In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

62 Four New Diseases and Transatlantic Exchanges In its long history the human species has been both extremely mobile and extremely isolated. This paradox has had several different consequences for humanity’s relations with disease. Prehistoric humans fanned out widely from their original central African homeland, across Europe and Asia; they apparently reached the Americas and Australia over land bridges (or at least narrow, shallow sea passages) at times of significantly lower ocean levels. These vast movements diffused the human genetic pool over the globe and may also have diffused a common pool of parasitic microorganisms as well. But in subsequent millennia geological changes separated different groups of people as the land bridges that connected Asia with the Americas and Australia were re-submerged. Humans on different continents, and their accompanying parasites, had a period of separate evolution. At least in the great Eurasian land mass (including Africa), however, isolation was never total. Human movement resulted in some interchange of the vast number of other organisms that accompanied it, some of those organisms more obvious (because visible) than others. Perhaps assisted by human traffic, diseases endemic to one area of the land mass might make their way to other regions, as did plague in the fourteenth century. To at least some extent Eurasians shared McNeill’s “disease pool” of common vectors, microorganisms, antigens, and antibodies. The inhabitants of the Americas and Australia, as well as of a variety of oceanic islands, did not share some of the elements of that pool. For several millennia they had been out of contact with Eurasia, with the occasional exception illustrated by the voyages of the Scandinavians to North America in the eleventh century. That isolation came to an abrupt end in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with the voyages of Columbus and his successors. Those voyages not only initiated the movement of a wide assortment of animals, insects, and parasitic microorganisms; such transfer was solidified by the establishment of an imperial hegemony over much American territory, in which European domination ensured the uninterrupted movement of both people and their accompanying flora and fauna. What those movements have meant for the history of disease has generated considerable historical speculation, both about the export of disease to America from the Old World and about America’s returning the favor. And while each of the several migrating diseases has inspired different historical questions, the overall experience with diseases such as syphilis, typhus, and smallpox strengthened the Western belief in the importance of contagion. Because this book emphasizes Western civilization’s disease experiences, this chapter will devote more attention to Europe. But the American civilizations now came into contact with the Euro-African world, and disastrous disease consequences for them ensued that deserve some discussion as well. Newly Recognized Diseases in Europe Late in the fifteenth century several diseases appeared in Europe that (at least apparently) had not previously affected Western peoples. The most prominent of these ailments were what later scholars have called syphilis and typhus; the mysterious disease called “English sweats” appeared at that time as well, and Europeans also became conscious of a great variety of “fevers.” Syphilis and typhus both had considerable effects on the society of early modern Europe, and syphilis especially stimulated interesting medical and social responses in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But the “newness” of each of these diseases remains in doubt, and hence their relationship—so attractive at first glance because of coincident chronology—to the great age of exploration also may not be a simple one. Syphilis Syphilis apparently first appeared in Italy in the middle 1490s, in the wake of warfare; contemporary accounts associated it with the invasion of Italy by the armies of Charles VIII of France in 1494–95. Armies of that era were almost ideal disseminators of disease: dirty, ill-disciplined, drawn from the far corners of the Continent, disbanded at the end of each campaign to scatter back into the far corners. After its first appearance in 1494–95 syphilis spread swiftly, to be reported all over Europe by 1499. By that date it had also reached the Middle East and North Africa; China experienced it within the next decade. Where had it originated? A few years later—and just when is open to different interpretations—it came to be believed that Columbus’ men had brought it back from America, and this “Columbian” theory of syphilis commanded scholarly support for a very long time. Some contemporary Europeans, convinced...

Share