Disease and Society in History: Recent Episodes
Dana Simmons
This course on the history of disease and society at the University of California, Riverside (HIST 107,) offers a platform for thinking historically about the current COVID-19 outbreak. We will take a comparative approach, looking to historical events across time and space to understand what is unique to the present moment. The history of disease is a history of massive population change and social and cultural transformations. Disease played a central role in the success of European colonization, beginning in sixteenth-century Mexico and South America. In Europe and the United States, disease prompted state-run hygienic reforms such as the building of sewers. It led to strict regulation of where people lived and how they behaved. The history of disease is also tied up with cultural images of the body, health and sex. The primary aim of the course is to grasp the complex and reciprocal relationship between society and disease. We examine how cultures, states and individuals shape the spread of contagious disease. Conversely, we analyze how disease affects the societies into which it enters. Disease participated in some of the great structural transformations in human history. We are living through one right now.
Dana Simmons speaks with three undergraduate students in HIST 107: Disease and Society, who are Emergency Room technicians and scribes working at the Riverside County Hospital Moreno Valley and the Anaheim Regional Hospital. Chenhao Li, Evan Ashcraft and Shayan Akhavon share their personal histories, experiences and perspectives on the future, coming out of the worst months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
When we start to study the history of disease, we realize that biology and society cannot be separated. Back in the 18th century, important people decided that the study of life and living things should be divided up into different fields. Biologists would study the processes of life, and historians and their ilk would study the facts in the acts of man, since back then, they were mostly interested in men. If there's one thing we're learning today, urgently and painfully, it is that the processes of life and human acts are so tightly bound up that it's impossible to separate them. Some scholars use the word "natureculture" (all in one word) to describe this condition of inseparablity. Diseases like COVID-19 teach us about our interdependency, the ways in which each of our lives depend on and impact, the lives of others, other people and living things. Disease also reveals ways in which societies and communities have neglected and failed to recognize our common interdependency. When we leave some folks excluded from citizenship, vulnerable, deprived, sick, homeless or incarcerated, the ripple effects of these decisions touch every one of us. This was already true before. COVID-19 makes it tangible.
Music credits: Nettle, "Black Eyes" on On A Steady Diet of Hash, Bread, & Salt by Soundeyet (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Soundeyet/On_A_Steady_Diet_of_Hash_Bread__Salt). Licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.
Disease played a central role in shaping the colonial order. Medicine and disease were sites of conflicts, contradictions, encounters, rivalries and power within colonial empires. Boosters of empire pointed to Western medicine to justify the ‘white man’s burden’ to occupy and rule over others. They described the tropical colonial world as dangerous, primitive and putrid, ripe for disease. Colonial subjects were viewed as carriers of disease and danger, which must be contained. Symptoms of sleeping sickness or malaria (like fatigue and weakness) became associated with racial character, in contrast to European vigor. Medicine was both a vehicle and expression of the Western civilizing mission.
Readings:
Warwick Anderson, "Immunities of Empire: Race, Disease, and the New Tropical Medicine, 1900–1920," Bulletin of the History of Medicine Spring 1996, 70(1): 94-118.
David Arnold, ed. Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies (Manchester University Press, 1988)
Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (University of California Press, 2002)
Mariola Espinosa, Epidemic Invasions: Yellow Fever and the Limits of Cuban Independence, 1878-1930 (University of Chicago Press, 2009)
J.N. Hays, The Burdens of Disease: Epidemics and Human Response in Western History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009)
Robert Peckham, David M. Pomfret, Imperial Contagions: Medicine, Hygiene, and Cultures of Planning in Asia (Hong Kong University Press, 2013.)
Music credits:
Nettle, "Black Eyes" on On A Steady Diet of Hash, Bread, & Salt by Soundeyet (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Soundeyet/On_A_Steady_Diet_of_Hash_Bread__Salt). Licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.
Over the course of the sixteenth century, some 90% of indigenous people in the Americas died. Many deaths occurred right at the start of European colonial occupation, but most – the worst – occurred a generation or two later, after indigenous peoples had already been weakened by European conquest, violence and starvation. Waves of disease traveled across the Americas: smallpox, measles, Salmonella, malaria, yellow fever, cholera…. So many indigenous people of the Americas died in the sixteenth century – perhaps 55 to 60 million people - that their abandoned lands, fields and cities were reclaimed by weeds, trees and rain forest. This huge, continent-wide increase in vegetation, which grew and covered the areas where humans once lived, was big enough to cause a measurable change in the geochemistry of the earth’s atmosphere. Those of us living in the Americas today reside on the remains of mass death. The legacy of the Great Dying is still with us, and still not fully accounted for, today.
Readings:
Rodolfo Acuna-Soto et al., "Megadrought and Megadeath in 16th Century Mexico" Emerging Infectious Diseases April 2002, 8(4):360-362.
Åshild J. Vågene et al., "Salmonella enterica genomes from victims of a major sixteenth-century epidemic in Mexico," Nature Ecology & Evolution 2018, 2:520–528.
Alfred W. Crosby, "Conquistador y Pestilencia: The First New World Pandemic and the Fall of the Great Indian Empires," The Hispanic American Historical Review August 1967, 47(3):321-337.
David S. Jones, "Virgin Soils Revisited," The William and Mary Quarterly October 2003, 60(4):703-742.
Music credits:
Nettle, "Black Eyes" on On A Steady Diet of Hash, Bread, & Salt by Soundeyet (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Soundeyet/On_A_Steady_Diet_of_Hash_Bread__Salt). Licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.
I have been obsessed over the past few days by a dry and brilliant book by historian Bruce Campbell, entitled The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late Medieval World. Each word in that title is meaningful. The Great Transition was an irreversible transformation in human societies and ecologies across Eurasia, which took hold in the 1340s-1370s. Three factors interacted to tip the balance of humans and nature: climate change, social instability and the bubonic plague.
The reason why I can't stop thinking about this book is that it describes how pandemic disease, social conflict and climate change amplified each other's effects, in a cycle that lasted over 150 years. This was not a simple epidemic outbreak, from which Europeans could recover. It was a permanent transformation.
Readings:
Bruce M.S. Campbell, The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late Medieval World(Cambridge University Press, 2016.)
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron (1348-1351.) “First Day: Introduction” (trans. J. M. Rigg, 1903). See especially lines 008-048.
Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722)
Frank Palmeri, “Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and the Year of COVID-19,” History News Network April 12, 2020. .
Map, “Second Pandemic of the Black Death in Europe,” Encyclopedia Britannica.
Music credits:
Nettle, "Black Eyes" on On A Steady Diet of Hash, Bread, & Salt by Soundeyet (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Soundeyet/On_A_Steady_Diet_of_Hash_Bread__Salt). Licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.
Viruses have history. Virus history is deep history, older than the history written in books. Virus history is older than human history, older than the history of disease, older than the history of all living organisms and possibly as old as the history of life on earth.
Readings:
Luis Villareal, “Are Viruses Alive?” Scientific American December 2004, 291(6): 100-105. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26060805
Carl Zimmer, “Ancient Viruses are Buried in Your DNA,” New York Times October 4, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/04/science/ancient-viruses-dna-genome.html
Edward C. Holmes and Andrew Rambaut, "Viral Evolution and the Emergence of SARS Coronavirus," Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences, Vol. 359, No. 1447, Emerging Infections: What Have We Learnt from SARS? (Jul. 29, 2004), pp. 1059-1065. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4142237
Kelly M. Harkins and Anne C. Stone, "Ancient pathogen genomics: insights into timing and adaptation," Journal of Human Evolution 2015 (79) pp. 137-149. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047248414002681?via%3Dihub
Music credits:
Nettle, "Black Eyes" on On A Steady Diet of Hash, Bread, & Salt by Soundeyet (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Soundeyet/On_A_Steady_Diet_of_Hash_Bread__Salt). Licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.