Plagues in World History Read Online Free PDF

of the past. For example, some medieval doctors describe the lymphatic swellings of bubonic plague as being red, yellow, green, or black in color, which they said signified the severity of the illness; the fact that modern observers of plague fail to notice this same phenomenon may indicate to some that medieval people were suffering from an entirely different disease.47 But a detailed reading of medieval plague treatises reveals that actually what this tells us is that medieval doctors were here relying on ancient authority, in this case, the Prognostics of Hippocrates, rather than on their own, firsthand observations in order to make a prognosis of the disease. The lesson to take away from all this is not that the Black Death was a different disease from modern plague but rather that medieval doctors had radically different notions of how to diagnose and treat symptoms than their counterparts of today.
    Completely abandoning the positivist or ontological definition would thus needlessly deprive us of a valuable tool in our effort to write the history of disease. It may be obvious to say that each disease is unique, but what is less evident is that each disease has its own social/cultural dynamic in terms of how a society or civilization perceives and responds to it. This is no less a part of the “social construction” of disease than the relative values and norms of the culture upon whom the disease is acting. Together, both these forces could intersect to create some quite dramatic impacts in the course of the history of a pandemic. A good instance of this is how many late medieval doctors conceived of plague as a kind of “poison,” which seemed a product of both contemporary perceptions of the disease’s progress in individual victims, as well as populations at large, and pre-conceived notions that were inherited from the ancients. Combined with the unprecedented mortality of the disease, this rather unique conceptualization of plague undoubtedly contributed to scapegoating tendencies that attributed the Black Death to a human cause, whereby Jews, witches, the poor, and other per-16 y Introduction ceived enemies of society were believed to be deliberately spreading or prolonging an epidemic for their own nefarious purposes. To take a more modern example, AIDS was initially seen in the mid-1980s as a “gay plague” spread mainly by abrasive anal intercourse (gay-related immunodeficiency disease, or GRID), which led to homophobic responses in the workplace, among health insurers, and elsewhere. (At the present time, AIDS is primarily prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa, where it is spread overwhelmingly by heterosexual contact.) In both cases, we now know that these respective views of plague and AIDS were wrong, but this does not change the tragedy of their historical responses.
    Likewise, a modern “laboratory” identification of a historical disease or pandemic, even if only speculative, may help illuminate some of the outstanding questions and conundrums posed by it. Identifying the Black Death with plague, for instance, while still controversial, would explain why many late medieval outbreaks were associated by contemporaries particularly with women, children, or the poor, since these demographic groups were more likely to live in domestic conditions that ensured close contact with rats and fleas. It would also help us to understand the importance of trade to medieval society, since this is the medium through which plague is usually spread. Moreover, recent advances in biomolecular archaeology—which attempts to recover the genetic material of disease pathogens in human remains that have been preserved under optimal conditions, such as encapsulated dental pulp—seem to hold out some promise for positively identifying epidemics of the past in the laboratory just as definitively as modern occurrences of disease.48
    Readers should take note here that, as a consequence of all the above considerations, I deal in