The Plague Cycle

by Charles Kenny

  31. King Afonso I, letter to King John III of Portugal, 1526. Retrieved from https://mrcaseyhistory.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/king-afonso-i-letter-to-king-john-iii-of-portugal.pdf.

  32. Population estimates from the Maddison Project website, http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/oriindex.htm.

  33. Philip Curtin et al., African History from Earliest Times to Independence (New York: Pearson, 1995).

  34. Stanley L. Engerman and Kenneth L. Sokoloff, in Factor Endowments, Inequality, and Paths of Development Among New World Economics, no. w9259, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2002, argue that it wasn’t so much the risk of death to colonists that shaped the population makeup of colonies, it was more the nature of the land they colonized. In the tropics, colonies were built on a model of exploiting slaves or natives in mines or on large plantations growing crops like sugar and tobacco. Outside the tropics, the crops that did well could be grown on small farms as successfully as they could on large ones, so demand for slave labor was lower and homesteading made sense. As the areas where tropical diseases were the greatest threat and the areas where plantation farming made sense largely overlap, the stories reinforce each other.

  35. Nathan Nunn, “The Long-Term Effects of Africa’s Slave Trades,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 1, no. 23 (2008): 139–176, and Nathan Nunn and Leonard Wantchekon, “The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa,” American Economic Review 101 (2011): 3221–3252.

  36. Stelios Michalopoulos and Elias Papaioannou, “Further Evidence on the Link Between Pre-Colonial Political Centralization and Comparative Economic Development in Africa,” Economics Letters 126 (2015): 57–62.

  37. Patrick Manson, “The Malaria Parasite,” Journal of the Royal African Society 6, no. 23 (1907): 225–233.

  38. There is argument over the New World status of the disease (see for example Watts, Epidemics and History p. 130), but some evidence suggests both that it was present in the Americas before Columbus’s arrival (see Bruce M. Rothschild et al., “First European Exposure to Syphilis: The Dominican Republic at the Time of Columbian Contact,” Clinical Infectious Diseases 31, no. 4 [2000]: 936–941) and that the disease is most closely related to a variation of yaws found in Guyana (Kristin N. Harper et al., “On the Origin of the Treponematoses: A Phylogenetic Approach,” PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases 2, no. 1 [2008]).

  39. Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2007), p. 75.

  40. Jo Nelson Hays, The Burdens of Disease: Epidemics and Human Response in Western History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), p. 70, and Dorothy Crawford, Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped Our History (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 125.

  41. Frederick Fox Cartwright and Michael Denis Biddiss, Disease and History (New York: Marboro Books, 1972), p. 63.

  42. A. B. Jannetta, Epidemics and Mortality in Early Modern Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).

  43. A. Jannetta, “Jennerian Vaccination and the Creation of a National Public Health Agenda in Japan, 1850–1900,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 83, no. 1 (2009): 125–140.

  44. Zinsser Rats, Lice and History, p. 152.

  45. Ibid., pp. 155–156.

  46. Ibid., p. 168.

  47. Bray, Armies of Pestilence, p. 139.

  48. Harrison, Disease and the Modern World, p. 84.

  49. Michael B. A. Oldstone, Viruses, Plagues, and History: Past, Present, and Future (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. 2009), p. 107.

  50. Joseph M. Conlon, The Historical Impact of Epidemic Typhus. Retrieved from http://phthiraptera.info/sites/phthiraptera.info/files/61235.pdf.

  51. Jakob Walter, Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier (New York: Doubleday, 2012), p. 43.

  52. Stephan Talty, The Illustrious Dead: The Terrifying Story of How Typhus Killed Napoleon’s Greatest Army (New York: Crown Publishers, 2009), p. 62.

  53. Talty, The Illustrious Dead, p. 84.

  54. Ibid., p. 156.

  55. Walter, Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier, p. 57.

  56. Ibid., pp. 62–63.

  57. Ibid., p. 78.

  58. Didier Raoult et al., “Evidence for Louse-Transmitted Diseases in Soldiers of Napoleon’s Grand Army in Vilnius,” Journal of Infectious Diseases 193, no. 1 (2006): 112–120.

  59. Bray, Armies of Pestilence, p. 146.

  Chapter Five: The Exclusion Instinct

  1. See the enjoyable discussion in Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature (London: Penguin UK, 1994).

  2. It seems hard to explain (for example) the hideous death toll that Polynesians first exposed to measles suffered in the nineteenth century—approaching 80 percent—without factoring in a lower level of genetic resistance. Robert A. McGuire and Philip Coelho, Parasites, Pathogens, and Progress (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). See also Elinor K. Karlsson, Dominic P. Kwiatkowski, and Pardis C. Sabeti, “Natural Selection and Infectious Disease in Human Populations,” Nature Reviews Genetics 15, no. 6 (2014): 379.

  3. Andrew Spielman and Michael d’Antonio, Mosquito: The Story of Man’s Deadliest Foe (New York: Hyperion, 2002).

  4. Frédéric B. Piel et al., “Global Distribution of the Sickle Cell Gene and Geographical Confirmation of the Malaria Hypothesis,” Nature Communications 1 (2010): 104.

  5. See Karlsson et al., “Natural Selection and Infectious Disease.” R. S. Bray, Armies of Pestilence: The Impact of Disease on History (Cambridge, UK: James Clarke & Co., 2004), p. 37, notes another potential channel for resistance to infection, through the immunoglobulin G, an antibody that can pass temporary immunity from mother to child across the placenta. If the child is infected before he or she has destroyed the inherited immunoglobulin, it will help the child survive the disease and develop longer-term resistance.

  6. Valerie Curtis et al., “Disgust as an Adaptive System for Disease Avoidance Behavior,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 366, no. 1563 (2011): 389–401.

  7. Quoted in Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2007), p. 138.

  8. Benjamin L. Hart, “Behavioral Adaptations to Pathogens and Parasites: Five Strategies,” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 14, no. 3 (1990): 273–294.

  9. Sarah Cobey, “Modeling Infectious Disease Dynamics,” Science, April 24, 2020.

  10. Kyla Epstein, “Just 14% of Americans Support Ending Social Distancing,” Business Insider, April 22, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/poll-most-americans-support-coronavirus-social-distancing-measures-2020-4, and Alexis Le Nestour, “Five Findings from a New Phone Survey in Senegal,” Center for Global Development blog, April 24, 2020, https://www.cgdev.org/blog/five-findings-new-phone-survey-senegal.

  11. Chad R. Mortensen et al., “Infection Breeds Reticence: The Effects of Disease Salience on Self-Perceptions of Personality and Behavioral Avoidance Tendencies,” Psychological Science 21 (2010): 440–447.

  12. Alan M. Kraut, “Foreign Bodies: The Perennial Negotiation over Health and Culture in a Nation of Immigrants,” Journal of American Ethnic History (2004): 3–22.

  13. James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the First Civilizations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), p. 99.

  14. Jeanette Farrell, Invisible Enemies: Stories of Infectious Disease (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1998), p. 62.

  15. Leprosy Mission, “Diana Princess of Wales,” published online at the Leprosy Mission website, http://www.leprosymission.org.uk/about-us-and-leprosy/our-history/diana-princess-of-wales.aspx.

  16. Liang Huigang, Xiang Xiaowei, Huang Cui, Ma Haixia, and Yuan Zhiming, “A Brief History of the Development of Infectious Disease Prevention, Control, and Biosafety Programs in China,”Journal of Biosafety and Biosecurity 2, no. 2 (2020).

  17. Dorothy Porter, Health, Civilization and the State: A History of Public Health from Ancient to Modern Times (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2005), p. 29.

&n
bsp; 18. Sheldon Watts, Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 50, and Porter, Health, Civilization and the State, p. 29.

  19. Watts, Epidemics and History, p. 52.

  20. Ibid., p. 49. In addition, perhaps legitimate cases of the condition became less common in the years after the plague. The spread of tuberculosis may have rendered the one in ten (approximately) who are ever susceptible to Hansen’s disease immune. Porter, Health, Civilization and the State, p. 28.

  21. Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth, “The Three Horsemen of Riches: Plague, War, and Urbanization in Early Modern Europe,” Review of Economic Studies 80, no. 2 (2012): 774–811.

  22. Ibid.

  23. Jo Nelson Hays, The Burdens of Disease: Epidemics and Human Response in Western History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), pp. 54–55, and Watts, Epidemics and History, p. 22.

  24. Porter, Health, Civilization and the State, p. 37.

  25. Eugenia Tognotti, “Lessons from the History of Quarantine, from Plague to Influenza A,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 19, no. 2 (2013): 254.

  26. From Boccaccio, The Decameron, translated by J. M. Rigg (1903). Available at https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/texts/.

  27. Mark Nathan Cohen, Health and the Rise of Civilization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 53.

  28. Mark Harrison, Disease and the Modern World: 1500 to the Present Day (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2013), p. 44.

  29. John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), Chapter 5.

  30. Porter, Health, Civilization and the State, pp. 34–35.

  31. Watts, Epidemics and History, p. 24.

  32. David M. Morens, Gregory K. Folkers, and Anthony S. Fauci, “Emerging Infections: A Perpetual Challenge,” Lancet Infectious Diseases 8, no. 11 (2008): 710–719.

  33. Watts, Epidemics and History, p. 137.

  34. Fahd Khan et al., “The Story of the Condom,” Indian Journal of Urology: Journal of the Urological Society of India 29, no. 1 (2013): 12.

  35. Ibid.

  36. Edward H. Beardsley, “Allied Against Sin: American and British Responses to Venereal Disease in World War I,” Medical History 20, no. 2 (1976): 189–202.

  37. Cited in Farrell, Invisible Enemies, pp. 183–184.

  38. Porter, Health, Civilization and the State, p. 135.

  39. Hays, The Burdens of Disease, p. 172.

  40. Porter, Health, Civilization and the State, p. 137.

  41. Howard Markel and Alexandra Minna Stern, “The Foreignness of Germs: The Persistent Association of Immigrants and Disease in American Society,” Milbank Quarterly 80, no. 4 (2002): 757–788.

  42. Hays, The Burdens of Disease, p. 185.

  43. Kraut, Foreign Bodies.

  44. Hays, The Burdens of Disease, p. 303.

  45. Markel and Stern, “The Foreignness of Germs.”

  46. Adam Nossiter, “Fear of Ebola Breeds a Terror of Physicians,” New York Times, July 27, 2014. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/28/world/africa/ebola-epidemic-west-africa-guinea.html.

  47. Amy Brittan, “The Women Chanted to the Village’s Men…,” Washington Post, January 1, 2015, p. 1.

  48. Jamelle Bouie, “America’s Long History of Immigrant Scaremongering,” Slate, July 18, 2014, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/07/immigrant_scaremongering_and_hate_conservatives_stoke_fears_of_diseased.html.

  49. Ibid.

  50. Mark Schaller and Damian Murray, “Infectious Disease and the Creation of Culture,” Advances in Culture and Psychology 1 (2011): 99–151. See also Florian van Leeuwen et al., “Regional Variation in Pathogen Prevalence Predicts Endorsement of Group-Focused Moral Concerns,” Evolution and Human Behavior 33 (2012). Although note Elizabeth Cashdan and Matthew Steele, “Pathogen Prevalence, Group Bias, and Collectivism in the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample,” Human Nature 24, no. 1 (2013): 59–75.

  51. Cullen S. Hendrix and Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, “Civil War: Is It All About Disease and Xenophobia? A Comment on Letendre, Fincher & Thornhill,” Biological Reviews 87, no. 1 (2012): 163–167.

  52. So far, the researchers working on parasite stress haven’t been able to convincingly demonstrate that it is the behavioral response to communicable disease that dominates in the relationship between quality of life and levels of infection. The best they have managed is to note that measures of parasite stress dating back to the 1930s are related to current levels of violence, xenophobia, and so on. But countries that were healthier, richer, and more peaceful in the 1930s remain healthier, richer, and more peaceful today, so that the relationship holds between modern development outcomes and seventy-year-old parasite stress isn’t fully reassuring as evidence of what causes what. Even if parasites play a role in violence and distrust, it might be through more the direct impact of illness or some other mechanism than greater distrust of strangers. For example, Matteo Cervellati et al., Malaria Risk and Civil Violence, Munich Discussion Paper 2017–8, University of Munich, suggest that malaria outbreaks are linked to civil unrest because they cause sizeable economic losses through incapacity and medical payments rather than through any change in attitudes.

  Chapter Six: Cleaning Up

  1. Paul W. Sherman and Jennifer Billing, “Darwinian Gastronomy: Why We Use Spices,” BioScience 49, no. 6 (1999): 453–463.

  2. Mark Schaller and Damian Murray, “Infectious Disease and the Creation of Culture,” Advances in Culture and Psychology 1 (2011).

  3. W. Hodding Carter, Flushed: How the Plumber Saved Civilization (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), pp. 25–26.

  4. Marco Polo, The Travels, translated by Ronald Latham (New York: Penguin, 1958), pp. 213–222.

  5. Ibid., pp. 130 and 136.

  6. Lord Amulree, “Hygienic Conditions in Ancient Rome and Modern London,” Medical History 17.3 (1973): 244–255.

  7. Frederick Fox Cartwright and Michael Denis Biddiss, Disease and History (New York: Marboro Books, 1972), p. 23.

  8. St. Jerome, Letters, No. 107: To Laeta. Retrieved from New Advent, http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3001107.htm.

  9. John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time (New York: HarperCollins, 2005).

  10. Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth, “The Three Horsemen of Riches: Plague, War, and Urbanization in Early Modern Europe,” Review of Economic Studies 80, no. 2 (2013): 774–811.

  11. Quoted in D. Evans, “A Good Riddance of Bad Rubbish? Scatological Musings on Rubbish Disposal and the Handling of ‘Filth’in Medieval and Early Post-Medieval Towns,” in Koen De Groote, Dries Tys, and Marnix Pieters (eds.), Exchanging Medieval Material Culture: Studies on Archaeology and History Presented to Frans Verhaeghe (Brussels, 2010): 267–278.

  12. Amulree, Hygienic Conditions.

  13. Evans, “A Good Riddance of Bad Rubbish?”

  14. Sheldon Watts, Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 16.

  15. Dorothy Porter, Health, Civilization and the State: A History of Public Health from Ancient to Modern Times (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2005), p. 41.

  16. Mark Harrison, Disease and the Modern World: 1500 to the Present Day (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2013), p. 45.

  17. Jo Nelson Hays, The Burdens of Disease: Epidemics and Human Response in Western History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), p. 110.

  18. Ibid., p. 165.

  19. Simon Szreter, “The Importance of Social Intervention in Britain’s Mortality Decline c. 1850–1914: A Re-interpretation of the Role of Public Health,” Social History of Medicine 1, no. 1 (1988): 1–38.

  20. The importance of environment to the disease’s impact is suggested by the fact that in the mid-1930s as many as one-third of US college students still tested positive for tuberculosis
even though death tolls from the disease were a small fraction of their rate fifty years before. Hays, The Burdens of Disease, p. 173.

  21. Ibid., pp. 159–162.

  22. R. S. Bray, Armies of Pestilence: The Impact of Disease on History (Cambridge, UK: James Clarke & Co., 2004), p. 155.

  23. Hastings quoted in Watts, Epidemics and History, p. 185, and Hays, The Burdens of Disease, p. 141.

  24. Watts, Epidemics and History, p. 167.

  25. Bray, Armies of Pestilence, p. 162.

  26. Hays, The Burdens of Disease, p. 135.

  27. Porter, Health, Civilization and the State, p. 88.

  28. Ibid., p. 72.

  29. Quoted in Samuel Edward Finer, The Life and Times of Sir Edwin Chadwick (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2016).

  30. Hays, The Burdens of Disease, p. 145.

  31. Stephen Halliday, “Death and Miasma in Victorian London: An Obstinate Belief,” British Medical Journal 323, no. 7327 (2001): 1469.

  32. Porter, Health, Civilization and the State, p. 118.

  33. Joseph William Bazalgette, On the Main Drainage of London: and the Interception of the Sewage from the River Thames (London: W. Clowes and Sons, 1865).

  34. Halliday, Death and Miasma in Victorian London.

  35. Ibid.

  36. Bazalgette, On the Main Drainage of London.

  37. Ibid., p 14.

  38. Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 107.

  39. Katherine Ashenburg, The Dirt on Clean (New York: North Point Press, 2007), p. 102.

  40. Ibid., pp. 175 and 233.

  41. Szreter, “The Importance of Social Intervention.”

  42. Fabiana Santana, “The World’s Most Expensive Restaurants.” Retrieved from http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2014/12/05/world-most-expensive-restaurants/.

  43. Menu retrieved from http://www.thomaskeller.com/sites/default/files/media/4.27.2016_dinner_tasting.pdf.

  44. Rande Iaboni, “Posh NYC Restaurant Roasted by Health Inspectors,” CNN, March 4, 2014. Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/04/us/new-york-restaurant-health-inspection/.