Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World

Abstract

I will refer to this as the 2014 outbreak, even though evidence suggests it began in late 2013 and, at the time of writing, gives every sign of continuing well into 2015. GLObE 1 (2014) pp. ix-xx 6 Van der Waals et al. (1986) and Knobloch et al. (1982), neither of which were cited by Schoepp et al. (2014), which found nearly comparable levels of seroprevalence of Ebola antibodies. Cf. Becquart et al. (2010) for a similar study of Gabon based on samples taken in 2006-08. Importantly, scientists have noted for more than a decade that major dieoffs were occurring from Ebola in primate populations in West Central Africa; see Muyembe-Tamfum et al. 2012. Saéz et al. (2014/2015, however, found no evidence of such dieoffs in primate or other nonbat populations in the area of Guinea where the 2014 outbreak is thought to have begun. ThE MEdIEvALxvi PREFACE There is an important trend now in historical studies: not only to move analysis beyond the limits of the nationstate and even the human organ ism, but also to move it into deeper time scales. Although some diseases (like malaria and various kinds of parasites) have likely been with humans for many millennia (e.g., Webb forthcoming), increasing congregations of human populations into urban settlements have amplified the impact of infectious diseases in a shorter timescale, perhaps some 4,000 to 6,000 years, in both the Old World and the New. No definitive shift separates us from that history of increasing urbanization and the networking of human communities through longdistance trade. Granted, the revolution in sci entific understanding of infectious diseases brought about by the great late nineteenthcentury revelations of germ theory did put us on a whole new footing with respect to understanding infectious disease. But only one infectious disease has since been thoroughly eradicated (smallpox). Malaria and tuberculosis are still high on the list of the world's killers; plague, as we have noted, is embedded in the landscapes of four conti nents, still regularly producing outbreaks in Madagascar, Peru, Vietnam, Central Africa, and China; cholera still rears its head in any number of places, most recently in Haiti and Ghana. And for all of these diseases, antibiotic resistance is weakening the arsenal of defenses we have. Ebola's "small" numbers or (currently) limited geography should not, therefore, in any way be dismissed. Rather, we should think of this as a realtime les son in how local diseases become global.Recent comparisons of Ebola and plague have often been accompa nied by an implicit shudder of horror: "How medieval." Yes, the practice of quarantine-so discredited when it was invoked by the Liberian gov ernment in August 2014 in its own capital of Monrovia, and implicitly by many other nations as they closed their borders to travellers from West Africa and cut off air transport-is medieval in its origins, even if prac tices of segregation and exclusion of suspected infectious persons are much older (Grmek 1980). Yes, the sight of bodies being piled in stre...