Plagues and Peoples

Germs and PlaguesWilliam H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, New York: Anchor Books, 1976, 1998 How did the Spanish Conquistadores, with a few hundred men, conquer the Aztecs and Incas—developed civilizations numbering in the millions? How did Cortez overcome Montezuma and the Aztecs in Mexico? How did Pizarro conquer the Incas of Peru? How did the religions of the Indians of South America disappear so rapidly, and why did millions accept Christianity? The lopsided impact of infectious diseases upon the Indians of South America offered a key to the military and cultural conquest, and that is the key that McNeill uses to examine the whole course of human history. This is the story of what happens when people who have grown immune to a disease contact a population that has never been exposed to that disease. The consequences can be disastrous. This book aims to bring the history of exposure to infectious disease into the realm of historical explanation by showing how patterns of disease have affected human affairs. McNeill begins with a few key concepts, and the first is disease and parasites. We are parasites, and host for parasites. We host microparasites—viruses, bacteria and multi-celled creatures. Some make us sick and can kill us; some are combatted and consumed by our white blood cells; and others just hang around in our bodies, not causing much or any trouble, but perhaps waiting for the opportunity to jump to another organism where their effect can be much more dangerous. We are also subject to macroparasites. Once we might have had to worry about being eaten by wolves or lions, and later, the conqueror would allow us to live and produce food, and we’d be allowed to keep enough to sustain ourselves, but he would get the rest. You can see we still have macroparasites. In England in the 18th century many cattle and sheep had been fenced into separate fields, so that there was much less exchange of diseases with other herds. Not only did this produce healthier livestock, but it greatly reduced diseases transmitted from livestock to humans. At this time farmers were learning of more productive farming techniques, including growing alfalfa for livestock. This resulted in greatly improved food production, and humans were eating more protein, which led to production of more protein antibodies to fight disease more effectively. Because French farmers had not yet learned to fence off herds, these results did not appear there until the 19th century. McNeill shows us how, as men were able to move more swiftly across the globe, how easy it was to spread germs. Marching armies were especially effective at spreading disease. So were the millions making the annual hajj pilgrimage from all over the Moslem world to Mecca, and back again. Disease often killed many thousands of an invading army. When Alexander the Great’s army reached India it was disease, not opposing troops, who stopped his world conquest.Bubonic Plague symptoms Bubonic plague has been a killer over many centuries, but it was not until 1894 when doctors discovered the connection between burrowing rodents, fleas and humans, transmitting Pasturella pestis, that eradication could become effective. The disease spread time and again by Mongol horsemen raiding in China and Europe, carrying a few infected rats in their saddlebags. Chinese records show several times in the middle ages when 90% of a province would be wiped out by the plague. At some periods in history there were centuries without outbreaks of the disease, as it traveled within colonies of burrowing rodents—squirrels, rats, marmots and the like. Napoleon sent troops to suppress an uprising in Santo Domingo in 1802, but yellow fever and other tropical diseases destroyed a force of 33,000 men, and led him to give up his visions of empire in America and sell the Louisiana Purchase to America. Until the 19th century, McNeill writes, cities were too polluted to sustain themselves. As city-dwellers died, they were replaced by healthy people from the countryside. Only in the 1800s did the balance shift, so that city-dwellers, who had become immune to diseases, made the populations of cities self-sustaining. Cholera is an interesting story. This disease is spread by people drinking the same water that others have used for their sewage, and as cities began to build sewers that transported wastewater to areas where it would not affect the drinking water supply, cholera began to become less of a threat. Note that many huge cities in Africa and South America today lack sanitary facilities for millions who live in shantytowns around the central city, and cholera is only one of the diseases always threatening them. McNeill’s description of efforts to control smallpox leaves one’s head spinning, because it starts in the middle and works forward and then backward. To simplify, a wandering wise man from India taught the Chinese a method for inoculation against smallpox in the 11th century. Inoculation began in England in 1721, and the royal family were inoculated the next year. This involved inserting a small bit of the disease under the skin, and usually created a slight dose of the disease, but then immunized the patient. In 1798 an alert English country doctor, Edward Jenner, noticed that milkmaids, who worked around cattle and were exposed to cowpox, attained immunity to smallpox. Cowpox, much less harmful to humans, was provided as an inoculation, and this began the virtual elimination of the disease. This book, initially published in 1976, includes a new, 1998 forward which discusses the then newest epidemic, that of AIDS. McNeill’s view of the human situation isn’t all that encouraging. We face microparasites within and macroparasites above, around and beyond. As soon as we become immune to smallpox or clean up our lives to protect against cholera, along comes AIDS, Ebola, or Zika; or a new macroparasite like a new tax, or a higher rent, or some other problem.-end-

_Plagues and Peoples_ by William H. McNeill is an absolutely brilliant work of history; though originally published in 1977 it is still insightful and influential. Just as Brian Fagan in _The Long Summer_ viewed human history through the prism of climatic change, McNeill in this work showed how the world got to be the way it is in large part thanks to disease. How the various communities of humans in the world came to an accommodation with those infectious diseases that were able to reach epidemic proportions, when and whether or not a disease went from a being epidemic to endemic (milder, generally a childhood disease) in a given population, was a major factor in world history and one that was often overlooked. According to McNeill, for too long the role of infectious disease in world history has not been properly taken into account, historians for many decades viewing epidemics as "accidents" and infection (and fear of infection) often having been treated as "unpredictable" and "incomprehensible," as disease "spoiled the web of interpretation and explanation" that historians used to understand the human experience. McNeill sought to chronicle man's history with infectious disease and the far-reaching consequences that resulted when contacts across disease boundaries allowed a new infection to invade a population that had no acquired immunity to its effects. The contemporary global diffusion of childhood diseases such as measles, mumps, and until recently smallpox took thousands of years, a history well covered in this book. It was due to a near lack of disease that humanity was able to multiple vastly between 40,000 and 10,000 B.C; as humans left the tropical environment of Africa, it left behind not only diseases that were endemic to the environment that had kept mankind in check but additionally moved into non-tropical environments that were not as benign for many parasites (McNeill often referred to infectious diseases as microparasites or simply parasites). The biological checks on humankind in sub-Saharan Africa were absent in temperate and northern climates, with lower temperatures and oftentimes drier conditions inimical to many parasites and with fewer organisms present to become possible parasites. Unfortunately, humanity began to reverse this relative lack of disease with the advent of agriculture. By multiplying a restricted number of species - both animal and human- dense concentrations of potential food for parasites were created. Weed species arose to fill in the gaps created by such huge distortions in normal ecological systems. Many weeds - such as plant weeds and mice - were relatively easy to control, but microorganisms for centuries defied understanding and control. Most if not all of these microorganisms jumped to humans from livestock, and as parasites that pass directly from human to human with no intermediate host and indeed cannot survive without a large pool of non-immune humans, are "rank newcomers" in terms of the evolution of life on Earth. These diseases are the hallmarks of civilization.The "domestication" of disease that occurred between 1300 and 1700 was a major landmark in world history, the direct result of two great transportation revolutions, one on land initiated by the Mongols and one on sea initiated by the Europeans during the age of exploration. When diseases first appear they are often spectacularly fatal, so lethal that it is possible for a microorganism to die out locally or even completely. Only after a period of time has passed can hosts and parasites adjust to one another, as the disease becomes a normal, endemic, more or less stable part of civilized society, a relationship less destructive to human hosts and more secure for the parasites, the latter able to count on a fresh supply of susceptible children to infect. Only with continued exposure can a population hope to develop this balance, as older individuals acquire immunity to the disease, reinforced by repeated exposure. Paradoxically, the more diseased a community, the less destructive are its epidemics, as adults are less likely to die, adults being more difficult to replace then infants and more damaging to society when they do perish. The more communications spread between Europe, North America, and the rest of the world, the smaller became the chance of any really devastating disease encounter. Only a radical mutation of an existing disease-causing organism or a new transfer from some other host to humans offered the possibility of any devastating epidemic as the world became one disease pool. Former separate disease pools, once separated by major geographical barriers - mountains, deserts, and oceans - converged into one disease pool as no large group of humans remained isolated from the rest of humanity by the end of the 19th century. To McNeill, a disease regime that he called modern existed only after "endemicity" spread throughout the world, first from port city to port city and then filtering into rural towns and the countryside. It was only after the endemicity of the major childhood diseases - their domestication - occurred that population growth really began to occur worldwide, that cities no longer needed a constant influx of rural migrants to replace large numbers of deaths each year (amazingly this only happened finally in 1900). In addition to the history of disease and its effects other related topics are covered, such as the development of modern urban sewer systems (thanks in large part to cholera), how changes in agricultural practices affected disease propagation and spread (ironically while many diseases spread from cattle to humans it was the presence of large number of cattle that interrupted the chain of malarial transmission in much of Europe), the advent of modern doctors, acceptance of the germ theory of disease, and the development of vaccines. It was very interesting to learn that Edward Jenner did not invent vaccination; while his role was very important, smallpox inoculation at a folk level existed for hundreds of years in Arabia, North Africa, Persia, India, and China. Also the coverage of bubonic plague, leprosy, and syphilis is especially good in this book, the sections on it making for fascinating reading.

Very informative and lots of viewpoints I wasn't aware of before. It would be nice if there existed an updated version of this 45 year old book, but it is still quite relevant. There is so much more information out there compared to the early seventies (when this was written), but as far as I am aware it is not available in such a concentrated form. Highly recommended.

It arrived well packed and safe and I am now reading it - the style is nice and very readable even though the book is quite old, it is well worth reading.

Read this amazing book and your whole view of history will likely be changed. I cannot praise it more highly.

Good!

Book in excellent condition. Thank you!