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Epidemics and History |
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 Epidemics and History:Disease, Power and Imperialism by Sheldon Watts Yale University Press 448 pages, 1999 ISBN 0300070152 Reviewed by John A. Broussard, PhD It all seems so clear. Diseases exist. Cures need to be discovered to conquer the diseases. Sheldon Watts describes how this scenario is a grotesque oversimplification of what actually occurs. In his explanation, a vaguely identifiable illness (construct) becomes different from the norm. From that springs an attempt to explain and to cure. At the same time, the disease is used to include other diseases and handy deviants. The more dreaded the disease, the more it becomes a vehicle for indiscriminate punishment. Leprosy is perhaps the best example. Contrary to popular belief, real clinical leprosy (Hansen's disease) was not widespread in the medieval world. It may actually have not even existed in biblical times. But "construct" was used to label, isolate and destroy those suffering from vaguely similar ailments or even from no disease at all, in the case of deviants. Leper "accusers" sprang up all over Europe, and became the basis for ethnic persecution. Watts does a superb and thorough job of analyzing similar responses to plague, smallpox, syphilis, cholera, malaria and yellow fever. And he spans the globe in his analysis. The origin of syphilis, for example, has long been a mystery. Its sudden eruption in Europe shortly after the initial voyages of discovery pointed to a New World origin of this illness. But the fact that the people of the Western Hemisphere were as susceptible to the disease as Europeans belied that origin, since long term exposure to a disease eventually produces at least a partially resistant population. The other view has been that syphilis originated in Europe. Sheldon's thesis - developed by others to whom he gives full credit - is that a form of yaws was probably endemic in the Caribbean, a form that was relatively benign and transmitted, not sexually, but by physical contact among children. Columbus' sailors had never been exposed to the disease and therefore acquired, through mutation in a much more susceptible host, a sexually transmitted variant - true syphilis - as a result. In the sixteenth century this new disease took on a horrifying and virulent form. Like the leprosy of an earlier age, it became identified with an endless variety of non-syphilitic symptoms and deviant behavior. The cure - chiefly mercury - was as bad or worse than the disease. Do we have anything similar occurring today in our own time and place? With over a million-and-a-half current inhabitants in our jails and prisons, it could well be that we have a crime "construct" in full bloom in the United States. This is a book well worth reading. Sheldon's documentation alone runs to a hundred pages. His work has that rare quality of being both a scholarly and a very readable book. |
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