Man and Disease
BESSER, JAMES DAVID
Man and Disease PLAGUES AND PEOPLES, by William H. McNeill. Anchor Press/Doubieday. 369 pp. $10. JAMES DAVID BESSER Less than half a century has passed since modern medicine freed us from the...
...Both involve delicate and changeable equilibria...
...Another consequence was scapegoating...
...Thanks to the Salk vaccine we stopped polio...
...Changes in civilization, conversely, can alter diseases and their propagation...
...Peaceful accommodation is a state of equilibrium...
...Diseases like the plague, terrifying and utterly inexplicable, distorted the social mechanisms of the societies they decimated...
...Historians, lacking hard evidence or close contact with such calamities, tend to subordinate disease to more obvious variables...
...Direct evidence of the spread of disease before 1900 is, at best, sparse, and contemporary accounts reflect the fear and mythology that invariably accompanied dread epidemics in a less scientific age...
...McNeill leaves us with the disquieting feeling that next time we may not be so lucky...
...Attacks on the German Jews as a ritualized response to the plague resulted in the transfer of much of the Jewish population to Eastern Europe, especially Poland, and added another thread to the fabric of German anti-Semitism...
...Recurrent epidemics, in turn, affected every other facet of Roman life, and the resulting instability — the famines, large-scale population shifts, and military activities — increased vulnerability to further infection...
...Plagues and Peoples is an intriguing analysis of the past that suggests that our current dominance over Earth's living environment is more tenuous than we care to imagine...
...Likewise they themselves can have their equilibria disturbed by other groups or through changes in their own lifestyles...
...The Europeans had developed resistance after generations of exposure...
...McNeill uses leprosy and typhus as examples...
...There are strong parallels, McNeill suggests, between our interactions with each other and our relationships to parasitical diseases...
...the natives had achieved no such balance...
...James David Besser is a free-lance writer whose special interests include environmental problems...
...City dwellers fed by surrounding rural communities exist in what is essentially a macroparasitic relationship analogous to the amicable exchange between our intestinal cells and the bacteria E Coli that live there...
...Medical science, he argues, has conquered the dread diseases of the past, but this alteration of natural processes will inevitably create new stresses...
...The development of an active textile industry in England led to greater use of protective clothing, which in turn reduced the body contact necessary for the transmission of leprosy...
...Communities that have adapted to their microparasites can bring death and terror to distant communities by upsetting the microparasitic balance through invasion and conquest...
...In Plagues and Peoples, a fascinating exercise in historical speculation, William H. McNeill argues convincingly for the extraordinary impact of disease on human history...
...radical shifts in any direction can be devastating...
...A simple example is polio...
...Many of McNeill's conclusions necessarily are based on thoughtful speculation...
...The recent inexplicable deaths in Philadelphia and the threat of a swine flu epidemic only hint of the fear and social upheaval that were regularly generated by diseases like the bubonic plague and smallpox...
...As we evolved into thinking, communicating creatures we altered a variety of natural balances, changing our own vulnerability to organisms and changing the conditions affecting other forms of life...
...Looked at from the point of view of other organisms," McNeill notes, "humankind therefore resembles an acute epidemic disease, whose occasional lapses into less virulent forms of behavior have never yet sufficed to permit any stable, chronic relationship to establish itself...
...But at the same time the increasing use of wool benefited lice and bedbugs, and the result was the emergence of typhus as a mass killer...
...The primary strength of Plagues and Peoples is McNeill's ability to fit our history into the complex and changing ecosystems of which humankind is only one part...
...He fits his conclusions neatly into an ecosystem perspective that leads the reader to wonder about the eventual consequences of our medical revolution...
...Yet he is thoroughly persuasive...
...The introduction of smallpox to unimmunized native American populations, for example, helps explain why Cortez and his 600 men were able to conquer millions of Aztecs with relative ease...
...It became an epidemic among modern populations when an emphasis on cleanliness and sanitation prevented normal childhood exposure to a harmless organism that conferred immunity to polio...
...One form of leprosy, yaws, in all likelihood then adapted to its changed environment by becoming dependent on the sex organs for transmission...
...McNeill points to the reawakened interest in religious mysticism at the expense of the rational theology of the age of Aquinas as one result of the Black Death...
...Similarly the macroparasitism of Roman imperialism brought new and terrible diseases to the homeland, where they flourished amid the relatively dense population...
...JAMES DAVID BESSER Less than half a century has passed since modern medicine freed us from the worst horrors of infectious disease, and already we have put out of mind the enormous impact disease can have on the course of human events...
Vol. 40 • December 1976 • No. 12
