First Floor Tarpley

The Reinhardt University History Program Blog

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Category Archives: Disease

Smallpox and the Revolution

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From National Geographic from last spring (hat tip: Dan Franke):

How a public health crisis nearly derailed the American Revolution

George Washington confronted a smallpox epidemic with a belief in science—and a controversial plan.

When American colonists launched their revolution against Britain, they quickly encountered a second but invisible enemy that threatened to wipe out the new Continental Army: highly contagious smallpox.

But luckily for the young nation, the army’s commander was familiar with this formidable foe. George Washington’s embrace of science-based medical treatments—despite stiff opposition from the Continental Congress—prevented a potentially disastrous defeat, and made him the country’s first public health advocate.

A hard lesson

Washington’s wisdom came from personal experience with the horrors of an epidemic. “Was strongly attacked by the small Pox,” Washington wrote as a teenager in 1751, while visiting the Caribbean island of Barbados. At the time, the disease caused by the variola virus killed as many as one in two victims. Washington was lucky. After nearly a month of chills, fever, and painful pustules, he emerged with the pockmarked face typical of survivors—but alive, and with immunity to the illness.

Washington’s encounter with the virus proved fortunate for the new nation. In 1775, smallpox arrived in Boston, carried by troops sent from Britain, Canada, and Germany to stamp out the growing rebellion. Many of these soldiers had been exposed and were therefore immune, but the vast majority of American colonists were not.

In the aftermath of the battles of Lexington and Concord, Washington’s Continental Army had set up camp across the Charles River from the stricken city. To the dismay of many patriots seeking refuge from the British, the general prohibited anyone from Boston from entering the military zone. “Every precaution must be used to prevent its spreading,” he sternly warned one of his subordinates about the virus. To John Hancock, the president of the Continental Congress, Washington vowed to “continue the utmost Vigilance against this most dangerous enemy.”

By immediately isolating anyone suspected of infection and limiting outside contact, Washington “prevented a disastrous epidemic among the Continental troops,” historian Ann Becker says. In March 1776, when the British withdrew from Boston, Washington even specified that only soldiers who had suffered from smallpox be allowed into the city and its surroundings.

More at the link, including Washington’s defense of “variolation” (i.e. inoculation). I suppose this article is supposed to be “timely” but it’s good to remember that not all diseases are the same. COVID-19 does not kill one in two people, for instance. 

Wine Windows

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From the New York Post, news of an interesting revival:

Medieval ‘wine windows’ are reopening, reviving Italian plague tradition

By Hannah Sparks

It’s a quaint tradition — with a very dark history.

Centuries ago, the bubonic plague, otherwise known as the Black Death, swept through Europe, killing one-third of the continent’s population at the time. Originating in Asia, the disease made its way to Italy during the late Middle Ages, and spread north from there.

These days, we know just as well as medieval Italians that a stiff drink can go a long way to ease troubles during the global coronavirus pandemic.

Thus, the “wine windows,” or buchette del vino, of Tuscany. They are just as they sound: pint-size hatches, carved into the concrete walls of urban wineries and shops, where beverage merchants would serve sips at a safe social distance.

First introduced in the 1600s, their true purpose went untapped for centuries after the plague — that is, until a new one came along this year.

“Everyone is confined to home for two months and then the government permits a gradual reopening,” the Wine Window Association website reads. “During this time, some enterprising Florentine Wine Window owners have turned back the clock and are using their Wine Windows to dispense glasses of wine, cups of coffee, drinks, sandwiches and ice cream — all germ-free, contactless!”

More (including photos) at the link.

Samuel Pepys and the Plague

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From the Conversation, “Diary of Samuel Pepys shows how life under the bubonic plague mirrored today’s pandemic” (hat tip: William Campbell):

In early April, writer Jen Miller urged New York Times readers to start a coronavirus diary.

“Who knows,” she wrote, “maybe one day your diary will provide a valuable window into this period.”

During a different pandemic, one 17th-century British naval administrator named Samuel Pepys did just that. He fastidiously kept a diary from 1660 to 1669 – a period of time that included a severe outbreak of the bubonic plague in London. Epidemics have always haunted humans, but rarely do we get such a detailed glimpse into one person’s life during a crisis from so long ago.

There were no Zoom meetings, drive-through testing or ventilators in 17th-century London. But Pepys’ diary reveals that there were some striking resemblances in how people responded to the pandemic.

For Pepys and the inhabitants of London, there was no way of knowing whether an outbreak of the plague that occurred in the parish of St. Giles, a poor area outside the city walls, in late 1664 and early 1665 would become an epidemic.

The plague first entered Pepys’ consciousness enough to warrant a diary entry on April 30, 1665: “Great fears of the Sickenesse here in the City,” he wrote, “it being said that two or three houses are already shut up. God preserve us all.”

Pepys continued to live his life normally until the beginning of June, when, for the first time, he saw houses “shut up” – the term his contemporaries used for quarantine – with his own eyes, “marked with a red cross upon the doors, and ‘Lord have mercy upon us’ writ there.” After this, Pepys became increasingly troubled by the outbreak.

He soon observed corpses being taken to their burial in the streets, and a number of his acquaintances died, including his own physician.

By mid-August, he had drawn up his will, writing, “that I shall be in much better state of soul, I hope, if it should please the Lord to call me away this sickly time.” Later that month, he wrote of deserted streets; the pedestrians he encountered were “walking like people that had taken leave of the world.”

Read the whole thing. 

Defoe’s Plague Year

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Heather Mallick in the Toronto Star (hat tip: Ron Good):

Defoe’s 1722 followup [to Robinson Crusoe] was A Journal of the Plague Year, an autofiction look-back to the plague that had struck England and elsewhere 50 years before. From our standpoint, it’s remarkable how Londoners in 1665 behaved very much as we are behaving now. It takes more than 355 years for people to change habits.

Reading A Journal this week, I was struck by the parallels between Defoe’s plague notes as he walked about the city and our own tales of the coronavirus lockdown.

Daniel Defoe adds up the daily numbers. “There died near 400 of the plague in the two parishes of St. Martin and St. Giles-in-the-Fields only, three died in the parish of Aldgate but four, in the parish of Whitechapel three.”

Defoe sees mad Twitter-like theories abound. “Some endeavours were used to suppress the printing of such books as terrified the people but the Government being unwilling to exasperate the people, who were, as I may say, all out of their wits already.”

Defoe frets over job losses, excoriates Big Landlord. “Maidservants especially, and menservants [asked] ‘Oh sir I for the Lord’s sake, what will become of me? Will my mistress keep me, or will she turn me off? Will she stay here, or will she go into the country … or leave me here to be starved and undone?’”

Defoe meets some bros. “There was a dreadful set of fellows that used their [tavern], and who, in the middle of all this horror, met there every night … so when the dead-cart came, they would make their impudent mocks and jeers at them, especially if they heard the poor people call upon God to have mercy upon them.”

Defoe encounters thoughtless Vancouver-type people. “They were not quite sick, had yet the distemper upon them, and who, by having an uninterrupted liberty to go about … gave the distemper to others, and spread the infection in a dreadful manner.”

More at the link. 

Parallels

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I was asked to contribute to a blog post on how medievalists are doing in these troubled times. Here’s what I came up with:

*** 

Medievalists, particularly American medievalists, are usually starved for attention. They must work very hard to convince other people that their subject is relevant. So when the country is under coronavirus quarantine, they naturally bring up parallels with the Black Death of the fourteenth century, which can provide illuminating insights or at least comic relief. A friend claimed that he and his family were hunkered down, “telling a story a day to each other,” like the characters in Boccaccio’s Decameron. Another jokingly announced:

Hmm, just got a thing from a local church. They’re organizing a large group of Christians to publicly pray for mercy and strike themselves with belts and other things to show that they mean it. If it goes well locally, they plan on organizing a march of penance to other towns and cities.

But presumably this neo-Flagellant group is not going to proceed to a local Jewish neighborhood and beat up the inhabitants there, for allegedly poisoning the wells. Because, let’s be honest: a study of history often makes one very grateful to be living in the time and place that one does. We know that this pestilence is caused by a virus, and we know how it spreads; we can even come up with vaccines against it, which eventually we will. No more messing around with astrology, humorism, or aromatherapy, as the poor medievals did. We might study the Middle Ages, but I doubt any one of us actually wants to return to them.

Although, if there is one interesting parallel between Yersinia Pestis and SARS-CoV-2, it is how the spread of both microbes was abetted by international trade. The Black Death got to Europe over the Silk Road; our outsourcing of most manufacturing to China has given us lots of cheap stuff to buy, but it is also the means by which a local outbreak of a novel coronavirus in Wuhan became an international sensation. This is an unintended price of globalism – and a good reason to consider bringing home some of the things we’ve outsourced to China.

The Plague

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Adjunct professor Tim Furnish explores the historical context of our current situation in The Stream:

In the early 1990s, as part of my doctoral program in history at Ohio State, I took a seminar on how epidemics affected history. Our main text was the seminal Plagues and Peoples by William H. McNeill. That book taught me a healthy respect for — if not fear of — viruses and microbes. (Hence my Prepper Lite basement hoarding of freeze-dried food, ammo and, yes, toilet paper, which long preceded COVID-19.)

As R.S. Bray wrote in his excellent Armies of Pestilence: The Impact of Disease on History: since “a brand new infectious agent may engulf us, transmitted quickly and efficiently” we should ensure that “the great pandemics of the past and their effects upon man and his organisations were not forgotten.”

Coronavirus is indeed a global pandemic afflicting, as of this writing, nearly 700,000 people. The overall mortality rate is around 4.6%. In this country we have over 125,000 confirmed cases. Some 2200, or about 1.8%, of those have died. Many comparisons of this disease to the seasonal flu have been done, such as this one. I won’t repeat that exercise, Instead, I will try to put coronavirus into historical perspective.

Read the whole thing. 

Epidemics

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I ought to be drawing illuminating parallels between these troubled times and the fourteenth-century Black Death, Defoe’s Plague Year (London, 1665), or the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918-20. But I am not an epidemiologist and have nothing of interest to say about these things – or any other of the great pestilences that have afflicted humanity in the past, except to say that I certainly hope that the COVID-19 plague of 2020 doesn’t turn into a rerun of what happened under Marcus Aurelius or Justinian. I do find it notable how this one has triggered such a public-health reaction – much greater than the more recent outbreaks of SARS, MERS, Ebola, Zika, West Nile, or just the seasonal flu, which as everyone has been saying has killed more people than the current pandemic. I suppose it is better to be safe than sorry, and I sure hope that the economy bounces back from whatever disruption this quarantining will cause. 

The Black Death

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From Smithsonian Magazine (hat tip: Dan Franke):

Mass Grave Shows the Black Death’s ‘Catastrophic’ Impact in Rural England

At least 48 individuals were buried in a single grave in Lincolnshire, suggesting the community struggled to deal with an onslaught of plague victims

In the summer of 1348, the Black Death arrived in southwest England. The deadly disease rapidly swept through the country, ultimately killing between one-third and one-half of its population. Now, a team of researchers writing in the journal Antiquity has revealed new details about a mass grave of probable Black Death victims buried in the English countryside. The discovery offers rare insight into the plague’s “catastrophic” impact on rural communities.

The grave, located on the grounds of the historic Thornton Abbey in North Lincolnshire, was first excavated in 2013. Archaeologists unearthed the remains of at least 48 individuals, including 27 children. Differences in levels between the rows of bodies suggest the grave was “filled over the course of several days or weeks,” according to the study’s authors. Radiocarbon dating of two skeletons indicated the victims died sometime between 1295 and 1400, while ceramics and two silver pennies found in the grave helped experts narrow the date range down to the mid-14th century.

Though the researchers acknowledge that any number of factors could have driven the mass fatality in Lincolnshire, they suspect the Black Death is the “most probable cause.” Documentary evidence indicates the bubonic plague had hit Lincolnshire by the spring of 1349. What’s more, centuries-old DNA extracted from the teeth of 16 individuals buried at the site revealed the presence of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes the disease.

The skeletons’ ages—which ranged from 1 year old to over 45—lend further credence to the theory that something devastating was at play. Hugh Willmott, a senior lecturer in European historical archaeology at the University of Sheffield and leader of the excavation, tells Live Science’s Mindy Weisberger that medieval cemeteries are typically dominated by very young and relatively old individuals, who are particularly susceptible to disease and injury.

“But what we’ve got is not that profile at all,” says Willmott. “We can tell from the proportion of individuals that everyone is being affected, and everyone is dying.”

Read the whole thing. 

Neanderthals

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From Phys.org (hat tip: Tom MacMaster):

Scientists link Neanderthal extinction to human diseases

Growing up in Israel, Gili Greenbaum would give tours of local caves once inhabited by Neanderthals and wonder along with others why our distant cousins abruptly disappeared about 40,000 years ago. Now a scientist at Stanford, Greenbaum thinks he has an answer.

In a new study published in the journal Nature Communications, Greenbaum and his colleagues propose that complex  transmission patterns can explain not only how  were able to wipe out Neanderthals in Europe and Asia in just a few thousand years but also, perhaps more puzzling, why the end didn’t come sooner.

“Our research suggests that diseases may have played a more important role in the extinction of the Neanderthals than previously thought. They may even be the main reason why modern humans are now the only human group left on the planet,” said Greenbaum, who is the first author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher in Stanford’s Department of Biology.

Read the whole thing.

Plague

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Apparently eating raw marmot kidneys is not actually good for one’s health – in fact, it might be a vector for bubonic plague. From NPR (hat tip: Bill Campbell):

Bubonic Plague Strikes In Mongolia: Why Is It Still A Threat?

The medieval plague known as the Black Death is making headlines this month.

In Mongolia, a couple died of bubonic plague on May 1 after reportedly hunting marmots, large rodents that can harbor the bacterium that causes the disease, and eating the animal’s raw meat and kidneys – which some Mongolians believe is good for their health.

This is the same illness that killed an estimated 50 million people across three continents in the 1300s. Nowadays, the plague still crops up from time to time, although antibiotics will treat it if taken soon after exposure or the appearance of symptoms.

Left untreated, the plague causes fever, vomiting, bleeding and open, infected sores — and can kill a person within a few days.

The ethnic Kazakh couple died in Bayan-Ulgii, Mongolia’s westernmost province bordering Russia and China. It is not clear what treatment they received, if any.

Read the whole thing.