'Rats, Lice and Cataclysm'

Wearing my full bio-chem protection gear I gingerly stepped back into Hans Zinsser's classic "Rats, Lice and History".  I began it some time ago but was diverted by other books - yes, "lacks concentration" was a frequent entry on my annual school reports! - but now I have returned.  Actually, there are so many implications to be taken from this extra-ordinary work that regular pauses are essential just to imagine the horrors.  Take this for example:

The Black Death, which was mainly bubonic plague, is one of the major calamities of history, not excluding wars, earth-quakes, barbarian invasions, the Crusades, and the last war [WWI to Zinsser].  It is estimated by [Justus] Hecker that about one quarter of the entire population of Europe [my emphasis] was destroyed by the disease - that is, at least 25,000,000.

It was, to paraphrase a modern saying, 'the disease that kept on giving' because it returned again and again, breaking out here, there and everywhere across Europe, beginnning in the middle of the 14th century and continuing, although in slightly less malignant form until well past the time of Samuel Pepys who describes his experience thus:

This day [June 7th 1665], much against my will, I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors and "Lord have mercy upon us" writ there; which was a sad sight to me, being the first of the kind that, to my remembrance, I ever saw.  It put me into an ill conception of myself and my smell, so that I was forced to buy some roll-tobacco to smell and to chaw, which took away my apprehension.

Note to all those anti-smoking zealots - it ain't all bad!  But to be serious, the effects of these constant attacks in which great swathes of the population were wiped out in the most dire circumstances must have had considerable effects in the religious, political and social mores of the times.  Some idea of these complexities may be judged by this site which provides the first few pages (only) of the introduction to a book by David Herlihy entitled The Black Death: The Transformation of the West.  It is obvious that during his years of study, Herlihy, himself, changed his mind on several of the theories as to the exact causes and outomes of what he calls a 'transformation'.

For me, it simply beggars imagination to even try to conceive that over the course of 40-odd years in one century alone, this country was reduced to an approximation of Auschwitz, not once, not twice but three times.  Sometimes I detest this modern world but pondering on that piece of our history, well, suddenly it doesn't seem so bad after all.

 

Comments

[GalaPie]

I just finished Bill Bryson's "At Home" which touched upon (among a myriad of other things!) the state of medicine and hygiene in the past... *shudder!* It's hard to conceive of a time where things that we barely notice now could have fatal consequences.

[dearieme]

The rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria could shake our world pretty profoundly, Duffers. I went to a conference some years ago and I was rather shaken by the figures cited. Yet the conference wasn't a medical one - it concerned surface science, one speaker raising the the question of which materials you should use in hospital construction to reduce the problem. I concluded that in our house, since we can't afford silver door handles, we'll use brass ones. Absolutely not plastic.

P.S. On hospital infection, Britain did conspicuously worse than e.g. The Netherlands or Denmark. That's not so much a matter of materials of construction, just the consequence of the medical trades being too slack to apply the lessons of the 19th century.

[Andra]

Yes DM. As I understand it the British folk didn't take to washing until very recently, if at all.

[Hank]

David

It is a great book.

Have you read Barbara Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror"?
http://www.amazon.com/Distant-Mirror-Calamitous-14th-Century/dp/0345349571

[David Duff]

GalaPie, do you mean "back in the good old days"?!

Hank, no, that is one of hers that I missed.

DM, there was yet another warning issued only a few days ago concerning the imminent danger of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. As for door-handles, the answer is simple, get yourself a footman!

Oddly enough, Andra, I was thinking seriously along your lines the other day as I showered at the swimming-pool. These days I am now so damn squeaky-clean but I can remember when one bath a week was considered more than enough.

[AussieD]

Not sure it was all bad. Those that survived carried an immune system that allowed them to do so and hence we, their descendants, are probably less likely to succumb to the Black Death.

And it gave us that immortal line, "Bring out your dead".

[dearieme]

It doesn't much matter whether the patients wash, Andra, but the medics and nurses must.

[Andi Lucas]

WHile working on my book I found a reference to a minor panic at Hooge in September 1916, when the Germans somehow got the idea that the plague had broken out opposite. As a result, shooting at
rats with service rifles (usually banned to prevent accidents)
was authorised in addition to the usual means of extermination (dogs, entrenching tools and pistols).

Both sides were deeply worried that the plague would arrive on the Western Front, but mercifully (to my knowledge) it never did.

The disease the Germans were most concerned about was Typhus, which was endemic in the Balkans (where it killed absolutely incredible numbers of Serbs) and on the Eastern Front. They successfully prevented it travelling to other theatres with a rigorous regime of immunisation and delousing of troops and civilians (which I have seen raised in one repulsively Teutonophobic volume as 'evidence' of the expression in the Kaiserreich of Nazi ideas that the peoples in the East were 'unclean' - evidently the correct anti-wacist thing to do would be to ignore the problem and let Typhus run rampant across Europe).

[David Duff]

Thanks for that, Andi, and for your interesting link which I have book-marked for later perusal.

[Michael Adams]

I also recommend Plagues and Peoples, by William McNeil.