Plagues in World History Read Online Free PDF Page B

this book only with a “positivist” panoply of diseases, namely, those caused by the invasion of the human body by a known, identified microorganism. I therefore leave out a host of noninfectious diseases, such as those caused by vitamin deficiencies or psychological disorders, that may appear in other surveys. I do this because, even though the latter diseases are certainly impacted by human behavior, at the same time, they lack some of the essential criteria for studying human responses to disease, such as, most obviously, the nature of being infectious. In general, I have adopted three standards by which I have selected the diseases that are addressed in the chapters that follow: first, the disease must be, or at least must have been in the past, fatal for large numbers of victims, for there is nothing like the fear of death for eliciting a response from people. Second, the disease must have been, or still is, worldwide in its scope, in order to afford the opportunity to study contrast-ing responses to it among different cultures and societies. Third, the disease must have been exerting its virulence for a lengthy period of time, to observe evolving attitudes toward it.

Introduction y 17
    In many ways, the topic of disease is ideally suited for a globally oriented world history textbook such as this one. Comparing how different civilizations throughout space and time have reacted to disease is perhaps the best means of recovering the lessons that disease has to teach. And these lessons have not always been learned or passed on, even by the best historians.49 But by exploring the complex interactions, primarily in cultural terms, between disease and humans, a “new history” of disease that combines and integrates the positivist and relativist approaches may be written, for which some historians have been calling.50
    I believe that understanding the many ways in which we, as humans with our almost infinite variations of societies and cultures, have coped with disease (or not, as the case may be) is one of the most important lessons of history. This is no mere academic exercise. It is nothing less than a matter of life or death.
    C H A P T E R 1
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    Plague
    The disease known as “plague” may seem obscure to most people nowadays, but plague has been called the deadliest of all diseases,1 one that was responsible for perhaps the most lethal pandemic in all of history. And it is a disease that is still very much with us, even in a modern, developed country such as the United States, as John Tull and Lucinda Marker, a couple living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, found out in November of 2002. While Lucinda quickly recovered from her bout with plague, her husband, John, came down with a case of the disease that was so severe he was immediately put into a drug-induced coma that was to last for the next two and a half months, at the end of which John woke up to find both his legs amputated below the knee. John did survive plague, but barely; at one point, all his close family members were rushed to his bedside to pay what were thought to be their final respects. As John tells his tale, it’s clear that he’ll never forget his near-death experience with plague.2
    Plague is a specific disease, which should not be confused with its other, more general meaning in which it refers to disease in the abstract. It occurs in three forms, depending on how the microorganism that causes the disease in all cases, a bacterium known as Yersinia pestis , invades and spreads within the body. Plague is fairly unique among diseases in that it can be spread by both an insect vector, a trait it shares in common with malaria and typhus, for example, and also by direct, human-to-human transmission, which likewise happens in cases of influenza, tuberculosis, and smallpox.
    Bubonic plague is the most common and widely known form of this disease, in which fleas are responsible for infecting hosts when they bite and attempt to 19
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