Cat Roberts & Yuna Farah
September 28, 2013
Honors 490

Group Notes: Plagues and Peoples

Introduction

  • “If Montezuma and his friends first thought the Spaniards were gods, experience showed otherwise” (pg. 19)
  • Gods were known for also bringing about destruction, though
  • It’s known that disease ravaged the native population and left the Spaniards untouched, so why would “experience [show] otherwise?”
  • Since natives were weakened, they were able to be conquered by Spaniards  Spaniards unharmed, said it was because of their God
  • Cultural shift  natives abandoned their religions and converted to Christianity since it appeared that the Spaniards’ God exists
  • Human body vs. parasite
  • Human body can either be ravaged by the parasite or resist infection
  • When resisting infection  causes crisis for parasite
  • Parallel worlds on different scales
  • Spaniards did to natives what a devastating parasite would do to a human body
  • This is seen with conquerors and the conquered again and again
  • The subject of the book  major changes in patterns of pestilential infection

Chapter IV: The Impact of the Mongol Empire on Shifting Disease Balances, 1200-1500

OVERIVIEW

•In this chapter McNeil gives a broad overview of how the plague managed the degree of destruction that it did in Europe and in Asia, focusing specifically on how it spread from location to location. He discusses briefly the cultural impact that the Black Death had on those affected by it and highlights the specific historical altercations this meant for those cultures.

•Mongol overland caravan movement across Asia climaxed under the reign of Genghis Khan (1162-1227). Records reveal that the Eurasian continent was "permeable" (p. 162) under Mongol rule. They progressed in a more northernly route than ever before. This created opportunities for wild rodents of the steppelands to come into contact with carriers of new diseases; most likely the bubonic plague. McNeil says that, contrary to what Russian writers have assumed, these Mongol movements across previously isolated locations brought the bacillus Pasturella pestis to the rodents of Eurasia for the first time.

•"The steamship network that arose in 1870 was the first vehicle to disperse the infection around the globe" (p. 168). Infected ship rats and their fleas carried the bubonic plague to new geographical locations. McNeil explains this by contrasting Europe's recurrent experience of the plague and corresponding it with human migration patterns. Their travel patterns passed diseases to rodents inhabiting the regions, which lead to outbreaks of the plague in their wake.

___

  • Mongol movements probably introduced the bacillus Pasturella pestis to rodents of Eurasian steppe
  • Rodents picked it up more easily than people
  • Burrows were hospitable for the disease, regardless of the species of rodents
  • Basis of bubonic plague (19th and 20th century)
  • Steamship network that arose in 1870’s
  • Vehicle that dispersed infection internationally
  • Airplanes were revolutionary, why hasn’t it happened with the rise of airplanes?
  • Maybe rats can’t climb aboard as easily?
  • Various new measures taken?  vaccines needed before entering other countries, extensive bag and body checks, etc.
  • Also, airfare is relatively expensive…maybe the disease is more prevalent among those in poverty?
  • Should be noted that some diseases are easily spread throughout the world due to airplanes  ex: TB
  • Doesn’t need a vector…maybe vector-transmitted diseases don’t do as well?
  • Infected rats and fleas infected their wild cousin
  • Spreading the disease to further vectors
  • “Only when newcomers failed to observe local superstitions did plague become a human problem” (pg. 169)
  • Maybe there were certain ways of doing things (hygiene wise, etc.) and when they weren’t followed, disease would come?
  • Or maybe the newcomers were bringing the diseases themselves?
  • Back to Mongols
  • Horsemen
  • Infection able to extend range of action
  • Seems like horsemen/horses are associated with conquest…disease…death
  • Sounds like some of the Four Horsemen…is that why they’re portrayed as horsemen? Instead of kings or carpenters or savages?
  • Quarantine measures ineffective because the people were ignorant of the involvement of the rats/fleas
  • Kind of like when Nightingale was saying no disinfectants/fumigations because those are just targeting the smell, not what’s actually causing the smell
  • Decisive regulators for keeping plague at bay
  • Changes in housing, shipping, sanitary practices
  • Similar factors affecting the interaction of rats/fleas/humans

Chapter V: Transoceanic Changes, 1500-1700
OVERVIEW

  • Lack of historical documentation of the Amerindian experience with plague makes "lopsidedness inevitable" (p. 208). In this chapter McNeil describes the New World's plague experience, going into as much detail as he can provided the information available. He also hypothesizes about the Amerindians' defeat and the likeliness that plague played a major role in their near-total desecration.

•Precise information on medicine and disease during the pre-Columbus era is difficult to find due to a lack of record keeping. It looks like Mexico and Peru suffered very little from disease before the European invasions. Their calorie-productive primary food sources – corn and potatoes – and their methods of preparation, such as soaking the corn in lime to allow human digestion to synthesize essential vitamins, helped them to create a nutritious diet to supplement the lack of meat due to overly-dense populations and resulting lack of animals to hunt. In times of crisis Eurasian pasturelands could be converted into croplands, however this cushion did not exist in the Americas, where domesticated animals had little impact on human food patterns.

•Amerindian populations have previously been recorded at around fourteen million. However, recent research based on sampling of tribute lists, and missionary reports increases this number to about one hundred million with twenty-five to thirty million assigned to the Mexican and Andean civilizations. This means that in only fifty years the population shrunk down to only ten percent of what it had been previously. McNeil asks how then such vast civilizations were destroyed with the onset on a few European soldiers.

•The explanation he offers, of course, is the plague. Historians are already certain that the plague infected the Amerindian populations, slaughtering them at the hands of the European soldiers. As a child most Americans must have learned even briefly about the smallpox-infected blankets the early American settlers gave to the Amerindian civilizations as "gifts" more detrimental than Pandora's Box.

•Plague wiped out Amerindian populations with such unaccountable speed that both Europeans and Amerindians alike assumed that the crisis was a product of divine intervention because, as McNeil confirms, "[f]aith in established institutions and beliefs cannot easily withstand such disaster; skills and knowledge disappear" (214). This is what allowed the Spaniards to transfer their culture and language so completely to the Amerindian populations, even in regions were previously millions of indian populations had lived according to their own cultural standards.

•McNeil contends that the utter destruction and "extraordinary ease of Spanish conquests and the success a few hundred men had in securing control of vast areas and millions of persons is unintelligible on any other basis" than that disease is mostly accountable (p. 217).

•European cultivators took advantage of the Americas' lack of immunity to disease and capitalized on the population's misfortune. Seizing the opportunity, their actions are one of the first recorded uses of disease warfare used to decimate a population and conquer the land. Their actions created the present world politics; these actions were made possible by plague epidemics, although plagues are presently overlooked in modern history.

___

  • New World disease experience
  • Spanish and Indians agreed disease was divine punishment
  • Spanish almost immune to the diseases that killed the natives because of early exposure to them
  • Consequently looks like the Spaniards are divinely favored
  • Conditions needs to be right for a disease to become an epidemic
  • Cannons
  • Allowed governments to maintain domestic peace across the world
  • Traveled via ocean  like plants and disease
  • Expensive
  • Directed organized violence into narrower channels
  • Last general change in macro-parasitic patterns  Iron Age
  • Weapons cheaper therefore easier for people to wreak havoc on each other
  • It seems like weapons have a profound effect but why?
  • Is it weaponry or the actual act of war?

Chapter VI: The Ecological Impact of Medical Science and Organization since 1700
OVERVIEW

  • Medical discovery altered the course of disease only after it was taken more seriously than the reasoning that divine intervention. Previous religious doctrine confirmed that disease was divine intervention and it was "impious to interfere with God's purposes by trying to take conscious precaution against disease, either in war or on pilgrimage" (p. 243). "Cures" were often rudimentarily empirical and dogmatic. Doctors existed and were called upon not to heal, but to relieve others of the duty of deciding what to do.

•Doctors and medical practitioners based their "cures" on observation and, well, luck instead of total understanding to the diseases they were curing. Observation was emphasized as a learning technique and applied to professional practice, even for potentially harmful procedures like blood letting. Only after 1850 did medical practice begin to make large-scale differences, but this happened only after the onset of New World diseases like syphilis increased in social importance.

•China experienced great cultural growth; McNeil attributes this to its strict adherence to imperial centralization and resulting segregation. Confucian values placed high importance on continuity from father to son, and political unity. This undoubtedly altered the course of disease and allowed for China's population expansion during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

•In the late nineteenth century food production increased due to progresses in the industrial revolution. Improvements in farm machinery, fertilizers, crop rotations, seed selection, and methods of food storage and preservation all contributed to improved crop production. An unexpected result of this "new husbandry" was the newly available cattle feed of alfalfa and turnips. The growth in cattle herding improved the human diet by "expanding meat and dairy production, and simultaneously provided malaria-carrying anopheles mosquitoes with a preferred source of blood" (p. 253). This large supply of protein increased human capacity to fight disease.

•Inoculation began to take during the eighteenth century. The process was simple, and mass inoculation was easily arranged after the general population recognized its effectiveness. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it spread in popularity and common usage, however its roots were actually in Arabian, North African, Persian, and Indian traditions. Europe was one of the last countries to adopt it as a common practice.

▪McNeil ends this chapter in saying that "[a]ny effort to understand what lies ahead, as much as what lies behind, the role of infectious disease cannot properly be left out of consideration" (p. 295), summarizing the premise of the book: the effort to include this integral part of world history in our common knowledge of how things came to be.

____

  • Important change in disease incidence in 1721  vaccines
  • Relationship between disease history and Europe’s development
  • Rise of Great Britain
  • Depended on population growth setting in earlier and continuing longer than France
  • Why? Think of it in terms of disease
  • Disease that takes over the body earlier and for longer is more effective than one that starts later and ends sooner
  • Ecological adjustments
  • Cholera established itself at Mecca in 1831 at time of pilgrimage
  • More people  crowds  more feces, less space  water gets contaminated  cholera has a party
  • Miasma Theory
  • Weak constitution
  • Germ Theory
  • Diseases of cleanliness
  • Probably due to the inability of protective/benign bacteria to grow  immune system grows weak  more easy to contract diseases and diseases the body should defend against it can’t
  • Full circle Goes back to the beginning where Spaniards didn’t succumb to the diseases they brought because they were already exposed to it

Notes to William McNeill, Plagues and Peoples

  • Micro-parasites = tiny organisms  viruses, bacteria, etc.
  • ‘Heroes’ of this book
  • They have to participate in the “’web of life’”
  • Adaptto changes in order to defend themselves
  • Fascinating/admirable how they suck off enough to sustain themselves without killing their host
  • McNeill : Darwin, micro-parasites : macro-parasites, Plagues & Peoples : On the Origin of Species
  • Macro-parasites = large-bodied organisms  humans, lions, wolves
  • I like how we’re put on the same page as ‘vicious’ carnivores…can’t giraffes and aardvarks be on this list, too?
  • Intermediaries = creatures that transmit micro-parasites from one host to another
  • Essentially vectors
  • So would ships and other modes of transportation be intermediaries for humans?
  • Would they also apply to “lions, wolves” or not?
  • I feel like lions and wolves don’t have a choice when they’re placed in cages and shipped off to places around the world, whether for zoos or conservations
  • Intra-species parasites
  • Conquerors, landlords, priests, kings = parasites preying on “hard-pressed peasantries”
  • It’s kind of funny because they sometimes saw peasants and/or rebels as parasites living off their lands
  • Preface  McNeill makes note that AIDS is not discussed in this book because it came into view in the 1980s, outside the realm of this book
  • Introduction
  • Parasites are self-destructive because they kill off the host they need to survive
  • Aren’t we kind of self-destructive, too?
  • Cold War  each side making more and more destructive weapons until they made enough to essentially wipe out the human race, that was the idea
  • Wars in general, both sides suffer casualties
  • Chapter 1, Man the Hunter
  • Overview of pre-history
  • Language and tools set humans apart from macro-parasites therefore increasing human potential for disrupting the balance
  • I feel like that’s debatable  need to define language and tools
  • All animals communicate and they can communicate in a way where other species can understand them on some level, too
  • Lots of animals use tools  otters, primates, etc.
  • I think it was the ability for humans to adapt more quickly to a variety of climates that really made them stand out
  • Rise of agriculture  civilizations/cities
  • Chapter 2, Breakthrough to History
  • Give and take between disease and human history
  • Rise of agriculture and animal husbandry = step forward
  • Domesticated animals as vectors for diseases = step back
  • Clearing forests for more human civilizations = step forward
  • Opens door to new kinds of mosquitoes and spread of malaria = step back
  • The more civilized populations were, the more vulnerable they turned out to be
  • Why is it different today?
  • Boston vs. Africa what was the line that was crossed to negate that statement?
  • Chapter 3, Confluence of the Civilized Disease Pools of Eurasia
  • The four great civilizations of the first millennium of the Christian era developed relatively distinct “disease pools”
  • Over time, increasing contact among these civilizations led to murderous epidemics
  • Eventually stabilization around 1000
  • Allowed for population increases

Class Notes

  • Important to think about historiography
  • How histories have come to be told
  • Histories usually written by the victors
  • 19th century
  • Medicine done by apprenticeship
  • Like auto mechanics
  • Losing sight of how other systems are interrelated  as medicine became more diversified
  • Gods vs. bacteria (before science really comes into play)
  • Can’t see either
  • Both cause disease
  • Prognosis vs. diagnosis
  • Empiricist
  • Trusted only senses
  • Couldn’t trust microscopes without believing theory of optics
  • Microscopes were faulty
  • We all have to believe in something at some point it seems…it’s really hard to get around without believing in something
  • Explanation of disease works well when God is behind things
  • Can’t evolution be reconciled the same way?  evolution exists because there is a higher power behind the process
  • Thomas Kuhn
  • Important historical developments cause paradigm shifts
  • Copernicus, Newton
  • Paradigm shift = master narrative…shift in narratives
  • Important to ask the right questions, even if you get the wrong solution
  • Reminds me of Pisani (Wisdom of Whores) where she kept insisting on it’s all about asking the right questions
  • History repeats itself
  • Human history, disease history  all very cyclical
  • Are we in this cyclical pattern because we’re all trying to move towards this benign state, as well?
  • Michel Foucault (?)
  • History = series of ruptures
  • How plagues come into history
  • Social structure changes because of the plague
  • But don’t conditions need to be right for the disease to rise? So is the change in social structure already there, but it’s just more subtle? So when the plague hits and tears down at ideologies, what comes up is the appearance of a social change?
  • Whig history
  • Things are getting better  moving in a positive direction
  • “Improving to believing in one God” (for example)
  • Reminds me of Poisonwood Bible
  • How it’s assumed that believing in monotheism/Christianity is the right and only way…picking on the words “improving to”
  • in the end of the book, it’s assumed Rachel becomes the spirit within the snake, as native religious beliefs support, which implies that the native belief is the true belief, their gods are the gods that exist, not the one Christian god
  • All a matter of perspective, history is indeed written by the victors
  • People are parasites
  • Beginning of this discussion in Plagues and Peoples  ruling class are parasitic on the peasants
  • Fernand Braudel
  • One