Plagues and Peoples Read Online Free

less destructive, but more recent and better-documented instance. Historians, however, never saw these as belonging to a more general class of critically important epidemiological breakthroughsbecause earlier examples of disastrous encounters with new diseases lay buried deeper in the past, where records were so imperfect that both the scale and the significance of what happened were easy to overlook.
    In appraising ancient texts, historians were naturally governed by their own experience of epidemic infection. Living amid disease-experienced populations, where relatively high levels of immunity to familiar infections damped any ordinary epidemic outbreak very quickly, critically trained historians were impelled to discount as exaggeration any remark about massive die-off from infectious disease. Failure to understand the profound difference between the outbreak of a familiar disease amid an experienced population and the ravages of the same infection when loosed upon a community lacking acquired immunities is, indeed, at the bottom of the failure of previous historians to give adequate attention to the whole subject. Assuming that infections had always been present in much the same fashion as they were in Europe before the advent of modern medicine, there seemed nothing much to say about epidemics, and historians tended, therefore, to pass such matters by with only the sort of casual mention I found in the account of Cortez’s victory.
    History of epidemics became the province of antiquarians, who took pleasure in recording essentially meaningless data simply because it was there. Yet there remained the Black Death, together with a number of instances when a sudden outbreak of disease in an army abruptly altered military circumstances, and sometimes determined the outcome of a campaign. Such episodes could not be left out, but their unpredictability made most historians uncomfortable. We all want human experience to make sense, and historians cater to this universal demand by emphasizing elements in the past that are calculable, definable, and, often, controllable as well. Epidemic disease, when it did become decisive in peace or in war, ran counter to the effort to make the past intelligible. Historians consequently played such episodes down.
    To be sure, there were a number of outsiders, like the bacteriologistHans Zinsser, who played devil’s advocate, picking out instances when disease did make a difference. Thus Zinsser’s eminently readable book,
Rats, Lice and History
, showed how outbreaks of typhus often upset the best-laid plans of kings and captains. But such books did not try to fit disease experience into any larger picture of human history. For them as for others, occasional disastrous outbreaks of infectious disease remained sudden and unpredictable interruptions of the norm, essentially beyond historical explanation and therefore of little interest to serious professional historians whose job it was to explain the past.
    This book aims to bring the history of infectious disease into the realm of historical explanation by showing how varying patterns of disease circulation have affected human affairs in ancient as well as in modern times. Many of my suggestions and inferences remain tentative. Careful examination of ancient texts by experts in many different and difficult languages will be needed to confirm and correct what I have to say. Such scholarly work requires a thesis to test, a target to shoot down. The speculation and guesswork I have indulged in ought to serve this purpose, and in the meantime, it can draw ordinary readers’ attention to important gaps in older ideas about the human past.
    Quite apart from details of what I have to say, everyone can surely agree that a fuller comprehension of humanity’s ever-changing place in the balance of nature ought to be part of our understanding of history, and no one can doubt that the role of infectious diseases in the natural balance has been and