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Authors: Monica Murphy, Bill Wasik
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making a wide detour by going back against the wind lest the vapor infect him, pulls his flask violently over the rocks.
A number of the fourteenth-century authors did comprehend the idea of person-to-person infection, though its mechanism was obscure tothem: one, a physician from the French town of Montpellier, held that the disease was passed through the optic nerves, such that the well man might look at the sick and immediately be attacked by the pestilence.
No link between the plague and the rats, let alone their fleas, could be apprehended by anyone at the time. Indeed, with the exception of rabies, the whole notion of zoonosis, that humans were being infected by animals, was almost entirely foreign to the medical mind of the Middle Ages. The only other zoonotic disease that seems to have been understood at the time was anthrax—the cattle disease that causes both skin lesions and (if inhaled) death in humans. But awareness of anthrax over the ages was dim and intermittent. While the Bible describes an anthrax-like plague in Exodus 9 (“festering boils…break out on people and animals throughout the land”) and a sixteenth-century “boke of husbandry” describes a similar malady, no descriptions of the disease are to be found in the intervening medical scholarship. (The term
anthrakes
dates back to Hippocrates, but it is used to describe not the zoonotic disease but the black carbuncles on human skin that typify a number of diseases, most probably smallpox.)
Yet increasing urbanization, and more intensive use of agriculture, were accelerating the rate at which infections passed from animals to humans. And by the fifteenth century a third factor—man’s new mobility, carried out in ocean voyages of staggering length—brought much of the world’s people into contact with devastating germs they had never before encountered. This so-called age of discovery saw two European neighbors, Spain and Portugal, amass enormous empires as they pursued wealth from expanding trade in spices and precious metals; Spain would seize far more territory, colonizing most of the Americas, while Portugal would cover the globe more finely, setting up outposts from Brazil to Angola to Goa to Macau. In ferrying goods, these colonists also ferried germs in all directions.
The bulk of these were human-to-human infections. Mostnotably, they brought smallpox to the Americas but took away syphilis, which tore through Europe and then eastward into Asia. But meeting new animals meant meeting their diseases, too.
It’s arguable that the greatest devastation Christopher Columbus wrought upon the New World took the form of eight sows, which made landfall in Hispaniola on December 8, 1493. Those pigs are believed to have instigated a massive swine flu epidemic that began the following day, killing Indians in staggering number—“the stench was very great and pestiferous,” observed one Spanish civil servant soberly—and initiating a long run of pestilence that offed some two-thirds of Santo Domingo’s natives in little more than a decade. One Dominican friar later put the death toll from disease in Hispaniola at nearly a million, in less than thirty years, and described similar die-offs in Cuba, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico.
But at the time, no one seemed to have looked askance at those eight fateful swine. * Columbus himself, who fell ill from the flu early in its run and took some three months to recover, was an especially poor epidemiologist: he wrote home that “the cause of the ailments so common among us, is the sustenance, and the waters, and airs.”
Rabies, in contrast to other zoonoses, was universally known and widely feared. Keeping hounds free from its ravages was a key preoccupation of the medieval huntsman. Edward of Norwich, the second Duke of York, who was born in 1373 and died in 1415 at the Battle of Agincourt, published an English-language translation and expansion—entitled
The Master of Game
—of Gaston’s famous
A number of the fourteenth-century authors did comprehend the idea of person-to-person infection, though its mechanism was obscure tothem: one, a physician from the French town of Montpellier, held that the disease was passed through the optic nerves, such that the well man might look at the sick and immediately be attacked by the pestilence.
No link between the plague and the rats, let alone their fleas, could be apprehended by anyone at the time. Indeed, with the exception of rabies, the whole notion of zoonosis, that humans were being infected by animals, was almost entirely foreign to the medical mind of the Middle Ages. The only other zoonotic disease that seems to have been understood at the time was anthrax—the cattle disease that causes both skin lesions and (if inhaled) death in humans. But awareness of anthrax over the ages was dim and intermittent. While the Bible describes an anthrax-like plague in Exodus 9 (“festering boils…break out on people and animals throughout the land”) and a sixteenth-century “boke of husbandry” describes a similar malady, no descriptions of the disease are to be found in the intervening medical scholarship. (The term
anthrakes
dates back to Hippocrates, but it is used to describe not the zoonotic disease but the black carbuncles on human skin that typify a number of diseases, most probably smallpox.)
Yet increasing urbanization, and more intensive use of agriculture, were accelerating the rate at which infections passed from animals to humans. And by the fifteenth century a third factor—man’s new mobility, carried out in ocean voyages of staggering length—brought much of the world’s people into contact with devastating germs they had never before encountered. This so-called age of discovery saw two European neighbors, Spain and Portugal, amass enormous empires as they pursued wealth from expanding trade in spices and precious metals; Spain would seize far more territory, colonizing most of the Americas, while Portugal would cover the globe more finely, setting up outposts from Brazil to Angola to Goa to Macau. In ferrying goods, these colonists also ferried germs in all directions.
The bulk of these were human-to-human infections. Mostnotably, they brought smallpox to the Americas but took away syphilis, which tore through Europe and then eastward into Asia. But meeting new animals meant meeting their diseases, too.
It’s arguable that the greatest devastation Christopher Columbus wrought upon the New World took the form of eight sows, which made landfall in Hispaniola on December 8, 1493. Those pigs are believed to have instigated a massive swine flu epidemic that began the following day, killing Indians in staggering number—“the stench was very great and pestiferous,” observed one Spanish civil servant soberly—and initiating a long run of pestilence that offed some two-thirds of Santo Domingo’s natives in little more than a decade. One Dominican friar later put the death toll from disease in Hispaniola at nearly a million, in less than thirty years, and described similar die-offs in Cuba, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico.
But at the time, no one seemed to have looked askance at those eight fateful swine. * Columbus himself, who fell ill from the flu early in its run and took some three months to recover, was an especially poor epidemiologist: he wrote home that “the cause of the ailments so common among us, is the sustenance, and the waters, and airs.”
Rabies, in contrast to other zoonoses, was universally known and widely feared. Keeping hounds free from its ravages was a key preoccupation of the medieval huntsman. Edward of Norwich, the second Duke of York, who was born in 1373 and died in 1415 at the Battle of Agincourt, published an English-language translation and expansion—entitled
The Master of Game
—of Gaston’s famous
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