Plagues and Peoples (50 page)

More recent students, having elaborate mathematical tools for refining census data of our own time, are unwilling to endorse and unable to improve such loose “order of magnitude” guesswork. Cf. John D. Durand, “The Modern Expansion of World Population,”
American Philosophical Society Proceedings
, 11 (1967), 136–59.

Yet however admirable and powerful mathematical analysis of census data can be, by confining attention to the most recent two centuries of the world’s history demographers focus attention on what is a grossly atypical sample of demographic history as a whole. They confine their study to an age in which epidemic disease had ceased to be nearly as important as in earlier times and when public control and containment of local violence has attained unparalleled efficiency. Even the incidence of famine has been much reduced by organized relief and the potentiality of redistributing food stocks through mechanical transport on short notice and on a global scale. By working so closely with an untypical sample of human demographic history, the experts tend to forget—or even disdainfully dismiss—factors that had been determinant in earlier ages.

9.
Ping-ti Ho, Studies on the Population of China, 1386–1953, pp. 277–78.

10.
Durand, op. cit., p. 137, offers the figure of 125 million for Europe’s population in 1750 and 152 million in 1800. Marcel R. Reinhard et André Armengaud,
Histoire Générale de la Population Mondiale
, pp. 114–201, summarize recent results of local studies in Europe without offering any overall figures.

11.
Debate over the interrelation between the industrial revolution, population growth, good and bad crop years and disease incidence is lively among British historians, who, however, have mostly followed the scientific demographers into such fascination with the way quantitative data can be converted into birth and death rates, fertility indices, age and sex pyramids, price indices, and other such mathematical artifacts as to pay little attention to disease. See for instance Thomas McKeown, R. G. Brown, R. G. Record, “An Interpretation of the Modern Rise of Population in Europe,”
Population Studies, 26
(1972), 341–82. Some, however, of whom P. E. Razzell, “Population Change in Eighteenth
Century England: A Reinterpretation,”
Economic History Review
, 18 (1965), 312–32, is the most emphatic, have brought changing incidence of disease under consideration. For a recent and judicious summary, see Thomas McKeown, “Medical Issues in Historical Demography,” in Edwin Clark, ed.,
Modern Methods in the History of Medicine
(London, 1971), 57–74.

12.
This figure is derived by adding totals offered for European settlement in different parts of America ca. 1800, listed in Reinhard and Armengaud, op. cit., pp. 202–6.

13.
Georg Sticker,
Abhandlungen
, I, 176–77, 237ff. For interesting sidelights on other aspects of Russia’s official reaction to the plague of 1771, see John T. Alexander, “Catherine II, Bubonic Plague, and the Problem of Industry in Moscow,”
American Historical Review, 79
(1974), 637–71.

14.
Reinhard and Armengaud, Histoire Générale de la Population Mondiale, pp. 180–81.

15.
On Irish population see Robert E. Kennedy, Jr.,
The Irish: Emigration, Marriage, Fertility
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1973). For the role of the potato in the drama, my unpublished Ph.D. thesis,
The Influence of the Potato in Irish History
(Cornell, 1947), provides the background for my remarks.

16.
L. W. Hackett, Malaria in Europe, an Ecological Study, pp. 53–6.

17.
Gordon Philpet, “Enclosure and Population Growth in Eighteenth Century England,”
Explorations in Economic History
, 12 (1975), 29–46, brought this idea to my attention.

18.
Jean-Paul Desaive, ed., Médecins, Climat et Epidemies à la Fin du XVIII
^e
Siècle (Paris, 1972); Jean-Pierre Goubert, Malades et Médecins en Bretagne, 1770–1970 (Paris, 1974).

19.
P. E. Razzell, “Population Change in Eighteenth Century England: A Reinterpretation,”
Economic History Review
, 18 (1965), 312–2; D. E. C. Eversley, “Epidemiology as Social History,” Foreword to Charles Creighton,
A History of Epidemics in Great Britain
, 2nd ed. (New York, 1965), p. 29.

20.
For details of the continued significance of smallpox in London, see William A. Grey, “Two Hundred and Fifty Years of Smallpox in London,”
Journal of the Royal Statistical Society
, 45 (1882), 399–443.

21.
Genevieve Miller, The Adoption of Inoculation for Smallpox in England and France (Philadelphia, 1957), pp. 194–240.

22.
The principal early champion of inoculation was the famous Congregational minister, Cotton Mather (d. 1728). Cf. Genevieve Miller, “Smallpox Inoculation in England and America: A Reappraisal,”
William and Mary Quarterly
, 13 (1956), 476–92. On epidemics in colonial
America see John Duffy,
Epidemics in Colonial America
(Baton Rouge, 1953).

23.
Cf. J. C. Long,
Lord Jeffrey Amherst, Soldier of the King
(New York, 1933), p. 186–87.

24.
Sherburne F. Cook, “F. X. Balmis and the Introduction of Vaccination to Spanish America,”
Bulletin for the History of Medicine
, 11 (1941), 543–60; 12 (1942), 70–101. Epidemics had been a serious administrative concern in Spanish America for a long time. Cf. Donald B. Cooper,
Epidemic Disease in Mexico City, 1761–1813: An Administrative, Social and Medical Study
(Austin, Texas, 1965).

25.
Harry Wain,
A History of Preventive Medicine
(Springfield, Illinois, 1970), pp. 177, 185, 195.

26.
Lady Mary can also be credited with introducing into England a quite new attitude toward an alien civilization. Instead of fear or scorn—or reluctant admiration for a recognized threat from afar—she and others became interested in Ottoman ways as a sample of the diversity of human behavior. Such disinterested, idle curiosity required leisure, and perhaps also a deep sense of the basic superiority of one’s own inherited style of life—all of which Lady Mary’s aristocratic circle enjoyed. Cf. Norman Daniel,
Islam and the West: The Making of an Image
(Edinburgh, 1960).

27.
Inoculation may also have been practiced in Wales before 1721. Perrot Williams, M.D., “A Method of Procuring the Small Pox Used in South Wales,” Royal Society of London,
Transactions Abridged III, Transactions to the Year 1732
[John Eames and John Martyn, eds.] (London, 1734), pp. 618–20. C. S. Dixon,
Smallpox
, p. 216, also mentions folk variolation reported from Poland (1671), Scotland (1715), Naples (1754).

28.
Genevieve Miller,
The Adoption of Inoculation
, pp. 48–67.

29.
K. Chimin Wong and Wu Lien-teh,
History of Chinese Medicine
, pp. 215–16.

30.
There seems no sound basis for the story popularized by Voltaire,
Lettres Philosophiques
(reprinted in Paris, 1915), II, 130, to the effect that inoculation had been invented among Circassians seeking to preserve the fair complexions of their daughters for sale to Turkish harems.

31.
C. W. Dixon, Smallpox, pp. 216–27; Genevieve Miller, The Adoption of Inoculation for Smallpox in England and France.

32.
On Near Eastern practices with respect to smallpox inoculation, cf. Patrick Russell, “An Account of Inoculation in Arabia in a Letter from Dr. Patrick Russell, Physician at Aleppo to Alexander Russell, M.D., F.R.S.,”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
, 18 (1768), 140–50. Russell’s report was in response to inquiry from the Royal Society.

33.
J. S. Chambers,
The Conquest of Cholera
(New York, 1938), p. 11.

34.
Wu Lien-teh, “The Early Days of Western Medicine in China,”
Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1931
, pp. 9–10; K. Chimin Wong and Wu Lien-teh,
History of Chinese Medicine
, pp. 276–80.

35.
Private letter from Professor D. B. Shimkin, Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois.

36.
Harry Wain,
A History of Preventive Medicine
(Springfield, Illinois, 1970), p. 206.

37.
For a catalogue of recorded outbreaks, cf. Friedrich Prinzing,
Epidemics Resulting from Wars
(Oxford, 1916), pp. 92–164. Prinzing concludes that accurate totals are unattainable, but suggests that in the single campaign of 1813–14, one tenth of the population died in this single epidemic.

38.
The fungus made it across the oceans because bigger and faster ships plying between South America and Europe could traverse the tropics without allowing their holds to heat up past the critical temperature which the fungus could not survive.

39.
One calculation concluded that one out of every forty-six New Yorkers died annually in 1810, whereas one out of twenty-seven did so in 1859. Cf. Howard D. Kramer, “The Beginnings of the Public Health Movement in the United States,”
Bulletin of the History of Medicine
, 21 (1947), 352–76. In Paris the death rate increased between 1817 and 1835 from 31 to 34 per thousand. Cf. Roderick E. McGrew,
Russia and the Cholera, 1823–1832
(Madison and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1965), p. 6.

40.
Cf. Aidan T. Cockburn,
The Evolution and Eradication of Infectious Diseases
, p. 196: “…  there is no reason why the last case of smallpox should not disappear within two or three years.” (1963).

41.
Laverne Kuhnke, Resistance and Response to Modernization: Preventive Medicine and Social Control in Egypt, 1825–1850 (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Chicago, 1971), p. 51.

42.
A number of casual references to sudden outbreaks of lethal disease in southern and western India that sound like cholera punctuate European records from the days of the first Portuguese residents at Goa. Cf. R Pollitzer,
Cholera
(Geneva, 1959), pp. 12–13. C. Macnamara,
A History of Asiatic Cholera
(London, 1876), discovered no fewer than sixty-four such references dating between 1503 and 1817.

43.
Cf. the bar graphs in Pollitzer, op. cit., p. 80.

44.
Cf. C. H. Gordon, An Epitome of the Reports of the Medical Officers of the Chinese Imperial Customs from 1871 to 1882 (London, 1884), p. 124.

45.
Pollitzer, op. cit., pp. 17–21; McGrew,
Russia and the Cholera
,
pp. 39–40; Norman Longmate, King Cholera: The Biography of a Disease (London, 1966), pp. 2–3; Hirsch, Handbook of Geographical and Historical Pathology, I, 394–97
.

46.
Estimates of mortality ranged from 12,000 to 30,000. Cf. Láveme Kuhnke, op. cit., p. 66.

47.
There was a minor recurrence in 1930, but nothing was reported from Mecca itself on that occasion. Pollitzer, op. cit., p. 63.

48.
Norman Longmate,
King Cholera
, p. 237.

49.
Between 1910 and 1954, 10.2 million died of cholera in India according to official tabulation; to these should be added nearly 200,000 deaths in Pakistan since 1947. Pollitzer, op. cit., p. 204 and
passim
.

50.
Kuhnke, op. cit., p. 204 and
passim
.

51.
Asa Briggs, “Cholera and Society in the 19th Century,”
Past and Present
, 19 (1961), 76–96.

52.
McGrew, op. cit., pp. 67, 111, 125; Longmate,
King Cholera
, pp. 4–5; Louis Chevalier, ed.,
Le Cholera, la Première Epidémie du XIX
^e
Siècle
(La Roche sur Yon, 1958).

53.
Cf. Charles E. Rosenberg, “Cholera in 19th Century Europe: A Tool for Social and Economic Analysis,”
Comparative Studies in Society and History
, 8 (1966), 452–63.

54.
Erwin H. Ackerknecht, “Anti-contagionism between 1821 and 1867,”
Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 22
(1948), 562–93.

55.
Reprinted as Snow on Cholera, being a Reprint of Two Papers by John Snow, M.D. (New York, 1936).

56.
According to Norman Howard-Jones, “Choleranomalies: the Unhistory of Medicine as Exemplified by Cholera,”
Perspectives in Biology and Medicine
, 15 (1972), 422–33, an Italian named Filippe Pacini anticipated Koch by some thirty years in identifying the “vibrio” as causing cholera; but his theory attracted almost no attention at the time and it was thus Koch’s “discovery” that mattered as far as medical opinion and practice are concerned.

57.
The motivation behind Charles Creighton’s monumental book,
The History of Epidemics in Britain
, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1891, 1894) was a passionate wish to disprove the germ theory of epidemic infection.

58.
Longmate,
King Cholera
, p. 229.

59.
Pollitzer,
Cholera
, pp. 202–372, offers a careful discussion of the complex factors that are currently believed to affect cholera infections.

60.
It has long been customary to ridicule the way the Admiralty handled scurvy. On the surface it certainly looks like a classic case of bureaucratic bungling. When effective cure and prevention had been published by respectable medical men as early as 1611 and several times thereafter, how could official command wait till 1795? Cf. John
Woodall,
The Surgeon’s Mate or Military and Domestique Surgery
, 2nd ed. (London, 1639), p. 165. “Of the Cure of the Scurvie,” which reads in part as follows: “The use of the juyce of lemmons is a precious medicine and well tried, being sound and good, let it have the chief place, for it will deserve it.… Some Chirugeons also give this juyce daily to the men in health as a preservative, which course is good if they have store, otherwise it were best to keep it for need.”

Yet it is a defect of historical perspective to assume from passages such as this that
the
cure for scurvy was apparent in London before the very end of the eighteenth century. For explanation of the reasons for delay and misinformation, see John Joyce Keevil,
Medicine and the Navy, 1200–1900
, 4 vols. (London, 1957–63) I, 151; Christopher Lloyd and Jack S. Coulter, ibid., III, 298–327.