Page 199 - Encyclopedia Of World History

diseases—overview 549

forms of human violence played a part in destroying but it came with soldiers from Cyprus and may not have
Native Americans, but Afro-Eurasian diseases always had been new, but only newly recognized by doctors of the
the principal role. day. More recently, other infections have also invaded
Caribbean islands and tropical coastlands of the Amer- disease-experienced populations of the earth.AIDS is the
icas also proved hospitable to malaria and yellow fever most serious and widespread, and may have been trans-
from Africa once the species of mosquito that carried ferred recently from monkeys somewhere in the African
them got across the Atlantic on board slave ships. No interior, or perhaps, like typhus,AIDS is much older and
exact time horizon for the arrival of malaria in the New remained unrecognized until increasing sexual promis-
World can be discerned, but in 1648 a lethal epidemic of cuity turned it into an epidemic.
yellow fever in Havana announced the arrival of that dis- Three other new disease exposures affecting industri-
ease unambiguously. When it subsequently became alized populations in modem times are also worth men-
endemic, survivors acquired a very potent protection tioning. Tuberculosis (TB), a very ancient infection,
against invading armies, since soldiers from Europe reg- gained fresh impetus after about 1780 when new facto-
ularly fell ill and died of it within about six weeks of their ries, powered by coal and steam, began to crowd people
arrival. This allowed the Spanish to overcome British together in industrial towns under unsanitary condi-
efforts to conquer the sugar islands in the 18th century, tions. Its ravages crested in Europe about 1850, shortly
doomed Napoleon’s attempt to reconquer Haiti in 1801, before a German professor, Robert Koch, discovered the
and persuaded him to sell the Louisiana territory to bacillus that caused it in 1882, thereby inaugurating a
Thomas Jefferson in 1803. Quite a political career for a new age for preventive medicine. Yet despite modern
virus from tropical Africa! medical skills,TB remains the most widespread and per-
Elsewhere, inhabitants of Australia, New Zealand, and sistent human infection worldwide, sustained by the
other isolated communities experienced approximately extraordinary growth of cities that had carried more
the same fate as Native Americans did when disease- than half of humankind into crowded urban settings by
experienced Europeans arrived among them. Always the 1950 or so.
newcomers also brought a rich array of other organisms Cholera, too, was an ancient disease at home in India,
with them: crops and weeds, together with domesti- where it flourished among Hindu pilgrims who came to
cated animals and pests like lice, rats, and mice.The earth bathe in the Ganges. The cholera bacillus can survive
is still reverberating from the ecological upheavals initi- independently in fresh water for considerable periods of
ated when humans and innumerable other organisms time, but multiplies very rapidly in the human alimentary
began to cross the oceans, making the biosphere into a tract, and causes diarrhea, vomiting, fever, and often
single interacting whole as never before. death within a few hours of its onset. Bodily shrinkage
Disease exchanges ran almost entirely one way, spread- from dehydration and skin discolored by bursting capil-
ing from Afro-Eurasia to other lands. Reverse transmis- laries make the symptoms of cholera especially horrible.
sions are hard to find, though some experts believe that So when the disease broke through long-standing bound-
syphilis came to Europe from the Americas. Europeans aries in 1819, spreading to Southeast Asia, China, Japan,
discovered that disease when it broke out in a French East Africa, and western Asia, it aroused intense fear and
army besieging Naples in 1494; so its connection with panic even though mortality rates remained rather
Columbus’s return in 1493 is indeed possible. But there modest—a mere 13 percent of the total population of
is no clear evidence of the prior existence of syphilis in Cairo, for instance. Between 1831 and 1833 a fresh out-
the New World, so no one can be sure. break carried cholera across Russia to the Baltic and
Another disease, typhus, also invaded Europe in 1490; thence to England, Ireland, Canada, the United States,