Plagues and Peoples (49 page)

The Peruvian data are affected by the breakdown of irrigation required to keep agriculture going on the arid coasts; the Mexican cover a longer time span and thus reflect a longer impact of unfamiliar disease upon the native inhabitants.

29.
Philip Curtin, “Epidemiology and the Slave Trade,”
Political Science Quarterly
, 83 (1968), 190–216; Francisco Guerra, “The Influence of Disease on Race, Logistics, and Colonization in the Antilles,”
Journal of Tropical Medicine
, 49 (1966), 23–35; Wilbur Zelinsky, “The Historical Geography of the Negro Population of Latin America,”
Journal of Negro History
, 34 (1949), 153–221.

30.
Henry F. Dobyns, “Estimating Aboriginal American Population,”
Current Anthropology, 7
(1966), 395–416; Sherburne F. Cook, “The Significance of Disease in the Extinction of the New England Indians,”
Human Biology
, 45 (1973), 485–508. For a naive but recent survey of the matter, see Wilbur R Jacobs, “The Tip of an Iceberg: Pre-Columbian Indian Demography and Some Implications for Revisionism,”
William and Mary Quarterly
, 31 (1974), 123–32.

31.
The Annals of the Cakchiquels and Title of the Lords of Totonicapan
, Adrian Recinos, et al., trans. (Norman, Oklahoma, 1953), p. 116, quoted in Crosby,
The Columbian Exchange
, p. 58.

32.
Early nineteenth-century figures for mortality among native African troops serving in the British army show about a 50 per cent increase in disease mortality as a consequence of moving within tropical Africa to a new region with new disease exposures and, of course, a radically new way of life. Philip D. Curtin, “Epidemiology and the Slave Trade,”
Political Science Quarterly
, 83 (1968), 204–5. Death rates for white personnel, however, remained far above those of Africans.

33.
Philip D. Curtin,
The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census
(Madison, Wisconsin, 1969), pp. 270–71.

34.
P. Huard, “La Syphilis Vue par les Médicins Arabo-Persans, Indiens et Sino-Japonais du XV
^e
et XVI
^e
Siècles,”
Histoire de la Médicine
, 6 (1956), 9–13. Recommended cures were also of world-wide distribution, with the Chinese pharmacopeia taking the lead. Cf. K. Chimin Wong and Wu Lien-teh,
History of Chinese Medicine
, 2nd ed. (Shanghai, 1936), pp. 136, 215–16. These authors are of the opinion that despite contemporary testimony to the novelty of the disease in the sixteenth century, ancient Chinese texts reveal familiarity with syphilitic sores.
Symptoms and language being as variable as they are, the facts seem completely irrecoverable.

35.
Cf. the judicious summary in Alfred W. Crosby, Jr.,
The Columbian Exchange
, pp. 122–56. Evidence of adaptation among isolated Amerindian tribes of the Amazon basin to syphilitic infection is ambiguous. Some tribes show widespread positive reactions to tests designed to tell whether they had been exposed to such infection; other tribes showed no such reactions, except among individuals who were known to have had contact with the outside world. Those tribes where positive reactions were widespread, however, showed no clinical signs of either yaws or syphilis or a third form of the infection, known as pinta. This remarkable result may indicate lengthy adaptation between host and parasite, and would be compatible with the theory of a Columbian introduction of syphilis into the Old World, for among a new population, inexperienced with the infectious agent in question, entirely different and far more fulminant symptoms are to be expected. Yet the erratic distribution of exposure to spirochetic infection among Amazonian Indians remains puzzling. Cf. Francis L. Black, “Infectious Diseases in Primitive Societies,”
Science
, 187 (1975), 517.

36.
Hans Zinsser,
Rats, Lice and History
, pp. 183–92, 210–28.

37.
Cf. Charles Creighton,
History of Epidemics in Britain
, I, 237–81.

38.
Cf. Albert Colnat,
Les Épidémies et l’Histoire
(Paris, 1937), p. 108.

39.
Karl F. Helleiner, “The Population of Europe from the Black Death to the Eve of the Vital Revolution,”
Cambridge Economic History of Europe, TV
(Cambridge, 1967), 20–40.

40.
For plague, see
Chapter IV
above; for malaria, L. W. Hackett,
Malaria in Europe: An Ecological Study
(Oxford, 1937), pp. 53–96; and below,
Chapter VI
.

41.
Cf. D. E. C. Eversley, “Population, Economy and Society,” in D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley,
Population in History: Essays in Historical Demography
(London, 1965), p. 57: “Everyone is agreed that the expectation of life was greater at the beginning of the modern statistical era [ca. 1750] than it had been in the seventeenth century. Yet we cannot pinpoint the improvement by time, area or cause.… If people lived longer, it must have been partly because they were cleaner, partly because some effective medical practice was known, partly because famines were no longer severe, but
mostly because the great killer epidemics failed to return
, for reasons which might not be connected with human actions at all.” (Italics added.) It seems obvious to me that the reason for the decay of the force of epidemics was their increased frequency, until epidemic became merely endemic childhood disease.

K. F. Helleiner, “The Vital Revolution Reconsidered,” in D. V. Glass
and D. E. C. Eversley, eds.,
Population in History: Essays in Historical Demography
(London, 1965), pp. 79–86, arrives at essentially the same conclusion with reference to eighteenth-century European population growth: not any notable diminution of death rates in normal times but rather a leveling off of peaks of mortality in times of crisis was the major growth factor in Helleiner’s opinion. Blunting of famine by improved marketing of food supplies plus increased food production had something to do with the reduction of crisis die-offs; but the changing pattern of epidemic incidence—which these authors seem unaware of was surely at work also.

42.
Temperature dropped in the seventeenth century; the peak of this “Little Ice Age” seems to have come in the first decade of the eighteenth century. Cf. Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie,
Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate Since the Year 1000
(New York, 1971).

43.
This has been persuasively analyzed by Fernand Braudel,
La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranée au Temps de Phillippe II
, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1966), English translation, New York, 1972.

44.
Despite the well-deserved obloquy that historians have lavished on the destructiveness of the soldieries in the Thirty Years’ War, deaths from disease far outstripped deaths from weapons in this as in every European conflict prior to the twentieth century. For a few details, cf. R. J. G. Concannon, “The Third Enemy: The Role of Epidemics in the Thirty Years’ War,”
Journal of World History
, 10 (1967), 500–11.

45.
Helleiner, op. cit., pp. 81–84.

46.
For an instructive analysis of the Tuscan model see Carlo M. Cipolla,
Christofano and the Plague: A Study in the History of Public Health in the Age of Galileo
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1973); for the Venetian model see Brian Pulían,
Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The Social Institutions of a Catholic State to 1620
(Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1971).

47.
As whites advanced, Amerindian populations withered, much as a penicillin mold creates a bacteria-free zone around its edges. In the United States, it was only in 1907, when smallpox vaccinations became compulsory in Indian schools, that population decay among Amerindians was checked, according to E. S. Stearn and A. E. Stearn,
The Effect of Smallpox on the Destiny of the Amerindian
(Boston, 1945), pp. 71, 136.

48.
Cf. A. Grenfell Price,
The Western Invasions of the Pacific and Its Continents: A Study of Moving Frontiers and Changing Landscapes, 1513–1958
(Oxford, 1963); Douglas L. Oliver,
The Pacific Islands
(New York, 1961); J. Burton Cleland, “Disease amongst Australian Aborigines,”
Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene
, 31 (1928), 53–59, 66–0, 141–45, 173–77, 307–13; Bolton G. Corney, “The Behavior of Certain Epidemic Diseases in Natives of Polynesia with Especial Refer-
enee to the Fiji Islands,” Epidemiological Society of London,
Transactions
, new series, 3 (1883–84), 76–95.

49.
Unnumbered pages in the back of I. S. Gurvich,
Etnicheskaya Istoriya Severo-Vostoka Sib eri
, Trudy Instituía Etnografiye, new series, 39 (1966), offer a series of graphs showing how various Siberian peoples decayed and in some cases recovered their numbers between 1650 and 1940.

50.
Philip Curtin,
The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census
, p. 270; C. W. Dixon,
Smallpox
(London, 1962), p. 208.

51.
P. Huard, “La Syphilis Vue par les Médicins Arabo-Persans, Indiens et Sino-Japonais du XV
^e
et XVI
^e
Siècles,”
Histoire de la Medicine, 6
(1956), 9–13.

52.
Cf. Appendix for details.

53.
Ping-ti Ho, Studies in the Population of China, 1368–1953, p. 277.

54.
Chu K’o-chen, op. cit., p. 37.

55.
Irene Taeuber,
The Population of Japan
, pp. 20–21.

56.
Totals are of course not particularly significant, since some epidemics were serious, others not. But here they are:

57.
So says Kingsley Davis,
The Population of India and Pakistan
(Princeton, 1951), p. 25.

58.
In Europe, maize and potatoes became significant only after 1650; in China, maize and sweet potatoes seem to have spread more rapidly, perhaps because the intensive hand labor characteristic of Chinese farming easily allowed experimentation with a new crop, whereas the rigidities of collective “open field” cultivation, which prevailed in most of northern Europe until the eighteenth century or later, powerfully inhibited any departure from custom. On spread of American food crops, cf. Berthold Laufer,
The American Plant Migration: I—The Potato
[Field Museum, Anthropological Series Publication #48] (Chicago, 1938); William L. Langer, “Europe’s Initial Population Explosion,”
American Historical Review, 69
(1963), 1–17; W. H. McNeill,
The Influence of the Potato on Irish History
(Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 1947); Traían Stoianovich, “Le Mais dans les Balkans,”
Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations
, 21 (1966), 1026–0; Ping-ti Ho, “The Introduction of American Food Plants into
China,”
American Anthropologist
, 57 (1955), 191–201; Philip Curtin,
The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (
Madison, Wisconsin, 1969), p. 270.

59.
My colleague, Donald Lach, first called my attention to the vitamin value of American food crops, and their importance in the contemporary cuisine of India. Cf. also Alfred W. Crosby,
The Columbian Exchange
, p. 194. The significance of vitamin-deficiency diseases in traditional civilized societies was sometimes very great. European encounters with scurvy on shipboard are relatively well known; but prior to the spread of potatoes, which also contain important vitamins, European peasantries, especially in the North, often suffered from scurvy over the winter. Cf. August Hirsch,
Handbook of Geographical and Historical Pathology
, II, 521–25. As for China, cf. T’ao Lee, “Historical Notes on Some Vitamin Deficiency Diseases of China,” in Brothwell and Sandison,
Disease in Antiquity
, pp. 417–22.

60.
For a general conspectus of the rise of these empires see W. H. McNeill,
The Rise of the West
, Ch. XI.

1.
Wu et al.,
Plague
, pp. 4–12.

2.
Jacques M. May, ed.,
Studies in Disease Ecology
(New York, 1961), p. 37.

3.
See above,
Chapter II
, p. 40.

4.
This statement may reflect lack of adequate information. Cf. Charles Leslie, “The Modernization of Asian Medical Systems,” John J. Poggie, Jr., and Robert N. Lynch, eds.,
Rethinking Modernization: Anthropological Perspectives
(New York, 1974), pp. 69–108.

5.
J. Ehrard, “Opinions médicales en France au XVIII
^e
siècle: la Peste et l’idée de contagion,”
Annales ESC
, 12 (1957), 46–59; Ernst Rodenwalt,
Pest in Venedig 1575–77: Ein Beitrag zur Frage der Infektkette bei den Pestepidemien West Europas
(Heidelberg, 1953); Brian Pulían,
Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The Social Institutions of a Catholic State
(Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1971), pp. 315ff.

6.
Cf. Allen Debus,
The English Paracelsians
(London, 1965), pp. 67–8.

7.
One estimate puts the population of Oceania in 1522 at 3.5 million. By 1939 the number of natives had fallen to 2.0 million according to Douglas L. Oliver,
The Pacific Islands
(New York, 1961), p. 255.

8.
Scholarly efforts to calculate world populations date from the seventeenth century, when a group of Englishmen, of whom John Graunt (d. 1674) and William Petty (d. 1687) were the most important, became interested in “political arithmetic” and in more theoretical matters like the mathematical regularities in London’s patterns of birth and
death. In the twentieth century speculation about world population took up where these seventeenth-century worthies had left off. Walter F. Willcox, “World Population Growth and Movement Since 1650,” in Walter F. Willcox, ed.,
International Mißrations
, 2 vols. (New York, 1929–31), simply reproduced the opinions of John Graunt in his estimates of Asian and African populations as of 1650. These guesses were modified on an impressionistic basis by A. M. Carr-Saunders,
World Population, Past Growth and Present Trends
(Oxford, 1936).