Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues

by Jonathan Kennedy

In all of history, Leeuwenhoek’s discovery of the microscopic realm might well be the closest anyone has come to falling down the rabbit hole, climbing through the looking-glass, or stepping into a wardrobe and finding oneself in a world of fantastical creatures.

It is interesting how microscopes were not originally intended for scientific use, rather for commercial enterprises. It's funny that the most important discovery of mankind - bateria therory, viruses, etc. - came about on a whim. This further's the author's idea, in reference to Freud, that we are not truly in control.

kaleidoscopic variety of life

When geneticists looked at the gene responsible for creating it, they realized that it was almost identical to those used by retroviruses to produce the proteins that attach to cells they are infecting without triggering an immune response.[24] The scientists concluded that a crucial function of the placenta didn’t emerge gradually as a result of evolution by natural selection but was suddenly acquired when a retrovirus inserted its DNA into our ancestor’s genome. If one of our distant ancestors hadn’t been infected by a virus hundreds of millions of years ago, humans would reproduce by laying eggs.

It's interesting to think that a virus caused our ancestors give birth without laying eggs. However, getting pregnant and having children would be less stressful if we did...

Viruses keep us healthy too, especially phages that kill harmful bacteria inside our bodies.

This is different to how we generally think of viruses.

Of over 500 strains of bacteria they tested, more than 90 percent were able to produce neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin that play a key role in regulating human moods.

Curious, could the items we ingest influence the "mood" of the microorganisms?

The evolutionary reason why bacteria produce chemicals that improve our moods may be that it makes us more likely to be gregarious and therefore provide them with opportunities to colonize other hosts.

It has raised hopes that fecal transplants from people with healthy microbiomes will one day provide a more effective treatment for depression than Prozac or therapy.

Shit is crazy

how viruses, bacteria and other microbes impact aggregations of bodies—that is, the body politic, body economic and body social.

The American sociologist Rodney Stark argues that infectious diseases are a crucial part of the story. The Christian faith skyrocketed because it provided a more appealing and assuring guide to life and death than paganism during the devastating pandemics that struck the Roman Empire in the second and third centuries CE. In fact, he goes as far as to say that if it wasn’t for the Antonine and Cyprianic Plagues, “Christianity might never have become so dominant a faith.”

This is an interesting theory as it highlights the teaching/practices of Chrisitanity aligned with those seeking a means to coupe with sufferring/death or coming to terms with their mal behavior in the face of strvation/violende - absolution/redemption may have been more appealing.

In this belief system, the best way to save oneself from Apollo’s wrath was to try to deflect his anger by making a sacrifice or some other form of offering. In contrast, Jesus’ message that hardship brought redemption was much more reassuring in the face of the recurring devastation of plagues. It offered hope and meaning by explicitly promising a better life in the next world for those who were suffering on earth.

into heaven with good deeds in their earthly lives. Dionysius describes how Christians looked after the ill during the Plague of Cyprian: “Heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need.” Christians would have been able to reduce mortality by up to two-thirds just with basic nursing, such as providing food and water.[48] The fact that so many more Christians survived, and that Christians managed to save pagans abandoned by their families, would have provided the best recruitment material any religion could ask for: miracles.

It could be said then that Chrisitnaity was seen as a "medicine" - it protected its followers from infection, thereby increasing its use and popularity.

renovatio imperii

From plague bacteria’s perspective, humans and black rats are second-rate hosts because of their tendency to die quickly after the pathogen enters their bodies.

As the plague swept through Europe, the Eastern Roman Empire struggled to find enough men to join its army. This was in part a result of the depleted population, but also because the collapse of the tax base forced Justinian to cancel the gold bonus that had been paid regularly to assure the loyalty of legionnaires for the past 200 years. Before the plague, the total size of the Byzantine army was about 350,000 and it was not uncommon to send 25,000–30,000 soldiers onto the battlefield at one time. A few decades after the plague first struck, the army totaled 150,000 and had difficulty mustering 10,000 soldiers to fight.[62] From the 560s onward, the Eastern Roman Empire once again began to lose the western provinces, which it had only just regained, to Barbarian invaders.

The start of the seventh century was a particularly violent time in their relationship. Initially, the Sasanians, who now controlled Persia, were successful against the plague-weakened Byzantines. They conquered Jerusalem in 614, along with much of the Middle East, and took the relic of the True Cross—that is, the cross that Jesus was supposedly crucified on—as a trophy; between 618 and 621 they gained Alexandria and the province of Egypt, which provided Constantinople with most of its grain. The Sasanians even besieged the imperial capital in 626 but failed to capture it. Then, in 627, the tide turned: the Sasanians were badly hit by an epidemic which is said to have killed half the population, including the emperor Sheroe, who gave his name to the plague.[64] In the next couple of years the Byzantines reclaimed Jerusalem and the cross, then reconquered Alexandria and the rest of Egypt.

It is interesting that the Sasanians were able to expand their influence during this time. While they were busy fighting the Byzantine Empire, Muhammed and his followers were expanding Islam across Arabia. By 630, an Islamic state was established in Mecca which would later challenge the Sasanian Empire. If the plague had not weaked the Byzantine Empire, the Sasanians would have likely focused on subjugating the fledgling Islamic-state instead.

Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian communities were allowed to maintain their own traditions as long as they paid taxes and respected the political authority of the new conquerors. In fact, most subjects of the caliphate continued to follow Christianity and Zoroastrianism for several centuries.

The creation of the Arabian Empire was the result of a series of astonishing military victories against the plague-devastated Byzantines and Sasanians.

But a large proportion of the population were nomadic Bedouins. On the origins of the word “Arab,” Mackintosh Smith points out that “for more of known history than not, the word has tended to mean tribal groups who live beyond the reach of settled society…it is certainly what they were during most of the second AD millennium.”[70] Consequently, the region was much less prone to a disease that was spread by flea-carrying rats, and the Roman and Persian Empires were weakened not only in absolute terms but also relative to the newly Muslim and united Arabs.

It appears that nomadic - like early neolithic setters or hunter gatherers - were spared the maladies that larger communties, like those in Byzantine or Sasanian communtiies, experienced. The spread of Islam spread across Arabia through nomads; therefore, infection was reduced while Islamic practices spread.

The subsequent disruption contributed to the decline of the Rashidun Caliphate and, after a decade of infighting, the rise of the Umayyad dynasty in 661. But the Arab commanders learned that when an epidemic struck it was safest to remove their troops from the city to isolated highland or desert locations until the danger had passed. Similarly, the Umayyad Caliphs would retreat to the desert palaces and live like Bedouins during plague season.[71]

Islamic leaders seemed more aware at how to prevent infection. Their nomadic roots seemed to still influence their culture; therefore, it was natural, not cowardice, to reduce onself to a lesser state for future preservation.

With the devastation of the Eastern Roman Empire, this artery was severed. The renowned Belgian historian Henri Pirenne famously argued that without Muhammad, Charlemagne would be inconceivable.[73] The political vacuum in northwestern Europe ultimately led to the emergence of a new order that was dominated by a patchwork of small kingdoms, feudal lords and thriving city-states but was at the same time unified by its Christian identity, in opposition to its Muslim neighbors to the south and east.

The decline of a strong, central Chistian entity allowed smaller Christian-led territories to form new identies. These identities would bring ideas of nationhood. Without Islam, our modern nations would not exist.

For two centuries after the Plague of Justinian (541–49), Yersinia pestis caused repeated epidemics in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Then there is no record of a plague outbreak for more than 500 years.[8] But the bacteria hadn’t disappeared entirely. They continued to survive among gerbils and marmots in the mountains of Central Asia. When the climate changed, these wild rodents emerged from their isolated habitats once again, and the stage was set for the first major outbreak of plague in half a millennium.

Its odd that such an insignificant animal - one that few people can identify even - had such an impact on the outcome of human history

The pathogen’s journey across the Eurasian landmass was assisted by the stability that the Mongols brought to the continent. During the so-called pax Mongolica, the Far East was linked to the Black Sea by a network of relatively safe and well-maintained routes that made up the Silk Road.

Surviving historical accounts show that China was hit by a series of epidemics in 1331–34, 1344–46, and then throughout the 1350s.[11] According to imperial records, these were devastating. An outbreak in the northeast province of Hebei in 1331 is reported to have killed 90 percent of its inhabitants. The Chinese population collapsed, falling from about 125 million at the beginning of the fourteenth century to 65 million at the end—although war and floods also contributed to the death toll.[12]

Based on the information discussed in the book so far, it seems that the majority of pandemics/outbreaks/etc. develop in China. As stated previously in the book, bacteria/virus thrive within large populations. Western Europein the 1300s could be considered less developed than its Eastern counterparts. Like the plagues discussed in the Neolithic period, less dense populations (early humans) were less likely to contract disease; however, densely populated communities (Neanderthals), were most susceptiple to disease - especially novel pathogens. Reversely, a highly dense population (China) moving into a smaller population (Western Europe) would have had a similar effect.

William McNeill suggests that the plague was a key factor in the political instability that struck China in the mid-fourteenth century. This culminated in the fall of the Great Yuan—Genghis Khan’s descendants—and the emergence of the Ming dynasty, which seized control in 1368.

In the 1340s, Yersinia pestis made its way along the Silk Road to Europe.[13] The plague is believed to have re-entered the continent via Kaffa (now Feodosia), a trading station on the Black Sea that Genovese merchants had bought in the late thirteenth century from the khanate of the Golden Horde—part of the Mongol Empire that dominated the Western Eurasian Steppe. As the location of the region’s biggest slave market, where Genovese traders bought humans captured in the region north of the Black Sea and trafficked them to Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, Kaffa was one of the key links between Mongol territory and the Mediterranean. Supposedly, Italian merchants contracted plague in the autumn of 1346 when Mongol soldiers besieged Kaffa and catapulted the corpses of plague victims over the city walls.

This situation, a small group of individuals come into contact with a larger population, seems to be the prefered way many pathogens spread. Given the small communities in Europe (compared to Asia), the pathogen may have remained in Asia. If the Genovese had not come in contact with the various groups of people associated with the East, then Western Europe may have been spared. Moreover, it could be said then that the Black Plague was caused by slavery.

a Franciscan monk in Kilkenny, Ireland, who died in the plague, left blank pages in his chronicle and a message in case “any child of Adam may escape this pestilence and continue the work thus commenced.”[17] Below this, someone added a postscript dated 1349: “it seems that the author died here.”

As a person who writes in a journal, I find this anecdote funny. This monk, knowing he may likely die, left a message for whoever came across his work after he passed. Indeed, someone did find it and had the decency to write that the author had passed. If I was aware that I was going to die, I would likely write a message in the same manner. I would hope someone had the deceny (and the humor) to leave a similar note in my own journal. All stories, even our own lives, come to an end. It would be nice if someone finished mine when I pass.

The medical faculty of the University of Paris, the most prestigious learning institution in Europe, argued that the devastation was the result of a malign conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars that occurred at 1 p.m. on 20 March 1345. This accorded with the idea that the plague was the will of God, as stars were believed to be the instruments through which His will became reality on earth.

This closely mirros the understanding Greeks had of the "natural world". Plato believed in a geometric comos whereby everything (earth, moon, starts, etc.) were all perefectly shapped and moved within perfectly circular progression around one another. Aristotle, a student of Plato, added to this idea by stating that alignment or balanced needed to be maintained in the cosmos - if unbalanced, then certain phenomenon would occur. For example, Earth itself madeup the core of the cosmos. Water and air created the second and third layers. Fire was thought of being above the air and above the fire were the starts, moons, and other planets. With this thought process, a volcanoe could ne explained by the Earth becoming too hot and therefor fire rose to reach its domain. A tsunami could be explained by water being too warm and having to move toward a cooler place, such as the soil. The medical professionals in Paris, likely being educated by manuscripts from ancien Greece times, took this understanding of the natural world and appplied the concept of "balance" in the cosmos for directly effecting Earth itself. While it seems silly to think of the celestial bodies being the cause of strife, to ancient and medieval people, this idea of balance was observable in their own world and would feel like a practical (or logical) explanation.

In 1348, Pope Clement VI issued two papal bulls that pointed to fundamental flaws in the well-poisoning libel: Jews were dying in similar numbers to gentiles in continental Europe and the plague was also devastating England, which had expelled its Jewish community in 1290. The Patriarch condemned those taking part in attacks on Jews as having been “seduced by that liar, the devil” and threatened them with excommunication.

It is interesting that it took the oversight of higher figures in the Christain community to put an end to the Jewish killings. It is strange that those in higher positions would bother afffirming or condeming those who had attacked Jews. Its a unqiue act of solidarity for this time period.

The plague returned every few years for the rest of the fourteenth and all of the fifteenth centuries. Epidemics became less frequent and widespread after 1500, but they continued to take a toll.

With such a reoccurring plague, why did European societies not develop protocols to protect its citzens? Like the pandemic seen in 2020, it could have been feasable for kingdoms to seal their gates from trade at the first rumors of its spread. As well, a kingdom could raise taxes (which was not uncommon) and purchase land or construct buildings to house the sick- this would have the dual effect of making it "appear" like the nobility cared for its people and have the added bonus of "disposing" the sick outside major city centers. At the very least, curfews could have been placed on people living within major city centers. A local guard or a volunteer force of citizens (who would be paid) could be called upon to enforce it. While it seems brutal from today's standards, it would not have seen as entirely inhumane by that time's standards.

Starting in the 1370s, all ships wanting to enter Venice had to wait on the nearby island of San Lazzaro until the health magistrates granted the crew permission to disembark. Over time, the waiting period became standardized at forty days—the word quarantine is derived from quaranta, the Italian for forty.

Its strange that this is the only example so far of a city taking active measures. It is interesting that we derive the word "quarantine" from quaranta - 40 days seems sufficent to see if incoming vessels harbor diseas. However, the waiting period may slow business...

lazaretto

The word, while being associted with the city itself, sounds like Lazarus.

Marseilles in 1720 to stop people moving between the city and the hinterland, are still visible. The most remarkable example of a cordon sanitaire was constructed on the eastern boundary of the Habsburg Empire, in order to stop the transportation of the disease overland from Ottoman-controlled territory. It operated between 1710 and 1871 along

These examples, while relevant, do not sit within the time frame of medieval Europe. It seems that overland measures were scarce based on the information provided in the book. While a wall could be constructed to restrict the flow of people into a city or town, the man power it seems did not exist during this time to build one.

Umayyad dynasty attacked.

This is the dynasty after Muhammad's son-in-law was forcibly taken from power as caliph. This ended the time of the "Four Great Caliphs" and ushered in a period of Muslim expansion into the rest of Eurasia.

The Turks converted to Islam in the second half of the 900s and under the Seljuk dynasty conquered vast swathes of the Middle East in the eleventh century—including much of Hellenized, Christian Asia Minor. This transformed the character of a region that for 2,000 years had been a wealthy, intellectually vibrant part of the Greco-Roman world.[39]

By the end of the thirteenth century, the Seljuk Sultanate had disintegrated into a patchwork of small Turkish principalities or beyliks.

Ottomans started to grow prior to the Black Death, the most important—and unlikely—conquests occurred afterward. In 1354, the Ottomans seized the fortress of Gallipoli on the western side of the Dardanelles after it had been damaged by an earthquake. This marked the beginning of their expansion into Europe. In the 1360s they captured Adrianople, 240 kilometers west of Constantinople, which became their capital, Edirne. Within a couple of decades, the Ottomans had conquered much of the Balkans. These conquests reduced the size of the area ruled by the Eastern Roman emperor. For almost a century before the fall of Constantinople in 1453 it was an imperial capital without an empire, with the Byzantines controlling only a small territory around the city plus parts of the Peloponnese. The final capitulation was hardly surprising, but it still caused dismay among Christians. As the Pope put it, the Ottomans had “plucked out one of the two eyes of Christendom”—the other being Rome.[43] Threatening to expand far into Europe’s heartlands, the Ottomans besieged Vienna in 1529, which began a century and a half of military tension. They attacked again in 1683 but were defeated by the combined forces of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Habsburg-led Holy Roman Empire. By then, however, the emergence of the Ottomans had forever altered the character of Europe.

The consequences of this partial conversion of the region 500 years ago played out in the Yugoslavian Wars of the 1990s, when nationalist politicians attempted to carve the remnants of the relatively tolerant, diverse Ottoman Empire into religiously and/or ethnically homogenous states. The Orthodox Christian Bosnian Serb army committed acts of genocide against Muslim Bosnians, most notoriously when they murdered over 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica.

Feels slighly biased. The author could have spoken about reansgressions on both sides to better highlight the tension between the two communities.

Although the plague-powered rise of the Ottomans had an enormous impact on Europe, the Black Death also transformed the continent from within by fundamentally changing the way in which people—particularly in the north—related to their God.

After completing this section, it could be argued that the author feels the Black Death is responsible for the rise of Islam which expanded across the continent resulting in a more cohesive culture. This culture reestablished trade routes with the West and reignitied Western interest in the Far East & Asia. This interest caused exploration and culminated in the discovery of the New World. In high school, I recall teachers explaining that the Black Death decimated Europe - and that's pretty much it. If history teachers used the Black Death as a spring board to talk about the rise of Islam, it may have helped students (and myself) better understand future events like the First World War. The Ottoman Emipre is portrayed as a minor character in the First World War. Its defeat and dismemberment is not stressed - it created perhaps the largest power vaccum at the start of the 20th century.

While the Catholic Church failed to satisfy the spiritual needs of the population, it succeeded in making a profit off believers’ existential angst. From the 1350s, on papal orders, it promoted the sale of indulgences, pieces of paper which could be purchased to reduce the time that people spent in purgatory and therefore hasten their entry to heaven.

Reminds me of a Disney FastPass. Likely functioned the same way too...

radix malorum est cupiditas, greed is the root of all evil.

Wycliffe criticized the Church for veering away from the word of the Bible. He argued that there was no justification in the scriptures for many of the ideas they promoted—such as attending Mass, repenting for one’s sins, praying to saints and buying indulgences.

As someone non-religious, were Wycliffe's grievances valid? As an outisder to Christianity, it has always been assumed that attending Mass was mandatory and that repenting for one's sins was a core part of the faith.

People should study the Holy Book—in the vernacular if they didn’t speak Latin—and decide for themselves what God’s message was. Wycliffe played a prominent role in the first translation of the Bible from the Latin Vulgate into Middle English in 1382.

In 1415, three decades after Wycliffe’s death, the Council of Constance declared him a heretic. It decreed that copies of his writings be destroyed and his remains removed from consecrated ground. The latter order wasn’t carried out until 1428, when Wycliffe’s body was exhumed and burned. Many of his followers weren’t so lucky and were burned alive, including the Bohemian preacher Jan Hus at Constance.

Wouldn't it have been more effective to punish him while he was alive? It seems a little late that the Chruch condemed Wycliffe after his death. It is even more unfair to punish someone for following his beliefs 30 years after his death. It would be akin to punishing someone born in the 1990's for believing in something already baked into the culture.

We are taught that the Reformation began in 1517 when a young friar called Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the church door in Wittenberg, central Germany, after being disgusted by Johann Tetzel’s aggressive marketing of indulgences.

Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. The increasing use of labor-saving devices was a direct response to the challenges created by the Black Death and subsequent outbreaks of the plague, because there were now so few workers that labor-intensive processes had become unviable.

This feels like a strectch. I imagine many people, especially the elite, wanted quicker access to current literature. It wouls be advantageous to be up-to-date on the most current affairs within their land/kingdom. Moreover, they would be able to distrubute their own writing to persuade the populace. While the Black Death may have made printing more difficult, the techological advancement in printing was perhaps already on its way to developing the printing-press.

satirical woodcut images, so that in an age of low literacy his ideas reached as wide an audience as possible.

The woodcut images woud've been more accessible that Lutheran's actual writing given the low literacy of the general populace. The printing-press was perhaps most effective in this medium.

The impact of the printing press on the spread of Protestantism

The plague seems to have had a contradictory impact: at first it struck a major blow as so many experienced academics died and the pool of potential students was much reduced; but then wealthy benefactors, concerned about the plague’s impact on learning and the supply of educated priests, endowed universities across the continent.

Again, this feels like a stretch. Some would agree that the public education system (especially in the US) tanked during COVID-19. In its aftermath, the system exeriened lower math & literacy rates. It could be said that the online-school enviornment was not beneficial to learning. Moreover, the return to tradtional-learning saw a less qualified educator pool. The oldest and most experienced teachers retired and were replaced by less experienced and less trained individuals. Additionally, schools found themselves with lower enrollment rates and therefore less funding. Across the board, increased funding and increased interest in learning seems non-existent still. How could the the Black Death cause an increase in funding and learning? Wouldn't the opposit (as we see currently) be true?