Plagues and Peoples (47 page)

33.
Cf. J. C. Russell, Late Ancient and Medieval Population, pp. 113-
31. Russell summarizes his often flimsy data as follows: “The effects of the plague were very much the same everywhere they can be tested. Upon the basis of evidence of an earlier chapter we assume a 40 per cent decline of the 1346 population, except for the drier areas, by the end of the fourteenth century. The numbers reached then were generally static until well into the fifteenth century although some places declined further and others improved their position.… The population of the whole area [Europe and North Africa] about 1500 was still markedly smaller than it had been just before the Black Death. By 1550 it had risen to about the pre-plague figure.” Ibid., p. 131.

34.
For Australian rabbits, cf. above,
Chapter II
; for Amerindians, cf. below, Ch. V; for Pacific island populations, cf. Macfarlane Burnet, “A Biologist’s Parable for the Modern World,”
Intellectual Digest
(March 1972), p. 88.

35.
George Rosen,
A History of Public Health
(New York 1958), p. 67.

36.
For Ragusa cf. Miodrag B. Petrovich,
A Mediterranean City State: A Study of Dubrovnik Elites, 1592–1667
(Unpublished Ph.D dissertation, University of Chicago, 1974); for Venice, Frederic C. Lane,
Venice: A Maritime Republic
(Baltimore, 1973), p. 18.

37.
Daniel Panzac, “La Peste à Smyrne au XVIII
^e
Siècle,”
Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations
, 28 (1973), 1071–93, is fundamental. Paul Cassar,
Medical History of Malta
(London, 1964), pp. 175–90, documents plague visitations to that Mediterranean port until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and describes the traditional quarantine methods in full detail.

38.
Cf. Erwin R. Ackerknecht, “Anticontagionism between 1821 and 1867,”
Bulletin of the History of Medicine
, 22 (1948), 562–93.

39.
Georg Sticker,
Abhandlungen aus der Seuchengeschichte
, I, 222–6, calculates deaths at 87, 666, or 35 per cent of the population in affected localities of Provence. For details see Paul Gaffarel et Mis de Duranty,
La Peste de 1720 à Marseille et en Prance
(Paris, 1911); J. N. Biraben, “Certain Demographic Characteristics of the Plague Epidemic in France, 1720–22,”
Daedalus
(1968), pp. 536–45.

40.
For an overview, see Roger Mols, Introduction à la démographie historique des villes d’Europe du XIV
^e
au XVIII
^e
siècle, 3 volumes (Louvain, 1954–56).

41.
Daniele Beltrami,
Storia della Popolazione di Venezia
(Padua, 1954). For details of public measures to meet the emergency of the plague of 1575–77, cf. Ernst Rodenwalt,
Pest in Venedig, 1557–77: Ein Beitrag zur Frage der Infektkette bei den Pestepidemien West Europas
(Heidelberg, 1953).

42.
Cf. Bartolème Bennassar, Recherches sur les Grandes Epidémies dans le Nord de l’Espagne d la Fin du XVI
^e
Siècle (Paris, 1969).

43.
René Baehrel, “Épidémie et terreur: Histoire et Sociologie,”
Annales Historiques de la Révolution
, 23 (1951), 113–46, argues that the public manifestations in Paris and other cities of France during the Terror of 1793–94 derived from patterns for the expression of popular excitement that had become semi-ritualized as responses to plague and fear of plague in the seventeenth century, and which had been revivified throughout much of France in response to the plague outbreak in 1720–22. Similar problems of social control in time of plague alarmed Catherine II of Russia. Cf. John T. Alexander, “Catherine II, Bubonic Plague, and the Problem of Industry in Moscow,”
American Historical Review,
, 79 (1974), 637–71.

44.
For details of this event, cf. Charles F. Mullet,
The Bubonic Plague and England
, pp. 105–222; Walter George Bell,
The Great Plague in London in 1665
(rev. ed., London, 1951).

45.
Cf. R. Pollitzer,
Plague
, pp. 282–85, 298–99.

46.
Cf. Mirko D. Grmek, “Maladies et morts: Préliminaries d’une étude historique des maladies,”
Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations
, 24 (1969), 1473–83; R. Pollitzer,
Plague
, pp. 92, 448.

47.
The canonical exposition may be found in Pollitzer, op. cit., pp. 11–16.

48.
Wu Lien-teh, et al.,
Plague: A Manual for Public Health Workers
(Shanghai, 1936), p. 14, claims that plague was also disappearing from China in the latter seventeenth century; but as an associate of Dr. Pollitzer and other public health experts, he simply assumed that the pandemic of the fourteenth century was fading out by the seventeenth century. Any search of Chinese literary records he may have made to support this assertion was minimal. There is no reason therefore to put much credence in Dr. Wu’s remark.

49.
Vilhelm Moller-Christensen, “Evidence of Leprosy in Earlier Peoples,” in Brothwell and Sandison,
Disease in Antiquity
, pp. 295–306.

50.
Hirsch, op. cit., 2, 7; Folke Henschen,
The History and Geography of Diseases
(English trans., New York, 1966), pp. 107–13.

51.
Personal letter from Dr. Olaf Skinsnes, May 21, 1975.

52.
Cf. T. Aidan Cockburn,
The Evolution and Eradication of Infectious Diseases
, pp. 219–23; Mirko D. Grmek, op. cit., p. 1478.

53.
M. Pièry et J. Roshem,
Histoire de la Tuberculose
(Paris, 1931), pp. 5–9. Cf. also Vilhelm Moller-Christensen, “Evidence of Tuberculosis, Leprosy and Syphilis in Antiquity and the Middle Ages,”
Proceedings of the XIX International Congress of the History of Medicine
(Basel, 1966). The Chinese corpse from the second century
B.C
., referred to
above in
Chapter II
, offers one of the few evidences for the existence of pulmonary tuberculosis from ancient times.

An amazing variety of animals suffer from one or another form of tuberculosis. Indeed, on chemical grounds it is commonly believed that the bacillus became parasitic when all life was still oceanic. This hypothesis is based on peculiar acidic properties of tuberculosis bacilli. Cf. Dan Morse, “Tuberculosis,” in Brothwell and Sandison,
Disease in Antiquityy
pp. 249–71.

54.
René Dubos, The White Plague: Tuberculosis, Man and Society (Boston, 1952), pp. 197–207.

55.
The principal advocate of this view is C. J. Hackett. Cf. C. J. Hackett, “On the Origin of the Human Treponematoses,”
Bulletin of the World Health Organization
, 29 (1963), 7–41; C. J. Hackett, “The Human Treponematoses,” in Brothwell and Sandison,
Diseases in Antiquity
, pp. 152–69. Others have accepted and elaborated upon the convertibility between pinta, yaws, and syphilis proposed by Hackett. Cf. E. H. Hudson, “Treponematosis and Man’s Social Evolution,”
American Anthropologist, 67
(1965), 885–901; Theodor Rosebury,
Microbes and Morals: The Strange Story of Venereal Disease
(New York, 1971); Thomas Aidan Cockburn, “The Origin of the Treponematoses,”
Bulletin of the World Health Organization
, 24 (1961), 221–28; T. D. Stewart and Alexander Spoehr, “Evidence on the Paleopathology of Yaws,”
Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 26
(1952), 538–53.

56.
See below, p. 200.

57.
The term was coined by Gloriamo Fracastoro who published a poem,
Syphilis sive Morbus Gallicus
, in 1530.

58.
Cf. A. W. Crosby, Jr., “The Early History of Syphilis: A Reappraisal,”
American Anthropologist, 71
(1969), 218–27.

59.
Cf. Ziegler,
The Black Death
, pp. 84–100.

60.
Raymond Crawford,
Plague and Pestilence in Literature and Art
(Oxford, 1914); A. M. Campbell,
The Black Death and Men of Learning
(New York, 1931); George Deaux,
The Black Death
, 1347 (London, 1969).

61.
Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death (Princeton, 1951), pp. 89–93 and passim; Henri Mollaret et Jacqueline Brossolet, La Peste, Source Méconnue d’Inspiration Artisque (Antwerp, 1965).

62.
Cf. James E. Thorold Rogers,
Six Centuries of Work and Wages: the History of English Labour
, 2nd ed. (London, 1886), pp. 239–42.

63.
For a useful summary of current views, see Elizabeth Carpentier, “Autour de la Peste Noire: Famines et Epidémies dans l’Histoire du XIV
^e
Siècle,”
Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 17
(1962), 1062–92. Charles F. Mullett,
The Bubonic Plague and England: An
Essay in the History of Preventive Medicine
(Lexington, Kentucky, 1956), pp. 17–41, offers a less iconoclastic digest of older opinions.

64.
Cf. Yves Renouard, “Conséquences et Intérêt Démographique de la Peste Noire de 1348,”
Population
, 3 (1948), 459–66; William L. Langer, “The Next Assignment,”
American Historical Review
, 63 (1958), 292–301.

65.
Cf. the remarks in J. F. D. Shrewsbury,
The Plague of the Philistines
(London, 1964), pp. 127ff. St. Sebastian was first invoked against pestilence in Rome in 680; but his cult remained insignificant until the sixteenth century. St. Roch was a Franciscan friar who died in 1327 after a career of caring for the sick.

66.
The autonomy of French and English towns was also very broad, and in health matters remained almost total until the eighteenth century. The first time the French royal government intervened in plague prophylaxis was 1720–21, when the plague, having outrun the boundaries of Marseilles, came to be treated as a national problem. Cf. Paul Delaunay,
La Vie Médicale aux XVI
^e
, XVII
^e
et XVIII
^e
Siècles
(Paris, 1935), pp. 269–70.

67.
Abraham L. Udovitch, “Egypt: Crisis in a Muslim Land,” reproduced in William L. Bowsky,
The Black Death: A Turning Point in History?
(New York, 1971), p. 124.

68.
M. W. Dois,
The Black Death in the Middle East
(Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton, 1971), pp. 56–64, tabulated no fewer than fifty-seven outbreaks of plague between 1349 and 1517; of these, thirty-one afflicted Egypt, twenty afflicted Syria, and only two afflicted Iraq. An earlier scholar derived the following chronologically more extensive results from perusal of Arabic sources:

EPIDEMIC OUTBREAKS IN EGYPT, SYRIA, AND IRAQ ACCORDING TO ARABIC SOURCES:

Number of episodes mentioned

Table derived from A. von Kremer, “Über die grossen Seuchen des Orients nach arabischen Quellen,” Oesterreich, Kaiserlichen Akademie,
Sitzungsberichte, Phil-Hist. Klasse
, 96 (1880), 110–42. Von Kremer does not indicate how broad his search of Arabic literature may have been; and clearly what he calls “Pest” covers diseases other than bubonic plague. Nevertheless, the sudden increase in the number of epidemics Egypt experienced in his last period, which corresponds to the first full century of rule by the Circassian Mamelukes, surely suggests a new vulnerability to infection.

The monumental scholarly record of literary mentions of plague, Georg Sticker,
Abhandlungen aus der Seuchengeschichte I: Die Pest
(Glessen, 1908), records only eighteen outbreaks of plague in Egypt between 1399 and 1706; but his data are entirely at the mercy of information available to him in European languages, and von Kremer’s compilation obviously escaped his attention. Generally, Sticker’s results are fragmentary and undependable, since most European scholars who had explored Chinese, Indian, Islamic, and other exotic literatures in the nineteenth century were completely uninterested in plague or other diseases. The result is whimsical and erratic: no plague in China until 1757, for example, or in East Africa until 1696. I conclude that it is useless to try to derive a valid world picture from the listings Sticker so energetically (and sometimes uncritically) collected. Only for Europe is he reasonably reliable and complete.

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: