Plagues and People By: William

Plagues and People by: William H. McNeill (Anchor Press, 1976)

Liberal or conservative, many historians share a fundamental bias, namely that human actions and beliefs, whether political and ideological, are the major factors that impact human history. History, viewed as such, is propelled by the human will, not by nature. However, historian of epidemiology William H. McNeill offers an alternative, bracing view to this construct. He suggests that one great historical actor that is often ignored in terms of its profound influence upon global history is the history of disease. Plagues and People portrays the sweep of history not in terms of human control over other humans and the environment, but in terms of how the human body is controlled by illness. Every nation, however mighty, lives under the sway of invisible microbes, germs that often hidden from sight because of the ignorance of the medical establishment of the day -- if a medical establishment exists at all.

The fragility of the human body and the lack of knowledge about the ways that infectious germs and microbes are spread, may be just as important as the ability of human beings to impact the world with their technological might. Most of us schooled in history have a vague knowledge of the fact that the Black Death was profoundly influential in reducing the population of Western Europe, and that American indigenous populations were decimated by European diseases to which they had not built up an immunological resistance. McNeill covers both subjects in his study, and suggests that the death toll of the native population in Northern and Central America might be even higher than once predicted. (McNeill wrote the first edition of his text in 1977. Then, the facts about this period may have been less widely known than they are today by most readers).

But McNeill takes a far more panoramic view than merely focusing on these two famous case studies. He considers many non-Western examples as well. He points out that plagues ravaged ancient Athens during the Peloponnesian War and the death toll from the European plagues of the 6th century a.D. were as numerically significant as the later bubonic plague during the Middle Ages. Plagues were one of the reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire, and plagues played a role not simply in later European expansion but in the early Islamic dominance of Europe. The Islamic empire itself was later decimated by plagues that sprung from poor sanitary conditions Eastern Europe, which exposed the Moslem conquers to diseases that they had never known in their native lands.

One of the problems with assessing such studies of the epidemiology of the ancient world, though, is that the ancient definition of plagues was far more inclusive than our own, and often was used to refer to any disease in general, rather than something that we might specifically call a plague. Regardless, it is important to remember that disease and widespread outbreaks cause existential crises within the population, often just as much as political and economic instability, and as well as the fact that disease itself is a cause of political and economic instability. This is not simply true of the Western tradition, but also true in China, where Buddhism took root in conservative, Confucian China after a plague wiped out nearly half of the population. And disease can also give rise to a lack of faith -- McNeill suggests that the 18th century Enlightenment was spawned partly because industrialization and urbanization created fetid cities with poor sanitation, which gave rise to epidemics that caused people to doubt the existence of a caring God.

The discovery of the sources of diseases, like insects and rats, were undoubtedly a boon to mankind. Without the delousing of during World War I many soldiers would have caught communicable diseases from the pests, and knowledge of microbes enabled people to take precautions against the spread of illnesses throughout the 20th century, and our knowledge of how new illnesses are spread is never complete. In the developing world, the landscape continues to be shaped by disease. Today, long after McNeill wrote his book, this continues in Africa, with the AIDS epidemic, although, as he notes in his updated introduction, he does not believe that AIDS, compared to plagues of the past, is nearly as significant or as deadly as, for example, the bubonic plague in Europe.

Plagues continue to this day. Even during McNeill's first edition, the bubonic plague was still present in many Latin American and African and the Western United States within vermin populations. Epidemics of influenza occurred even within the 20th century in America. And high-speed air travel often facilitates rather than inhabits the spread of disease, as during the outbreak of Lassa fever chronicled in the later portions of the book devoted to outbreaks in the developing world.