whats-in-a-sentence

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Histories of the Inca describe major epidemics in the century before Europeans stumbled onto the New World. The microbes responsible have been lost to history, unless their genomes are someday recovered.³⁰

30. Guaman Poma, a Quecha (indigenous Peruvian) nobleman, (...) described the military exploits of Pachacuti (the probable builder of Machu Picchu): "The defeat of Chile was made possible by the ravages of plague, which lasted for ten years. Disease and farming, even more than force of arms, brought about the downfall of the Chileans."

"Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History" - Kyle Harper

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They are zoonotic pathogens, such as viruses that survive permanently in species of birds, bats, or rodents and only sporadically transmit to humans. Some are helminths, macroparasites that only exist in the New World. Many are vector-borne, spread by the mosquitos, sand flies, and black flies native to the hemisphere.²⁶

26. I am not aware of a comprehensive catalog of the various minor diseases unique to the New World, but the GIDEON database provides an extensive number of such pathogens – for example, Junin virus, Lechiguana virus, Machupo mammarenavirus, Bermejo virus, Sabia virus, Anajatuba virus, various leishmaniases, Bussuquara virus, Ilheus virus, Candiru phlebovirus, Inermicapsifer cubensis, Paragonimus mexicanus, Gnathostoma binucleatum, various rickettsial diseases, Paragonimus kellicotti, various orthobunyaviruses, Colorado tick coltivirus, various hantaviruses, Monongahela virus, New York-1 virus, Heartland bandavirus, St. Louis encephalitis virus, helminths in the genus Echinococcus, various vesiculoviruses, Cardiovirus A, Rocio virus, various Borrelia bacteria, Monnsonella ozzardi, Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus, eastern equine encephalitis virus, Group C viral fever viruses, Mayaro virus, and western equine encephalitis virus.

"Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History" - Kyle Harper

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To be diagnosed with tertiary syphilis in the days before antibiotics was to be condemned to wakeful damnation. It was incurable and excruciating.²³

23. Tertiary syphilis was a terrible and incurable condition that Julius Wagner-Jauregg was awarded a Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1927 for having developed malaria therapy, in which patients were intentionally infected with malaria to induce fevers that might destroy the syphilis bacterium. Soon rendered unnecessary by antibiotics, malaria therapy also played an important role in the recognition of population differences in malaria susceptibility.

"Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History" - Kyle Harper

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Pandemic influenza swept across Europe in the 1550s and possibly reached the New World. It might have been the first truly global pandemic.²¹

21. Plague is sometimes alleged to have crossed the ocean, but not on firm evidence. Europeans were intimately familiar with plague, and the lack of buboes in all the sources for the Americas is striking.

"Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History" - Kyle Harper

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Tenochtitlán may have been home to a little over two hundred thousand residents on the eve of Cortés's invasion; at this time the largest European cities were Paris and Constantinople, at roughly the same size.¹⁵

15. Estimates of the population of Peru have ranged from two to thirty-two million but the totals were probably between six and thirteen million.

"Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History" - Kyle Harper

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The depopulation of Hispaniola is a microcosm for a whole series of dramatic and unresolved questions about the biological impact of European contact.¹¹

11. The literature is massive and involves multiple interrelated issues, including indigenous numbers in 1492, the relative role of germs and other factors, and the question of whether to frame the encounter as a genocide.

"Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History" - Kyle Harper

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The history of disease in each region of the Americas depended on the interplay of four primary variables: (1) the timing, intensity, and nature of European contact; (2) the population density of native societies in the precontact period; (3) physical geography – above all, latitude and altitude – and (4) the effects of ecological transformation, especially in the creation of plantation-based societies reliant upon slave labor.

To capture the different configurations of these forces, we can discuss the New World into epidemiological macroregions, represented in figure 7.1 (along with table 7.1).

"Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History" - Kyle Harper

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In a book on the history of disease, this chapter is supposed to be the one where tiny numbers of Europeans conquer the teeming populations of the New World because of the terrible and tragic fury unleashed when the germs of civilization met the virgin soil of the Americas.

"Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History" - Kyle Harper

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Almost anywhere the evidence in Europe is rich enough to form a quantitative impression, the Black Death carried off 50-60 percent of the population (see table 6.2).

"Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History" - Kyle Harper

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But in all, it has been estimated that the immediate post-plague population of Florence was 37,250, for a total mortality of 55-65 percent.⁷²

72. It is often hard to know how much population decline can be equated with mortality per se, because migration or changes in the reach of the state or patterns of property ownership can also affect counts. Often, we have information on the number of households, but not the number of individuals. And any sample raises questions of representativeness. Different social groups could have had different exposure to the plague and different mortality experience.

"Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History" - Kyle Harper

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In all, here is a big piece of global history where we can hope for ongoing elucidation.⁶¹

61. On India, the Arab traveler Ibn Battutah mentioned an epidemic at the time, but it was probably not bubonic plague. Arab and European chroniclers vaguely assert that the pandemic swept through India, but local sources from the Delhi Sultanate do not corroborate these claims.

"Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History" - Kyle Harper

[whats-in-a-sentence]

How wide was the geographic reach of the Black Death (table 6.1)?

"Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History" - Kyle Harper

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Bastard. O, let us pay the time but needful woe,

Since it hath been beforehand with our griefs.

This England never did, nor never shall,

Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,

But when it first did help to wound itself.

Now these her princes are come home again,

Come the three corners of the world in arms,

And we shall shock them. Nought shall make us rue,

If England to itself do rest but true.

William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, The Life and Death of King John (Act V, Scene VII)

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In 2019, a plague genome from Laishevo, at the confluence of the Volga and the Kama Rivers in Russia, was published. The bacterium that killed this individual is the closest found so far to the great polytomy, and it is immediately ancestral to the strains that caused the Black Death. It is a trace of the plague's movement into western Eurasia on the eve of the Second Pandemic.⁵⁸

58. The Tian Shan plague focus lies at an important juncture between the Mongolian heartlands and the central steppe. It has been known since the 1950s that a series of gravestones carved by Nestorian Christians in this region suggested a severe epidemic in 1338-39. Ten of the inscriptions even mention a "pestilence." (...) It is not certain that Y. pestis caused the epidemic, but if it did this raises the intriguing possibility that the pandemic explosion of the Black Death was here in the years before its appearance in the west.

"Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History" - Kyle Harper

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The strains of Y. pestis that are closest to the polytomy have been recovered from the Tian Shan mountains and its foothills (see figure 6.7). This region around Lake Issyk Kul, where the autonomous Xinjiang region of China meets Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, has emerged as a zone of particular interest for the evolutionary history of plague.

"Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History" - Kyle Harper

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Prince Henry. It is too late: the life of all his blood

Is touch'd corruptibly, and his pure brain,

Which some suppose the soul's frail dwelling-house,

Doth by the idle comments that it makes

Foretell the ending of mortality.

William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, The Life and Death of King John (Act V, Scene VII)

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In England at the time of the Domesday Book (the great survey commissioned by William the Conqueror in AD 1086) there were about 1.71 million people alive (see figure 6.6). The population grew thanks to progressive reclamation of arable land for farming, until almost every cultivable acre was occupied. This expansion was complemented by steady if unspectacular advances in technology.

"Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History" - Kyle Harper