Plagues and Peoples

by William H. McNeill

  40. For plague, see Chapter IV above; for malaria, L. W. Hackett, Malaria in Europe: An Ecological Study (Oxford, 1937), pp. 53–96; and below, Chapter VI.

  41. Cf. D. E. C. Eversley, “Population, Economy and Society,” in D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley, Population in History: Essays in Historical Demography (London, 1965), p. 57: “Everyone is agreed that the expectation of life was greater at the beginning of the modern statistical era [ca. 1750] than it had been in the seventeenth century. Yet we cannot pinpoint the improvement by time, area or cause.… If people lived longer, it must have been partly because they were cleaner, partly because some effective medical practice was known, partly because famines were no longer severe, but mostly because the great killer epidemics failed to return, for reasons which might not be connected with human actions at all.” (Italics added.) It seems obvious to me that the reason for the decay of the force of epidemics was their increased frequency, until epidemic became merely endemic childhood disease.

  K. F. Helleiner, “The Vital Revolution Reconsidered,” in D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley, eds., Population in History: Essays in Historical Demography (London, 1965), pp. 79–86, arrives at essentially the same conclusion with reference to eighteenth-century European population growth: not any notable diminution of death rates in normal times but rather a leveling off of peaks of mortality in times of crisis was the major growth factor in Helleiner’s opinion. Blunting of famine by improved marketing of food supplies plus increased food production had something to do with the reduction of crisis die-offs; but the changing pattern of epidemic incidence—which these authors seem unaware of was surely at work also.

  42. Temperature dropped in the seventeenth century; the peak of this “Little Ice Age” seems to have come in the first decade of the eighteenth century. Cf. Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate Since the Year 1000 (New York, 1971).

  43. This has been persuasively analyzed by Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranée au Temps de Phillippe II, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1966), English translation, New York, 1972.

  44. Despite the well-deserved obloquy that historians have lavished on the destructiveness of the soldieries in the Thirty Years’ War, deaths from disease far outstripped deaths from weapons in this as in every European conflict prior to the twentieth century. For a few details, cf. R. J. G. Concannon, “The Third Enemy: The Role of Epidemics in the Thirty Years’ War,” Journal of World History, 10 (1967), 500–11.

  45. Helleiner, op. cit., pp. 81–84.

  46. For an instructive analysis of the Tuscan model see Carlo M. Cipolla, Christofano and the Plague: A Study in the History of Public Health in the Age of Galileo (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1973); for the Venetian model see Brian Pulían, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The Social Institutions of a Catholic State to 1620 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1971).

  47. As whites advanced, Amerindian populations withered, much as a penicillin mold creates a bacteria-free zone around its edges. In the United States, it was only in 1907, when smallpox vaccinations became compulsory in Indian schools, that population decay among Amerindians was checked, according to E. S. Stearn and A. E. Stearn, The Effect of Smallpox on the Destiny of the Amerindian (Boston, 1945), pp. 71, 136.

  48. Cf. A. Grenfell Price, The Western Invasions of the Pacific and Its Continents: A Study of Moving Frontiers and Changing Landscapes, 1513–1958 (Oxford, 1963); Douglas L. Oliver, The Pacific Islands (New York, 1961); J. Burton Cleland, “Disease amongst Australian Aborigines,” Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 31 (1928), 53–59, 66–0, 141–45, 173–77, 307–13; Bolton G. Corney, “The Behavior of Certain Epidemic Diseases in Natives of Polynesia with Especial Refer- enee to the Fiji Islands,” Epidemiological Society of London, Transactions, new series, 3 (1883–84), 76–95.

  49. Unnumbered pages in the back of I. S. Gurvich, Etnicheskaya Istoriya Severo-Vostoka Sib eri, Trudy Instituía Etnografiye, new series, 39 (1966), offer a series of graphs showing how various Siberian peoples decayed and in some cases recovered their numbers between 1650 and 1940.

  50. Philip Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, p. 270; C. W. Dixon, Smallpox (London, 1962), p. 208.

  51. P. Huard, “La Syphilis Vue par les Médicins Arabo-Persans, Indiens et Sino-Japonais du XVe et XVIe Siècles,” Histoire de la Medicine, 6 (1956), 9–13.

  52. Cf. Appendix for details.

  53. Ping-ti Ho, Studies in the Population of China, 1368–1953, p. 277.

  54. Chu K’o-chen, op. cit., p. 37.

  55. Irene Taeuber, The Population of Japan, pp. 20–21.

  56. Totals are of course not particularly significant, since some epidemics were serious, others not. But here they are:

  1300–1399 27 epidemics

  1400–1499 28 epidemics

  1500–1599 21 epidemics

  1600–1699 18 epidemics

  1700–1799 32 epidemics

  1800–1867 33 epidemics

  57. So says Kingsley Davis, The Population of India and Pakistan (Princeton, 1951), p. 25.

  58. In Europe, maize and potatoes became significant only after 1650; in China, maize and sweet potatoes seem to have spread more rapidly, perhaps because the intensive hand labor characteristic of Chinese farming easily allowed experimentation with a new crop, whereas the rigidities of collective “open field” cultivation, which prevailed in most of northern Europe until the eighteenth century or later, powerfully inhibited any departure from custom. On spread of American food crops, cf. Berthold Laufer, The American Plant Migration: I—The Potato [Field Museum, Anthropological Series Publication #48] (Chicago, 1938); William L. Langer, “Europe’s Initial Population Explosion,” American Historical Review, 69 (1963), 1–17; W. H. McNeill, The Influence of the Potato on Irish History (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 1947); Traían Stoianovich, “Le Mais dans les Balkans,” Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 21 (1966), 1026–0; Ping-ti Ho, “The Introduction of American Food Plants into China,” American Anthropologist, 57 (1955), 191–201; Philip Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, Wisconsin, 1969), p. 270.

  59. My colleague, Donald Lach, first called my attention to the vitamin value of American food crops, and their importance in the contemporary cuisine of India. Cf. also Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange, p. 194. The significance of vitamin-deficiency diseases in traditional civilized societies was sometimes very great. European encounters with scurvy on shipboard are relatively well known; but prior to the spread of potatoes, which also contain important vitamins, European peasantries, especially in the North, often suffered from scurvy over the winter. Cf. August Hirsch, Handbook of Geographical and Historical Pathology, II, 521–25. As for China, cf. T’ao Lee, “Historical Notes on Some Vitamin Deficiency Diseases of China,” in Brothwell and Sandison, Disease in Antiquity, pp. 417–22.

  60. For a general conspectus of the rise of these empires see W. H. McNeill, The Rise of the West, Ch. XI.

  Chapter VI

  1. Wu et al., Plague, pp. 4–12.

  2. Jacques M. May, ed., Studies in Disease Ecology (New York, 1961), p. 37.

  3. See above, Chapter II, p. 40.

  4. This statement may reflect lack of adequate information. Cf. Charles Leslie, “The Modernization of Asian Medical Systems,” John J. Poggie, Jr., and Robert N. Lynch, eds., Rethinking Modernization: Anthropological Perspectives (New York, 1974), pp. 69–108.

  5. J. Ehrard, “Opinions médicales en France au XVIIIe siècle: la Peste et l’idée de contagion,” Annales ESC, 12 (1957), 46–59; Ernst Rodenwalt, Pest in Venedig 1575–77: Ein Beitrag zur Frage der Infektkette bei den Pestepidemien West Europas (Heidelberg, 1953); Brian Pulían, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The Social Institutions of a Catholic State (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1971), pp. 315ff.

  6. Cf. Allen Debus, The English Paracelsians (London, 1965), pp. 67–8.

  7. One estimate puts the population of Oceania in 1522 at 3.5
million. By 1939 the number of natives had fallen to 2.0 million according to Douglas L. Oliver, The Pacific Islands (New York, 1961), p. 255.

  8. Scholarly efforts to calculate world populations date from the seventeenth century, when a group of Englishmen, of whom John Graunt (d. 1674) and William Petty (d. 1687) were the most important, became interested in “political arithmetic” and in more theoretical matters like the mathematical regularities in London’s patterns of birth and death. In the twentieth century speculation about world population took up where these seventeenth-century worthies had left off. Walter F. Willcox, “World Population Growth and Movement Since 1650,” in Walter F. Willcox, ed., International Mißrations, 2 vols. (New York, 1929–31), simply reproduced the opinions of John Graunt in his estimates of Asian and African populations as of 1650. These guesses were modified on an impressionistic basis by A. M. Carr-Saunders, World Population, Past Growth and Present Trends (Oxford, 1936).

  More recent students, having elaborate mathematical tools for refining census data of our own time, are unwilling to endorse and unable to improve such loose “order of magnitude” guesswork. Cf. John D. Durand, “The Modern Expansion of World Population,” American Philosophical Society Proceedings, 11 (1967), 136–59.

  Yet however admirable and powerful mathematical analysis of census data can be, by confining attention to the most recent two centuries of the world’s history demographers focus attention on what is a grossly atypical sample of demographic history as a whole. They confine their study to an age in which epidemic disease had ceased to be nearly as important as in earlier times and when public control and containment of local violence has attained unparalleled efficiency. Even the incidence of famine has been much reduced by organized relief and the potentiality of redistributing food stocks through mechanical transport on short notice and on a global scale. By working so closely with an untypical sample of human demographic history, the experts tend to forget—or even disdainfully dismiss—factors that had been determinant in earlier ages.

  9. Ping-ti Ho, Studies on the Population of China, 1386–1953, pp. 277–78.

  10. Durand, op. cit., p. 137, offers the figure of 125 million for Europe’s population in 1750 and 152 million in 1800. Marcel R. Reinhard et André Armengaud, Histoire Générale de la Population Mondiale, pp. 114–201, summarize recent results of local studies in Europe without offering any overall figures.

  11. Debate over the interrelation between the industrial revolution, population growth, good and bad crop years and disease incidence is lively among British historians, who, however, have mostly followed the scientific demographers into such fascination with the way quantitative data can be converted into birth and death rates, fertility indices, age and sex pyramids, price indices, and other such mathematical artifacts as to pay little attention to disease. See for instance Thomas McKeown, R. G. Brown, R. G. Record, “An Interpretation of the Modern Rise of Population in Europe,” Population Studies, 26 (1972), 341–82. Some, however, of whom P. E. Razzell, “Population Change in Eighteenth Century England: A Reinterpretation,” Economic History Review, 18 (1965), 312–32, is the most emphatic, have brought changing incidence of disease under consideration. For a recent and judicious summary, see Thomas McKeown, “Medical Issues in Historical Demography,” in Edwin Clark, ed., Modern Methods in the History of Medicine (London, 1971), 57–74.

  12. This figure is derived by adding totals offered for European settlement in different parts of America ca. 1800, listed in Reinhard and Armengaud, op. cit., pp. 202–6.

  13. Georg Sticker, Abhandlungen, I, 176–77, 237ff. For interesting sidelights on other aspects of Russia’s official reaction to the plague of 1771, see John T. Alexander, “Catherine II, Bubonic Plague, and the Problem of Industry in Moscow,” American Historical Review, 79 (1974), 637–71.

  14. Reinhard and Armengaud, Histoire Générale de la Population Mondiale, pp. 180–81.

  15. On Irish population see Robert E. Kennedy, Jr., The Irish: Emigration, Marriage, Fertility (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1973). For the role of the potato in the drama, my unpublished Ph.D. thesis, The Influence of the Potato in Irish History (Cornell, 1947), provides the background for my remarks.

  16. L. W. Hackett, Malaria in Europe, an Ecological Study, pp. 53–6.

  17. Gordon Philpet, “Enclosure and Population Growth in Eighteenth Century England,” Explorations in Economic History, 12 (1975), 29–46, brought this idea to my attention.

  18. Jean-Paul Desaive, ed., Médecins, Climat et Epidemies à la Fin du XVIIIe Siècle (Paris, 1972); Jean-Pierre Goubert, Malades et Médecins en Bretagne, 1770–1970 (Paris, 1974).

  19. P. E. Razzell, “Population Change in Eighteenth Century England: A Reinterpretation,” Economic History Review, 18 (1965), 312–2; D. E. C. Eversley, “Epidemiology as Social History,” Foreword to Charles Creighton, A History of Epidemics in Great Britain, 2nd ed. (New York, 1965), p. 29.

  20. For details of the continued significance of smallpox in London, see William A. Grey, “Two Hundred and Fifty Years of Smallpox in London,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 45 (1882), 399–443.

  21. Genevieve Miller, The Adoption of Inoculation for Smallpox in England and France (Philadelphia, 1957), pp. 194–240.

  22. The principal early champion of inoculation was the famous Congregational minister, Cotton Mather (d. 1728). Cf. Genevieve Miller, “Smallpox Inoculation in England and America: A Reappraisal,” William and Mary Quarterly, 13 (1956), 476–92. On epidemics in colonial America see John Duffy, Epidemics in Colonial America (Baton Rouge, 1953).

  23. Cf. J. C. Long, Lord Jeffrey Amherst, Soldier of the King (New York, 1933), p. 186–87.

  24. Sherburne F. Cook, “F. X. Balmis and the Introduction of Vaccination to Spanish America,” Bulletin for the History of Medicine, 11 (1941), 543–60; 12 (1942), 70–101. Epidemics had been a serious administrative concern in Spanish America for a long time. Cf. Donald B. Cooper, Epidemic Disease in Mexico City, 1761–1813: An Administrative, Social and Medical Study (Austin, Texas, 1965).

  25. Harry Wain, A History of Preventive Medicine (Springfield, Illinois, 1970), pp. 177, 185, 195.

  26. Lady Mary can also be credited with introducing into England a quite new attitude toward an alien civilization. Instead of fear or scorn—or reluctant admiration for a recognized threat from afar—she and others became interested in Ottoman ways as a sample of the diversity of human behavior. Such disinterested, idle curiosity required leisure, and perhaps also a deep sense of the basic superiority of one’s own inherited style of life—all of which Lady Mary’s aristocratic circle enjoyed. Cf. Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (Edinburgh, 1960).

  27. Inoculation may also have been practiced in Wales before 1721. Perrot Williams, M.D., “A Method of Procuring the Small Pox Used in South Wales,” Royal Society of London, Transactions Abridged III, Transactions to the Year 1732 [John Eames and John Martyn, eds.] (London, 1734), pp. 618–20. C. S. Dixon, Smallpox, p. 216, also mentions folk variolation reported from Poland (1671), Scotland (1715), Naples (1754).

  28. Genevieve Miller, The Adoption of Inoculation, pp. 48–67.

  29. K. Chimin Wong and Wu Lien-teh, History of Chinese Medicine, pp. 215–16.

  30. There seems no sound basis for the story popularized by Voltaire, Lettres Philosophiques (reprinted in Paris, 1915), II, 130, to the effect that inoculation had been invented among Circassians seeking to preserve the fair complexions of their daughters for sale to Turkish harems.

  31. C. W. Dixon, Smallpox, pp. 216–27; Genevieve Miller, The Adoption of Inoculation for Smallpox in England and France.

  32. On Near Eastern practices with respect to smallpox inoculation, cf. Patrick Russell, “An Account of Inoculation in Arabia in a Letter from Dr. Patrick Russell, Physician at Aleppo to Alexander Russell, M.D., F.R.S.,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 18 (1768), 140–50. Russell’s report was in response to inquiry from the Royal Society.

&
nbsp; 33. J. S. Chambers, The Conquest of Cholera (New York, 1938), p. 11.

  34. Wu Lien-teh, “The Early Days of Western Medicine in China,” Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1931, pp. 9–10; K. Chimin Wong and Wu Lien-teh, History of Chinese Medicine, pp. 276–80.

  35. Private letter from Professor D. B. Shimkin, Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois.

  36. Harry Wain, A History of Preventive Medicine (Springfield, Illinois, 1970), p. 206.

  37. For a catalogue of recorded outbreaks, cf. Friedrich Prinzing, Epidemics Resulting from Wars (Oxford, 1916), pp. 92–164. Prinzing concludes that accurate totals are unattainable, but suggests that in the single campaign of 1813–14, one tenth of the population died in this single epidemic.

  38. The fungus made it across the oceans because bigger and faster ships plying between South America and Europe could traverse the tropics without allowing their holds to heat up past the critical temperature which the fungus could not survive.

  39. One calculation concluded that one out of every forty-six New Yorkers died annually in 1810, whereas one out of twenty-seven did so in 1859. Cf. Howard D. Kramer, “The Beginnings of the Public Health Movement in the United States,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 21 (1947), 352–76. In Paris the death rate increased between 1817 and 1835 from 31 to 34 per thousand. Cf. Roderick E. McGrew, Russia and the Cholera, 1823–1832 (Madison and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1965), p. 6.

  40. Cf. Aidan T. Cockburn, The Evolution and Eradication of Infectious Diseases, p. 196: “… there is no reason why the last case of smallpox should not disappear within two or three years.” (1963).

  41. Laverne Kuhnke, Resistance and Response to Modernization: Preventive Medicine and Social Control in Egypt, 1825–1850 (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Chicago, 1971), p. 51.

  42. A number of casual references to sudden outbreaks of lethal disease in southern and western India that sound like cholera punctuate European records from the days of the first Portuguese residents at Goa. Cf. R Pollitzer, Cholera (Geneva, 1959), pp. 12–13. C. Macnamara, A History of Asiatic Cholera (London, 1876), discovered no fewer than sixty-four such references dating between 1503 and 1817.