Plagues in World History (14 page)

It is remarkable how, despite all the new advances and information that emerged during the Third Pandemic with respect to identifying the causative microorganism behind plague and explaining its transmission, the actual measures taken by modern medical authorities against the disease in both India and China mirrored those adopted by European health boards during the Second 64 y Chapter 1

Pandemic primarily between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. As during the late medieval and Early Modern periods, authorities implementing antiplague measures during the Third Pandemic often felt stymied and frustrated by the perceived ignorance, superstition, and at least passive resistance of the masses they were trying to help. Even in China, where native authorities had better compliance from their subject population than the British medical service had in India, resistance to such measures as hospitalization of victims and isolation of contacts could be significant. Dr. Wu Liande, chief medical officer of the North Manchurian Plague Prevention Service, who was put in charge of all Chinese efforts to contain the pneumonic plague outbreaks in Manchuria and who received his medical training at the University of Cambridge in England, complained that “one of the most difficult problems of plague-prevention in China was this passive opposition of the populace in not reporting cases when alive and then throwing the bodies out when dead.” This happened even among “well-to-do and educated persons,” and Wu frankly admitted that it hindered his efforts at fighting plague, for “if there had been cooperation between the public and the authorities at the beginning, the epidemic would have been more confined, but the cases were hidden and the families or friends were thus infected.”

However, Wu also allowed that there was at least a culturally, if not medically, valid reason for why his Chinese subjects refused to cooperate in this regard, which was their fear of isolation from their families, whose importance had been stressed in China going back to the philosopher Confucius during the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E. “This fear of isolation,” Wu wrote, was prevalent throughout the country, “in North and South China alike”170—nor can the masses really be blamed for harboring such fears when patients were doomed to spend their last days in the solitary confinement of what even Wu described as stark, “puri-tan-like” hospital rooms with only a cast-iron bed and spittoon for company, all the while tended by masked and therefore faceless attendants, and when isolation wards for healthy contacts consisted of railway boxcars normally fit only for carrying freight but that were left idle during the quarantine imposed by the plague.

When plague hospitals, such as the one at Harbin, are also described as surrounded by barbed wire and posted armed guards to keep their infectious residents from escaping, one can be forgiven for comparing their general atmosphere and conditions to that of prisons for the most hopelessly condemned.171

Likewise in India, even the most well-intentioned, well-thought-out precautions against plague could be stonewalled or undone altogether by native resistance, which included substituting healthy people for sick ones in roll calls, hiding corpses in dust heaps, and inducing native doctors to diagnose victims as suffering from asthma or bronchitis instead of plague. Even worse, from the authorities’ point of view, was inducing friends or relatives to hide plague victims Plague y 65

from their prying eyes, since plague was still deemed to be contagious, even though this is not strictly true in the case of bubonic plague (unless patients develop secondary plague pneumonia). It also must have been most demoralizing for the British Civil Service in India to hear of “plague rumors,” not all of which were unjustified and which arguably reflected a very real terror of plague: these included that British medical staff at plague hospitals and segregation camps poisoned native patients, stole their possessions, forcibly carted away healthy persons for extortion purposes or else compelled them to be guinea pigs for inoculation trials, and even that they cut up native bodies and boiled them down to extract a healing balm known as
momiai
.172 (Manchuria also had its share of these plague rumors during the 1920–1921 outbreak, such as that Wu’s staff put poison in people’s wells, flour, and other food in order to collect the three-dollar reward for each corpse supposedly dead of plague, and that Wu himself was said to be secretly shooting the sick behind the walls of his plague hospital at Harbin.173) The French colony of Senegal in West Africa, where a major epidemic of bubonic plague occurred in 1914, presents a third example of how native resistance to antiplague measures could force a compromise in colonial policies, especially when the mother country faced the simultaneous pressure of just having entered the First World War. Here, the paternalistic medical response of the French government included quarantine and residential segregation, disinfection and burning of affected houses, and mandatory vaccination, while the native resistance, characterized as “the most militant popular opposition” in the colony’s history, included mass street protests and general strikes among market sellers of produce.174

But since the dynamics of bubonic plague (spread by rats and fleas) are so very different from pneumonic plague (communicated by human-to-human contact), one can question the relative effectiveness of such measures as quarantine and disinfection in India, China, and Senegal. Whereas Wu was able to slash the number of deaths to less than a sixth of their former total after a decade of fighting pneumonic plague in Manchuria, India at least initially had rather less success, since half of all its deaths from bubonic plague occurred during its first ten years of living with the disease from 1898 to 1908. Indeed, the fact that India’s antiplague measures were basically unchanged from the Second Pandemic indicates that they were adopted by the British out of long habit and expectation (their “traditional” response in the same way that the natives had theirs), rather than being specifically formulated to meet the new realities of the germ theory and their spread by insect and rodent vectors. This also seems to have been the case in Senegal in 1914, where medical authorities placed very low priority on disrupting flea and rat infestations of straw huts and granaries in both city and countryside.175 By the same token, this leads one to question whether human 66 y Chapter 1

attempts to control plague had any role at all in ending the Second Pandemic, or was it rather due to independent biological factors, such as emerging rat immunity to the disease, that had nothing to do with the human response?176

Disinfecting homes and burning clothes and bedding undoubtedly helped reduce the number of fleas that could communicate bubonic plague, but this may also have unintentionally driven rats to seek the shelter of other dwellings, where they then continued to spread the disease. The only truly effective means of breaking the chain of connection between plague-infected rats and fleas and their potential human hosts, the Indian Plague Commission found, was the longstanding tradition that native Indians already had of evacuating to the surrounding countryside whenever the disease broke out in their villages.

As in China, authorities in India also underestimated the strength of family ties that bitterly resisted any attempt to separate members of a household once plague was discovered there. The broad powers that the British government arrogated to itself by the terms of the Epidemic Diseases Act passed in February 1897 in order to segregate and hospitalize anyone tainted by the plague provoked an outcry of native protest. One native newspaper in Pune, the
Burdwan Sanjivani
, declared that, no matter how justified such measures might be in sacrificing individual needs for the general welfare, “few will desire to live in a country where the wife is separated from the husband, the child from the parent, and the parent from the child. We call this selfishness, and not self-sacrifice.”177 Indeed, according to another native newspaper, the
Vyápári
, “The moral effect of segregation alone, apart from the character of the arrangements at the segregation hospital, is sufficient to retard the recovery of a patient compulsorily removed from among his relations.”178

This contradicted the testimony of some of the British agents who appeared before the Indian Plague Commission, such as Colonel Donald Robertson from the Mysore state and Major G. E. Hyde-Cates of Cutch, who alleged that some natives abandoned their relatives, to the point that mothers even refused to nurse their children, once they were infected with plague.179 Yet, this is so similar to what European chroniclers were saying of family behavior during the Black Death that it begs the question of whether modern observations (at least those made from a Western point of view) were conditioned by what was known of the earlier Second Pandemic? Or rather, were such cases of abandonment an extreme response, not at all indicative of the behavior of the population at large, that nonetheless drew the attention of many observers during both pandemics? For al the data generated by its modern, scientific approach to the disease, in many ways the Third Pandemic raises more questions, both with respect to its own experience of plague and that of the past, than it answers.

Finally, the Third Pandemic has been portrayed by its historians as a classic example of Western imperialism imposing its concepts of medicine and disease Plague y 67

upon the colonial subjects of its empires, but is this really or entirely the case? It has been fairly pointed out that the native Indian response to plague and to the draconian measures imposed by the British government was a complex one that did not always fall along neatly antagonistic lines.180 Nonetheless, some elements of how the disease played out particularly in India do suggest that resistance to plague was tantamount to resistance to imperialism. Most obvious in this regard was the assassination on June 22, 1897, of the British Civil Service officer, W. C.

Rand, who was in charge of enforcing plague-prevention measures in Pune.

Rand had, in effect, become a symbol of oppressive, “white bull” British rule in India, for he had a notorious reputation for carrying out measures such as house inspection in a brutally harsh and offensive manner, which contrasted with more enlightened regimes such as that of General W. F. Gatacre in Bombay. (Rand boasted that his efforts to control plague “were perhaps the most drastic that had ever been taken to stamp out an epidemic.”181) The editors of one native newspaper in Pune,
Dnyán Prakásh
, concluded that Rand’s Plague Committee had no other motive for its actions than that they were being done “for tyranny’s sake—for no other reason save that the members of that body take a peculiar delight in making the citizens feel their power.”182 Certainly a connection between plague controls and imperialist policies existed in the minds of some British authorities, such as W. L. Reade, the medical officer who eventually succeeded Rand as the man in charge of plague operations at Pune. In a letter to his superiors back in London, Reade frankly confessed that “plague operations, properly undertaken, present one of the best opportunities for riveting our rule in India, as it is not only an opportunity for showing a kindness to the people, but also for showing the superiority of our Western Science, and thoroughness.”183 Clearly for Reade, conquering the plague and the allegiance of native Indians to the British Empire went hand in hand, even though he certainly presented an overly optimistic view of how well plague controls were working and the natives’ reception of them for the benefit of the India Office back home, as well as for the sake of his own self-promotion. Some native newspapers also made this connection quite explicit, such as when
Poona Vaibhav
, responding to the passing of the Epidemic Diseases Act in February 1897, stated that, “if [the British] government under such circumstances will oppress people in the shape of plague preventive measures and pass laws giving ample powers to their officers to carry them out, there is every probability that the government and the people will be the bitterest enemies of each other.” The paper also issued a thinly veiled warning to British authorities by calling to mind the numerous “examples in Indian history of oppressive regimes being overthrown through agencies sent by God for the deliverance of the oppressed,” a reference, perhaps, to the not-so-distant Sepoy Mutiny of 1857; other papers sardonically paraded similar examples of resistance to tyranny from 68 y Chapter 1

Britain’s own history, such as when the barons of England forced King John to sign Magna Carta in 1215.184

However, as Reade’s letter makes clear, British imperialist intentions with respect to the plague were inseparable from the supposed technological superiority of modern Western medicine when compared to what was available from native traditional healers, the Hindu
vaids
and Muslim
hakims
. (This in spite of the fact that the British response of plague controls could be considered just as traditional, in the European context of the Second Pandemic, as the Indian one.) In this sense, then, it did not matter who administered the antiplague measures so much as that they were alien to a people’s customary way of life and culture. This much is clear from the fact that resistance blossomed even in China, where plague controls were administered by native agents (albeit, in Wu’s case, one who had been heavily influenced by Western ideas, as transmitted through his Cambridge training). A revealing anecdote from Wu is when he unfavorably compares his own people to the Japanese, whom he praises for overcoming their fear of plague controls such as isolation due to the fact that the “new universal education of the masses produced its beneficial results.” To counter the sometimes violent resistance of the mob, which included gun and knife threats made against members of his staff, Wu authorized the publication of “thousands of circulars,”