “De La Médicine,” chs. 30, 31.
72. For Moslem attitudes toward plague see Jacqueline Sublet, “La Peste Prise aux Rets de la Jurisprudence: la Traité d’Ibn Hagar al-As-qalani sur la Peste,” Studia Islamica, 33 (1971), 141–9; M. W. Dois, The Black Death in the Middle East (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton, 1971), pp. 131–46. On the interrelation of epidemic outbreaks (smallpox?) and Arab conquests, see Hirsch, Handbook of Geographical and Historical Pathology, 1, 126. M. W. Dois, “Plague in Early Islamic History,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, 94 (1974), 371–83, accepts the notion that the epidemics accompanying early Arab conquests were bubonic. This depends on whether or not the Arabic term used after 1346 for bubonic infection was used for the same infection seven hundred years earlier. This may or may not be true, since Moslem writers had not used the term to describe current afflictions for at least 150 years before the disastrous irruption of the Black Death in the fourteenth century. Or so Dols’s own search of Arabic texts concludes. Cf. M. W. Dois, The Black Death, p. 29.
73. Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq, Travels in Turkey (London, 1744), p. 228.
74. See Appendix, and above, p. 144.
75. Michael W. Dois, The Black Death in the Middle East, p. 30.
76. I have been unable to locate any discussion of steppe demography; but David Neustadt, “The Plague and its Effects upon the Mameluke Army,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1946), p. 67, remarks that diminution of the steppe population north of the Black Sea, whence the Mamelukes recruited their ranks, caused difficulties in the period after 1346.
77. No satisfactory history of the Crim Tartars exists. General histories of the steppe, of which the best is René Grousset, The Empire of the Steppes: A History of Central Asia (New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1970), do not consider disease at all.
78. Cf. William H. McNeill, Europe’s Steppe Frontier, 1500–1800 (Chicago, 1964).
79. On Russian population, cf. the convenient summary of widely differing estimates for the period 1570–1715, in Richard Hellie, Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy (Chicago, 1971), p. 305. On Ottoman population, cf. Halil Inalcik, The Ottoman Empire in the Classical Age (London, 1973), p. 46.
Chapter V
1. Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbian Exchange (Westport, Conn., 1972), pp. 73–121. This author goes so far as to state: “Today an American botanist can easily find whole meadows in which he is hard put to it to find a single species of plant that grew in the Americas in pre “Columbian times.” (P. 74.)
2. Saul Jarcho, “Some Observations on Diseases in Prehistoric America,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 38 (1964), 1–19; G. W. Goff, “Syphilis,” in Brothwell and Sandison, Diseases in Antiquity, 279–94; Abner I. Weisman, “Syphilis: Was it Endemic in Pre-Columbian America or Was it Brought Here from Europe?” New York Academy Medical Bulletin, 24 (1966), 284–300.
3. Ernest Carrol Faust, “History of Human Parasitic Infections,” public Health Reports, 70 (1955), 958–65.
4. Sherburne F. Cook, “The Incidence and Significance of Disease Among the Aztecs and Related Tribes,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 36 (1946), 320–35. Cook calculates the dates at 780, 1320, 1454; but the decipherment of Aztec codices is an inexact science at best.
5. “There was then no sickness, they had no aching bones; they had then no high fever; then had they no smallpox.… At that time the course of humanity was orderly. The foreigners made it otherwise when they arrived here.” Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel, Ralph L. Roy, trans. (Washington, D.C., 1933), p. 83, quoted in Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., “Conquistador y Pestilencia: The First World Pandemic and the Fall of the Great Indian Empires,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 47 (1967), 322. This article is reproduced in Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange, pp. 36–63.
6. On wild habitat of alpaca and llama, see F. F. Zeuner, A History of Domesticated Animals (London, 1963), pp. 437–38. I was unable to find any literature on the diseases of guinea pigs, llamas, or alpacas.
7. Cf. Daphne A. Roe, A Plague of Corn: The Social History of Pellagra (Ithaca and London, 1973), pp. 15–30 and passim.
8. Clifford Thorpe Smith, “Depopulation of the Central Andes in the 16th Century,” Current Anthropology, 5 (1970), 453–60; Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange, pp. 112–13.
9. Cf. the interesting summary of the evolution of opinion in Henry F. Dobyns, “Estimating Aboriginal American Population: An Appraisal of Techniques with a New Hemispheric Estimate,” Current Anthropology, 7 (1966), 395–416.
10. Sherburne F. Cook led this revision of opinion beginning with his essay, “The Extent and Significance of Disease among the Indians of Baja California, 1697–1773,” Ibero-Americana, 12 (1937). Thereafter appeared: Sherburne F. Cook and Lesley Byrd Simpson, “The Population of Central Mexico in the 16th Century,” Ibero-Americana, 31 (1948); Sherburne F. Cook and Woodrow Borah, “The Indian Population of Central Mexico, 1531–1610,” Ibero-Americana, 45 (1963); and as a sort of climactic demonstration of statistical and critical sophistication, Sherburne F. Cook and Woodrow Borah, Essays in Population History: Mexico and the Caribbean, 2 vols. (Berkeley, 1971–73).
11. Cf. convenient summaries in Woodrow Borah, “America as Model: The Demographic Impact of European Expansion upon the Non-European World,” Actas y Memorias del XXXV Congresso Internacional de Americanistas (Mexico, 1964), III, 379–87; Henry F. Dobyns, “Estimating Aboriginal American Population,” Current Anthropology, 7 (1966), 395–416.
12. Ibid., p. 413. For an impassioned (yet epidemiologically uninformed) account of similar demographic destruction among Eskimo in the Canadian Arctic, see Farley Mowat, The Desperate People (Boston, 1959).
13. John F. Marchand, “Tribal Epidemics in the Yukon,” Journal of the American Medical Association, 23 (December 18, 1943) pp. 1019–0; George Catlin, The Manners, Customs and Condition of the North American Indians (London, 1841), I, 80, II, 257. I owe these references to Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in Aboriginal Depopulation in America,” William and Mary Quarterly (forthcoming, April 19
76).
14. So Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History, pp. 194–95, tentatively identifies this affliction; but definitive description of typhus in America comes only in 1576 with an epidemic restricted to Mexico. Not only humans suffered: the epidemic of 1546 was preceded by an epizootic, 1544–45, which drastically reduced llama flocks. Cf. Nathan Wachtel, La Vision des Vainçus: Les Indiens du Perou Devant de Conquête Espagnole (Paris, 1971), p. 147.
15. Typhus fever is due to a rickettsial infection. As with plague, rats and their fleas constitute a reservoir of typhus infection; but in epidemic situations a simpler cycle involving only men and human lice prevails. Zinsser, op. cit., pp. 167ff.
16. F. J. Fisher, “Influenza and Inflation in Tudor England,” Economic History Review, 18 (1965), 120–29. The Elizabethan poor law and Statute of Artificers were, Fisher suggests, legislative responses to the resulting dislocations of English society.
17. Fujikawa Yu, Nikon Shippei Shi (Tokyo, 1969) as abstracted for me by Dr. Joseph Cha. Chinese records, however, do not seem to mention anything unusual in the 1550s.
18. Sherburne F. Cook, “The Extent and Significance of Disease Among the Indians of Baja California, 1697–1773,” Ibero-Americana, 12 (1937). Cook calculated that a population of 41, 500 after the first pestilence shrank to a mere 3, 972 by 1775.
19. But not altogether impossible, since digging up burial grounds and statistical analysis of age patterns among skeletons, etc., can reconstruct demographic disasters. Cf. Thomas H. Charlton, “On Post-conquest Depopulation in the Americas,” Current Anthropology, XII (1971), 518.
20. William Wood, New England’s Prospect (London, 1634), wrote that the “Lord put an end to this quarrel by smiting them with smallpox … Thus did the Lord allay their quarrelsome spirit and make room for the following part of his army.” Quoted in Esther Wagner Stearn and Allen E. Stearn, The Effect of Smallpox on the Destiny of the Amerindian (Boston, 1945), p. 22.
21. Joseph Stocklein, Der Neue Welt Bott (Augsburg and Graz, 1728–9), quoted in Stearn and Stearn, op. cit., p. 17.
22. Percy M. Ashburn, The Ranks of Death: A Medical History of the Conquest of America (New York, 1947), pp. 57–79, analyzed details of several such expeditions and concluded that famine and scurvy were the two principal killers of European colonists and conquistadors.
23. Frederick L. Dunn, “On the Antiquity of Malaria in the Western Hemisphere,” Human Biology, 37 (1965), 385–93. Other experts have argued differently, e.g., L. J. Bruce-Chwatt, “Paleogenesis and Paleoepidemiology of Primate Malaria,” World Health Organization, Bulletin, 32 (1965), 377–82. The Amerindian testimony, cited above, to the effect that fevers were unknown before the white men came, would of course also support Dunn’s conclusion.
24. Ashburn, op. cit., pp. 112–15.
25. Marston Bates, “The Ecology of Anopheline Mosquitoes,” in Mark F. Boyd, ed., Malariology (Philadelphia, 1949), I, 302–30; L. W. Hackett, Malaria in Europe: An Ecological Study (Oxford, 1937), 85–08.
26. For current data on the distribution of malaria in the New World, cf. Ernest Carroll Faust, “Malaria Incidence in North America,” in Mark F. Boyd, Malariology, I, 748–63; Arnaldo Gabaldon, “Malaria Incidence in the West Indies and South America,” ibid., I, 746–87. Though we are tempted to think of malaria as a disease of tropical and subtropical climates, it was in fact prevalent in the whole Mississippi Valley in the nineteenth century and extended its range northward into Canada as well. Cf. E. H. Ackerknecht, “Malaria in the Upper Mississippi Valley,” Supplement # 4, Bulletin of the History of Medicine (Baltimore, 1945). For malaria as a probable killer of coastal Amerindian populations of the Caribbean, cf. Woodrow Borah and Sherburne F. Cook, “The Aboriginal Population of Central Mexico on the Eve of the Spanish Conquest,” Ibero-Americana, 45 (1963), 89.
27. Henry Rose Carter, yellow Fever: An Epidemiological and Historical Study of Its Place of Origin (Baltimore, 1931), p. 10. When Carter published this book he was arguing against the fact that yellow fever was first identified in the Americas, and was recognized in Africa only in 1782. This led to the idea that it was an import to the Old World from the Caribbean. Subsequent study, including the observation that American monkeys are liable to epidemic death from yellow fever, whereas those of the African rain forest exhibit a well-adjusted tolerance for the infection, have confirmed Carter’s view. Cf. Richard Fiennes, Zoonoses of Primates (Ithaca, New York, 1967), p. 13; Macfarlane Burnet and David O. White, Natural History of Infectious Disease, 4th ed. (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 242–49.
28. The contrast in environments was sharpest in Peru, and the survival differential between altiplano and coastlands was correspondingly greater there than in Mexico—or so imperfect statistics seem to show. Thus Clifford Thorpe Smith, “Depopulation of the Central Andes in the 16th century,” Current Anthropology, 11 (1970), 453–60, find the following ratios of depopulation between 1520 and 1571:
Sierra 3.4:1
Coast 58.0:1
Sherburne F. Cook and Woodrow Borah, Essays in Population History: Mexico and the Caribbean (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971), I, 79–89, present graphs and tables illustrating the speedier and greater destruction of Amerindian population in the tropical coastal zones of Mexico. Translated into ratios like those used by Smith, these become, for the years 1531–1610:
Plateau 14:1
Coast 16:1
The Peruvian data are affected by the breakdown of irrigation required to keep agriculture going on the arid coasts; the Mexican cover a longer time span and thus reflect a longer impact of unfamiliar disease upon the native inhabitants.
29. Philip Curtin, “Epidemiology and the Slave Trade,” Political Science Quarterly, 83 (1968), 190–216; Francisco Guerra, “The Influence of Disease on Race, Logistics, and Colonization in the Antilles,” Journal of Tropical Medicine, 49 (1966), 23–35; Wilbur Zelinsky, “The Historical Geography of the Negro Population of Latin America,” Journal of Negro History, 34 (1949), 153–221.
30. Henry F. Dobyns, “Estimating Aboriginal American Population,” Current Anthropology, 7 (1966), 395–416; Sherburne F. Cook, “The Significance of Disease in the Extinction of the New England Indians,” Human Biology, 45 (1973), 485–508. For a naive but recent survey of the matter, see Wilbur R Jacobs, “The Tip of an Iceberg: Pre-Columbian Indian Demography and Some Implications for Revisionism,” William and Mary Quarterly, 31 (1974), 123–32.
31. The Annals of the Cakchiquels and Title of the Lords of Totonicapan, Adrian Recinos, et al., trans. (Norman, Oklahoma, 1953), p. 116, quoted in Crosby, The Columbian Exchange, p. 58.
32. Early nineteenth-century figures for mortality among native African troops serving in the British army show about a 50 per cent increase in disease mortality as a consequence of moving within tropical Africa to a new region with new disease exposures and, of course, a radically new way of life. Philip D. Curtin, “Epidemiology and the Slave Trade,” Political Science Quarterly, 83 (1968), 204–5. Death rates for white personnel, however, remained far above those of Africans.
33. Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, Wisconsin, 1969), pp. 270–71.
34. P. Huard, “La Syphilis Vue par les Médicins Arabo-Persans, Indiens et Sino-Japonais du XVe et XVIe Siècles,” Histoire de la Médicine, 6 (1956), 9–13. Recommended cures were also of world-wide distribution, with the Chinese pharmacopeia taking the lead. Cf. K. Chimin Wong and Wu Lien-teh, History of Chinese Medicine, 2nd ed. (Shanghai, 1936), pp. 136, 215–16. These authors are of the opinion that despite contemporary testimony to the novelty of the disease in the sixteenth century, ancient Chinese texts reveal familiarity with syphilitic sores. Symptoms and language being as variable as they are, the facts seem completely irrecoverable.
35. Cf. the judicious summary in Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbian Exchange, pp. 122–56. Evidence of adaptation among isolated Amerindian tribes of the Amazon basin to syphilitic infection is ambiguous. Some tribes show widespread positive reactions to tests
designed to tell whether they had been exposed to such infection; other tribes showed no such reactions, except among individuals who were known to have had contact with the outside world. Those tribes where positive reactions were widespread, however, showed no clinical signs of either yaws or syphilis or a third form of the infection, known as pinta. This remarkable result may indicate lengthy adaptation between host and parasite, and would be compatible with the theory of a Columbian introduction of syphilis into the Old World, for among a new population, inexperienced with the infectious agent in question, entirely different and far more fulminant symptoms are to be expected. Yet the erratic distribution of exposure to spirochetic infection among Amazonian Indians remains puzzling. Cf. Francis L. Black, “Infectious Diseases in Primitive Societies,” Science, 187 (1975), 517.
36. Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History, pp. 183–92, 210–28.
37. Cf. Charles Creighton, History of Epidemics in Britain, I, 237–81.
38. Cf. Albert Colnat, Les Épidémies et l’Histoire (Paris, 1937), p. 108.
39. Karl F. Helleiner, “The Population of Europe from the Black Death to the Eve of the Vital Revolution,” Cambridge Economic History of Europe, TV (Cambridge, 1967), 20–40.
Plagues and Peoples Page 36
