Plagues in World History Read Online Free Page A

can both agree and disagree with McNeill’s thesis that disease has played a central role in human history. It seems an intuitive fact that most people who die a “natural death” do so as the result of some disease or other, rather than being blessed with the good fortune of dying of extreme old age, when the cells of the body simply cease to divide and function. In this regard, disease is almost as ubiquitous as death in terms of its presence and importance in our everyday lives. Yet, one could also argue that the very fact that populations around the globe are increasing in number, and have done so at varying rates of propagation throughout history, prove that human fortunes are rarely dictated or limited by disease and its consequent mortality. Instead, one might counter that it is restrictions on reproductive capacity (aside from disease) that have played the greater role in the course of human development, such as the availability of food and other material resources that, from a Malthusian point of view, are forever locked with population in a struggle to achieve equi-librium or balance.36 In a way, McNeill has sidestepped this whole conundrum by only focusing on large-scale, global pandemics of disease, whose mortalities posed extraordinary challenges to civilizations. His example, by necessity, will be followed in this book.
    12 y Introduction
    Nonetheless, even within McNeill’s more specialized construct, his thesis has been attacked on two other fronts by revisionist scholars of disease. One group has made the case that disease does not act on its own when impacting human history; rather, it wreaks its devastation only in conjunction with other historical forces, such as the oppressive policies of colonialist/imperialist powers that inten-sify disease’s morbidity and mortality.37 This is true despite the fact that in some cases colonial powers believed they were acting in the best interests of their native subjects, such as by imposing Western standards of hygiene and medicine upon longstanding traditions of healing and customary responses to disease. Native resistance to high-handed health measures—such as hospitalization, isolation of contacts, disinfection, and quarantine—could effectively blunt their intended benefits. Given that, in some places, such as the Americas or the Pacific Islands, the sheer mortalities of imported diseases assuredly outweighed any medical blessings imperialism supposedly bestowed upon a conquered people, even when the benefits of modern medicine had material effect, imperialism could still amplify disease’s impact since these same benefits also allowed Western soldiers and colonists to intrude longer and more deeply into previously inhospitable areas.38 All this implies that McNeill had accorded an overmighty role to disease on the stage of history, which now should give way to a more nuanced, complex interplay with other factors.
    Yet another contingent of historians besieged McNeill’s edifice on the grounds that he was too consistently negative about the impacts of disease upon its victims.
    Instead, it could be argued that disease brought some benefits for certain elements of society, who might even welcome its arrival among them. This debate has been played out especial y with respect to the Black Death in Europe during the late Middle Ages. McNeill claimed that the ravages of the Black Death, whose mortality in Europe during its first outbreak in the mid-fourteenth century was as high as 50 percent on average, instilled a “fatalistic” or even “suicidal” mentality upon the collective consciousness of Europeans.39 But more recent scholars of the Black Death have argued that it set in train necessary “transformations” in many areas of medieval society, including ushering in a more capitalistic-based economic system, new technologies such as the caravel and the printing press, a more empirical approach to science and medicine, and even the Renaissance and