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Christianity would hardly have succeeded in establishing itself as a world force and would certainly not have taken the form that it eventually did if the Roman Empire had not been ravaged by incurable disease during the years which followed the life of Christ.
Practice of medicine was beneath the dignity of Roman citizens. Their early physicians were slaves of Greek extraction.
At the height of the Plague of Cyprian he and his fellow-priests in North Africa baptized as many as two or three hundred persons a day.
The late-third-century persecutions of Diocletian failed to stamp out Christianity, and it received imperial sanction from Constantine the Great in 313.
At the end of the fourth century it became the official religion of the empire after Theodosius enacted his laws against paganism.
many of the Roman gods and the early Christian saints were one and the same, a few with almost unchanged names. Thus Febris, the Roman goddess of fever, became the Christian St Febronia.
Bubonic plague is not carried by human breath or direct contact.
We catch a glimpse of the starving, out-of-work ploughman and labourer in the often-misquoted nursery rhyme: Baa, baa, black sheep, have you any wool? Yes sir. no sir, three bags full. Two for my master and one for his dame But none for the little boy who cries down the lane.
the Black Death intensified the medieval Christian tradition of the scapegoat-Jew and, by causing the migration of so large a number to the east and north of Europe, is linked to the pogroms of imperial Russia and the gas-chambers of Auschwitz.
The Christian Church had risen to be a dominant power partly as a result of the earlier pestilences.
Parish priests, the best-loved and most useful of church workers, died by the hundred
The only medical advance attributable to the Black Death is in the field of public health. In 1374 the Venetian Republic appointed three officials with the duty of inspecting and excluding all infected vessels from the ports.
In 1377 Ragusa detained travellers from infected places for thirty days (trentini giorni). When this proved ineffective the period of detention was lengthened to forty days (quaranti giorni) from which comes our word ‘quarantine’.
We may credit the Church for its unremitting care of the sick, but acknowledge that its influence upon medical and scientific advance was almost wholly negative.
the three-hundred-year reign of plague in Europe ended by some natural process and not by any active measures on the part of men.
The scholar Erasmus wrote in 1519 that any nobleman who had not contracted syphilis was considered ignobilis et rusticans, i.e. ‘a country bumpkin’.
Francis I of France, Pope Alexander Borgia, Benvenuto Cellini and Toulouse-Lautrec, Winston’s father Randolph Churchill, these are just a few names drawn at random from hundreds of victims.
Typhus fever is a disease of dirt.
Since the late 1940s broad spectrum antibiotics have also become available
Ill-luck and impatience were chiefly responsible for the defeat of Napoleon’s army.
Napoleon was a narcissist and something of an exhibitionist
every evil of the industrial town originated in the agricultural village and resulted from the transfer not of people only but of their manner of living.
‘à la lanterne’
Infant mortality (death in the first year)
excessive mortality was largely caused by drugging the babies with opium.
Three of the major evils attending the Industrial Revolution were syphilis, alcohol and respiratory infections, of which last tuberculosis was the greatest scourge.
One in every four hundred Americans was a drug addict in the early 1920s.
when Alexander Fleming first prepared crude penicillin in 1928, he used it as a ‘laboratory antiseptic’ to obtain uncontaminated cultures of Pfeiffer’s bacillus, then often named Bacillus influenzae, and for over ten years totally neglected the potential of penicillin as an antibiotic for human medication.
The pandemic of 1918–19 undoubtedly produced the largest loss of lives by a single invasion of disease since the Black Death, though on a percentage of the population basis, the mortality rate was probably much smaller than in 1347–50.
‘God grant you better health and more sense.’
malaria contributed to the end of the Roman Empire.
Malaria is in fact the most dangerous and widespread of the African diseases.
if malaria attacks a community on a large scale, the vigour of the people will decline. This is why nineteenth-century travellers to malaria-infested regions such as the Pontine Marshes remarked on the feebleness of the population and their squalid life.
The witch craze is mysterious in more than one respect. It has been convincingly argued that it is essentially a devil doctrine purposively established by the Church during the early Middle Ages, which might account for the marked similarity in witch practices in widely separated countries.
on 11 November, when the world learnt of the Armistice, the German armies still held their lines on foreign soil and not a single Allied soldier had penetrated German territory.
allowing for the various insights afforded by different versions of ‘traditional’ medical practice rooted in other regions of the world, there is no alternative approach to the treatment and cure of major diseases which has proved more generally effective,
by the early twenty-first century, medicine within the advanced economies was also big business.
Covid-19, it was beginning to emerge as the most rapidly spreading outbreak of severe illness since the ‘Spanish flu’ of 1918-19.
Initial evidence from patients who had managed to survive a bout of the virus suggested that many of them would then go on to suffer from ‘long Covid’ – not only persistent lung damage but also continuing severe fatigue as well as chronic coronary, neurological, and other major weaknesses.
the USA, its losses were already far higher than for any of these European countries.
Among the less impressive examples of governmental responses were those made by the UK and the USA.
UK would soon be suffering the highest mortality toll in Europe.
In Washington the handling of the crisis was similarly dismal. There medical experts had to confront in Donald Trump a leader who showed stubborn resistance to proper recognition of the dire realities.
The distinguished Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan was soon arguing that the year 2020 should be seen as constituting, like the great landmarks of 1789 and 1917, a juncture ‘when the river of history changes direction’.
