Virgin Soil Epidemics

The SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 is also known as the novel coronavirus, which suggests that environmental historians thinking about our current anxieties and disease epidemics more generally, might find themselves turning first to Alfred W Crosby’s discussions of the  “virgin soil epidemics” that plagued indigenous societies when Europeans brought hitherto unknown pathogens to what they called new worlds overseas:  The Columbian Exchange:  Ecological and Cultural Consequences of 1792 (Westport, CN: Greenwood 1972); Ecological Imperialism: Biological Consequences of the Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982). These arresting syntheses drew on the detailed work of historical demographers and spawned much work on allied themes. For the USA, Elizabeth A Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 (New York: Hill and Wang 2002). Tracing the effects of variola on the American War of Independence and more broadly on the people of central and north America, Penn’s lively account shows how “the destructive, desolating power of smallpox made for a cascade of public-health crises and heartbreaking human drama” while detailing “how this mega-tragedy was met and what its consequences were for America.”  There is now a vast literature on this theme. But our understanding and interpretation of the past is always evolving, and it is well here to remember that David Jones "Virgin Soils Revisited," William and Mary QuarterlyLX, 4 (October 2003),703-42 [available Open Access through JSTOR and Project MUSE until June 30, 2020] challenged the “sadly persistent myth” that a lack of immunity to introduced pathogens devastated Native Americans.  Instead, Jones argued, the disruptions of communities, food scarcity, and wars brought on by colonialism laid the ground for introduced pathogens to do their deadly work.  Disease exists in a context.

Plague and Cholera

The plague has been invoked as a reason for hope (and deployed as a stimulus to intellectual productivity) of late, because the observation that Shakespeare wrote King Learwhile “self-isolated” from the plague has become a “meme”; there is also an argument abroad that because the plague erased social, gender and personal differences. Shakespeare responded by emphasizing people’s unique and inerasable difference” Emma Smith, “What Shakespeare Teaches Us About Living With Pandemics,” New York Times, March 28, 2020); in this view “his work is a narrative vaccine.” Let us not carry this too far: Remember that Gloucester observes (in Lear) “Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked ’twixt son and father … we have seen the best of our time.” 

·     Norman F. Cantor, In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015)

·     Robert S Gottfried, The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe(New York: The Free Press, 1983)

·     David Herlihy, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West(Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1997)

·     Ole J Benedictow, “The Black Death: The Greatest Catastrophe Ever,” History Today, 55,3 (March 2005)

There is an interesting reflection on the historical plague (as it affected Eyam, a village in the UK that opted to self-quarantine in 1665-66, -- see also Geraldine Brooks, below in “Fiction”) and current pandemic circumstances in Shanghai and Sardinia at: http://paulwhiteplaces.blogspot.com/

Thanks to the much-discussed work of Dr. John Snow on the causes of death in the vicinity of Broad Street in London in the 1850s, cholera helped to launch the field of epidemiology. It also proved to be a deadly and persistent scourge and continues to raise questions for public health workers.  See: 

·     Sandra Hempel. The Strange Case of the Broad Street Pump: John Snow and the Mystery of Cholera (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007)

·     Tom Koch, “The Map as Intent: Variations on the Theme of John Snow,” Cartographica39, 4 (January 2004),1-14

·     Amanda J Thomas, Cholera: The Victorian Plague (Barnsley: Pen and Sword Books, 2015)

·     R J Morris, Cholera 1832: The Social Response to an Epidemic (London: 1976) 

·     Myron Echenberg, Africa in the Time of Cholera: A History of Pandemics from 1817 to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011)

·     Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866(Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1962, 1987) 

·     S.L. Kotar, J.E. Gessler, Cholera: A Worldwide History(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014) 

The 1918 Influenza Pandemic

Here again we might begin with Alfred Crosby whose America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918 (NY: Cambridge UP, 1989) [first published as Epidemic and Peace: 1918 (Westport, CN; Greenwood Press, 1976)], has been a wellspring of interest in the topic – although the first international conference on the history of the pandemic in Cape Town in 1998 drew only 36 scholars. Interest has soared in the two decades since.  

·     Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World (London: Jonathan Cape, 2017)

·     Catharine Arnold, Pandemic 1918: Eyewitness Accounts from the Greatest Medical Holocaust in Modern History  (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018)

·     M. Honigsbaum, A History of the Great Influenza Pandemics: Death, Panic and Hysteria 1830–1920 (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2014)

·     John M Barry, The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History (New York: Viking, 2004) 

·     Niall Johnson, Britain and the 1918-19 Influenza Pandemic: A Dark Epilogue(London. New York: Routledge,2006). Includes a bibliography listing dozens of local studies of impact of the 1918 pandemic 

·     Kirsty Duncan, Hunting the 1918 Flu: One Scientist's Search for a Killer Virus(Toronto: University of Toronto Press,2003). This author, Canada’s Minister of Science between 2015 and 2019 and sometime university professor of medical geography, mounted an expedition to Svalbard in 1998 to exhume the bodies of miners buried there in 1918, with a view to recovering and sequencing the 1918 flu virus. This is Duncan’s account of her efforts, which did not achieve its goals – although the virus was sequenced by Jeffrey Taubenberger, once associated with Duncan’s team but later at odds with her. 

·     This story of research and rivalry is told in part in Pete Davies's Catching Cold: 1918's Forgotten Tragedy and the Scientific Hunt for the Virus That Caused It (1999; published in the United States a year later as The Devil's Flu (New York: Henry Holt, 2000)) and in Gina Kolata Flu:The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It ( New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1999). 

·     Esyllt W. Jones, Influenza 1918: Disease, Death, and Struggle in Winnipeg (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007) makes an important claim challenging the view that the flu affected all parts of society equally in demonstrating that social inequality was an important determinant of mortality in Winnipeg. 

·     For more Canadian studies see:  Magda. Fahrni and Esyllt. W. Jones, eds, Epidemic Encounters: Influenza, Society, and Culture in Canada, 1918–20 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2012)

·     J K Taubenberger, and D M Morens, “1918 Influenza: the mother of all pandemics,”  Emerging infectious diseases, 12, 1 ((2006), 15–22.

·      Frank Bongiorno, “How Australia’s response to the Spanish flu of 1919 sounds warnings on dealing with coronavirus,” The Conversation, March 22. 2020,  http://theconversation.com/how-australias-response-to-the-spanish-flu-of-1919-sounds-warnings-on-dealing-with-coronavirus-134017

·    Blacik, Victoria. 2009. “De la desinformación al saneamiento: críticas al Estado español durante la epidemia de gripe de 1918”. Ayer, no 75: 247-73. [Suggested by Pablo Corral-Broto]

Epidemics and the Environment

·      Marc Hall,  Thinking Like a Parasite: Malaria, Plasmodium, and Sardinia’s Extraordinary Longevity. In Landscapes, Natures, Ecologies: Italy and the Environmental Humanities, S. Iovino, E. Cesaretti, & E. Past, eds. University of Virginia Press: 117-128.

·     J Glenn Morris, “Cholera and Other Types of Vibriosis: A Story of Human Pandemics and Oysters on the Half Shell”, Clinical Infectious Diseases, 37, 2 (15 July 2003), 272–280.

·     T Brook, “Differential effects of global and local climate data in assessing environmental drivers of epidemic outbreaks,”  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [PNAS], 114 (2017), 12845-12847.—responding to the paper by Tian et al (see below)on the differential effects of using long-term or short-term data to reconstruct climatic drivers of human epidemics, Tim Brook uses his training as an historian to comment on the authors’ use historical data to develop the argument of scale dependency. “Our methodology demands close attention to how sources were originally constructed and for what purposes, and to factor out the downstream effects that these purposes may have on the conclusions we draw.”

·      Huidong Tian et al., “Scale-Dependent Climatic Drivers of Human Epidemics in Ancient China,” PNAS, 114, 49 (2017),12970-12975.

·     Boris V Schmid et al. “Climate-Driven Introduction of the Black Death and Successive Plague Reintroductions into Europe. PNAS, 112 (2015), 3020-3025.- deals with the second plague pandemic (1347-19thcentury) and argues for for repeated climate-driven reintroductions of the bacterium into European harbors from reservoirs in Asia, rather than the existence of permanent plague reservoirs in Europe ,

·     James L A Webb, Jr, The Guts of the Matter: A Global History of Human Waste and Infectious Intestinal Disease (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.2019)

·     Ricci P H Yue & Harry F Lee (2018) Pre-industrial plague transmission is mediated by the synergistic effect of temperature and aridity index. BMC Infectious Diseases, 18 (2018), 134.—argues thatplague outbreaks occur after cold and dry spells, and correlates a5-year lagged temperature and aridity index with significant plague outbreaks in pre-industrial Europe. 

General Studies

·     W H McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York: Anchor Press, 1976) 

·     Sonia Shah, Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016) — a science journalist on “the history of viral infections that have ravaged humanity—and how that knowledge prepares us to stop the next worldwide outbreak.

·     Frank M. Snowden, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present (New Haven: YaleUP, 2019) an informed overview which among other things reminds us of that “quarantine” derives from the Italian quaranta, meaning “forty” – or the number of days that vessels with infections on board were required to wait before entering port.

·      Graeme Wynn, “Nature We Cannot See,” in Colin M Coates and Wynn, eds., The Nature of Canada (Vancouver. OnPoint Press an imprint of UBC Press, 2019)142-65 essays a broad ranging synthesis and interpretation of several significant disease events over several centuries.

·      Mike Davis, The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu (New York: New Press, 2005)  “In this urgent and extraordinarily frightening book, Mike Davis reconstructs the scientific and political history of a. viral apocalypse in the making, exposing the central roles of agribusiness and the fast-food industries, abetted by corrupt governments, in creating the ecological conditions for the emergence of this new plague.

·     B M S Campbell, The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2016)

·     Elizabeth Kolbert, “Pandemics and the Shape of Human History,” The New Yorker, April 6 , 2020—a short read and timely overview 

·     Andrew T Price-Smith, Contagion and Chaos: Disease, Ecology, and National Security in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009)

·     Tom Koch, Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011)

·     Linda Nash, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006)

·     Christos Lynteris, ed., Framing Animals as Epidemic Villains (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)

·     David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and The Next Human Pandemic (New York: W W Norton, 2012)

·   The masks that have become the subject of so much debate - do they help? should they be worn? might they promote the spread as much as they restrict it? — apparently owe their origin to Dr Wu Lien-Teh a student at Emmanuel College Cambridge from 1896 and the first Chinese person to graduate from Cambridge in medicine. He was posted to Harbin in north Manchuria in 1910 by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to lead a medical team to tackle an outbreak of pneumonic plague in the area, and as detailed in teh following article, claimed to have invented the face mask. His directions for home manufacture are also provided: Christos Lynteris,  "Plague Masks: The Visual Emergence of Anti-Epidemic Personal Protection Equipment," Medical Anthropology, 37, 6 (2018), 442-457

 AIDS, Ebola and SARS

·     Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (New York: Penguin Books, 1988) 

·     Richard Preston, The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus (New York: Random House 1994)

·     Jaclyn Duffin and Arthur Sweetman, eds., SARS in Context: Memory, History and Politics (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2006)

·    Carolyn Strange, “Postcard from Plaguetown: SARS and the Exoticization of Toronto,” in Alison Bashford, ed., Medicine at the border: disease, globalization and security, 1850 to the present (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) [Suggested by Carolyn Strange]

Malaria, Yellow Fever, Dengue and Zika

·     J. R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)

·     Timothy Mitchell, "‘Can the Mosquito Speak?’, in Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 2002)

·     Gabriel Lopes and Luisa Reis-Castro, A Vector in the (Re)Making: A History of Aedes aegypti as Mosquitoes that Transmit Diseases in Brazil, in Framing Animals as Epidemic Villains (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)

·     Duane Gubler and Gary Clark, “Dengue/Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever: The Emergence of a Global Health Problem,” Emerging Infectious Diseases, 1, 2 (April 1995) 

·    Pometti, Kevin. 2016. “Tertian Fevers in Catalonia in the Late Eighteenth Centuries: The Case of Barcelona (1783-1786): A Methodological Proposal to Develop Studies over Endemic and Epidemic Malaria in Past Societies”. In Current Topics in Malaria, édité par Alfonso Rodríguez Morales. Rijeka: InTechopen, p. 3-37 [Suggested by Pablo Corral-Broto]

Ways Forward? 

Read Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell (New York: Viking, 2009) and Naomi Klein, Shock Doctrine (Toronto: A A Knopf, 2007) alongside each other. Both refuse to see crises as “natural disasters” and insist that what happens is significantly affected by the choices people make along the way. For Klein the consequential actors are often those with power who use crises to further their particular agendas or for self-aggrandizement (As Rahm Emmanuel said in 2008, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste”). Solnit has a more positive and empowering message: that disasters can strengthen the resolve of people and the solidarity of their societies, and encourage human ingenuity. There is hope of change for the better. Perhaps the global cooperation that is emerging to fight the coronavirus can be brought to bear on the climate crisis. But given that scientists have been warning of the pandemic threat for years and little was done until it was upon us, perhaps we will miss this opportunity to mobilize against climate disaster. Congruent with Klein’s notion that powerful interests capitalize on “Disaster 1” by engineering “Disaster 2,” the last days of March 2020 saw the US administration roll back Obama era pollution regulations and the enforcement thereof.

Fiction:

·     Tobias Carroll, “Pandemics: An Essential Reading List,” New York Vulture, March 10, 2020, has a list of 20 suggestions at: https://www.vulture.com/article/best-pandemic-books.html

·     Four staffers of the NY Times offer another selection (with some overlap with the Carroll list) in “Your Quarantine Reader,” NYT, March 13, 2020

·     Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders. A novel of the plague(Penguin Random House, 2001)

·     Daniel Kalla, We All Fall Down,(Toronto: Simon and Schuster, 2019); Pandemic (Tor, 2005); Cold Plague(New York: Forge, 2008)

·    Albert Camus, La Peste (Gallimard, 1947) published in English in 1948 as The Plague 

·    Kevin Chong, The Plague (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press 2018)  re-imagines Camus’ classic tale of suffering in Vancouver Canada.

·    Larissa Lai, The Tiger Flu (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press 2018) By Vancouver’s Larissa Lai, Tiger Flu is set in 2145, and tells the story of a post-fossil fuel world, with an obscenely wealthy elite, a deteriorating climate and a hidden community of women descended from mutant clones who are capable of of reproducing without male involvement. And it is currently ravaged—especially the male population—by the “tiger flu,” the result of another of humanity’s unexpected side effects from mucking about with nature, in this case bringing the Caspian tiger back from extinction

·    William C Heine, The Last Canadian [Published in US as Death Wind ] (Paperjacks  1974).  Eugene Arnprior has just received notice of his Canadian citizenship when an airborne virus released by the Soviet Union makes him the last of his kind

·    Emily St John Mandel, Station Eleven  (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2014) The "Georgia flu,”  a particularly lethal strain of influenza, arrives in Canada via flights from Moscow, and quickly changes everything.

·    Gabriel García Márquez, Love in Time of Cholera, 1985 [Suggested by Pablo Corral-Broto]

·    José Saramago, Blindness, 1999 [Suggested by Pablo Corral-Broto]

Podcast/audio:

Two items featuring Australian historian Peter Hobbins: 

·     “The 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic was a global killer” at: https://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/nightlife/this-week-in-history---spanish-flu/9523634

·     “The Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918” at https://www.4bc.com.au/podcast/the-spanish-flu-pandemic-of-1918/

Films

In “The Recent Wave of ‘Spanish’ Flu Historiography,” Social History of Medicine 27, 4 (November 2014), 789–808[ included in the OUP History of Outbreaks Collection, below] Howard Phillips writes: “The seven professionally-made documentaries of which I know are: Influenza 1918 (PBS, The American Experience series, 1998); History Undercover: The Doomsday Flu (Lou Reda Productions, New York, 1998); Pandemic (BBC, Horizon series, 1999); Secrets of the Dead: Killer Flu (Granada TV, 2003); In Search of Spanish Flu (BBC, 2008); Killer Flu (RTE/Radio and Television Ireland, Outbreak series, 2009); We Heard the Bells: The Influenza of 1918 (US Dept of Health and Human Services, 2010) and Die Spanische Grippe—Das große Sterben (2012) [originally released as La grande épidémie (Arte France, 2005)].”

Wikipedia lists 89 “Films about Viral Outbreaks” and does not include David Wu, Plague City [SARS in Toronto] (2005). Among the films that appear on many lists: Stephen Soderbergh, Contagion(2011) Outbreak (1995)

And the band played on / HBO Pictures ; produced by Midge Sanford, Sarah Pillsbury ; screenplay by Arnold Schulman ; directed by Roger Spottiswoode

Sarita Siegel and Gregg Mitman In the Shadow of Ebola (Alchemy Films and Gregg Mitman, 2014)

Collections

- Historia Ambiental Latinoamericana y Caribeña (HALAC) Vol. 10 Núm. Ed. Sup. 1 (2020) Special Issue COVID-19 https://doi.org/10.32991/2237-2717.2020v10iEd.Sup.1

- With remarkable prescience Oxford University Press compiled a History of Outbreaks collection of 29 articles drawn from journals published by OUP.  The introduction to this varied assemblage notes: “In addition to human suffering, outbreaks create panic, disrupt the social and economic structure, and can impede development in the affected communities. While we cannot predict exactly when or where the next epidemic or pandemic will begin, we can explore and learn from outbreaks of the past.”

This selection of articles, is freely available through April 30th, 2020 at: https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/history_of_outbreaks

TEACHING

Duke University Press has created a Navigating the Threat of Pandemic Syllabus in which books are free to read online until 1 June 2020, and journal articles are free until 1 October 2020.

 Should you be interested in sharing thoughts and /or syllabi on teaching on themes raised here, please submit material to William San Martín before 1 July 2020 and we will develop a post for this website if there is sufficient material.