Plagues upon the Earth Quotes

“The German medical historian Alfons Labisch aptly described the hygiene revolution as the rise of Homo hygenicus,/i>, likening it to the evolution of a new being. We are a species whose personal habits and domestic spaces are committed to the project of disinfection.”
― Kyle Harper, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History

“In tandem, life-giving medicine and death-dealing machine guns opened the interior of Africa to European exploitation.”
― Kyle Harper, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History

“The “scramble for Africa,” the sudden onset of direct colonization, brought new forms of exploitation and violence. Among the worst effects of modern globalization was the introduction of unfamiliar veterinary diseases, the rinderpest virus above all.”
― Kyle Harper, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History

“When Captain Cook arrived in 1778, he ended a long period of isolation. The islands were home to more than half a million people. Westerners introduced syphilis and gonorrhea, and in the following years came typhoid, dysentery, whooping cough, measles, and smallpox. The tragedy played out in miniature in 1824, when a royal delegation from the island including King Kamehameha II and Queen Kamamalu traveled to London on a whaler to seek a British alliance; they were received with polite fascination in England, but within a month measles struck the royal party. Both the king and queen died. The lopsided disease exchange meant that within a century of European contact, the indigenous population of Hawai‘i declined by more than 90 percent.”
― Kyle Harper, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History

“The use of Peruvian bark radiated outward from Seville and Rome in the second half of the seventeenth century, but its efficacy was controversial, and its association with Catholicism slowed its uptake in Protestant Europe.”
― Kyle Harper, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History

“[...] paradoxically, the “catchment area” of tuberculosis was expanded by the prolongation of life achieved by the control over other diseases. [...] The eighteenth century created a kind of tubercular society.”
― Kyle Harper, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History

“Because aggressive haircuts were the best means of delousing, wigs were much in fashion [...].”
― Kyle Harper, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History

“The plague did not just disappear on its own—it was disappeared, by human design. Better construction and the use of brick instead of timber created microenvironments less hospitable to rodent infestation. It has also been argued that the rise of arsenic mining and the creation of a rat-poison industry helped bring rodent populations under control. But by far the most persuasive explanations center on the institution of quarantine.”
― Kyle Harper, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History

“Although we might not imagine England as a hotbed of malaria, in fact the marshes and fens of Kent, Essex, and Sussex were notorious for their “agues.” The prevalence of the mosquito vector Anopheles atroparvus in the soggy English lowlands created an extension of the vivax malaria zone. The first settlers—at Jamestown, at Plymouth—carried Plasmodium vivax across the Atlantic in their blood.”
― Kyle Harper, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History

“The age of plague also reconfigured political incentives and military technologies. In particular, the sudden shortage of manpower incentivized the use of labor-saving devices, especially those that concentrated great violence in a few hands.”
― Kyle Harper, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History

“There has been a classic debate over whether the spread of agriculture was a “demic” or “cultural” diffusion—that is, whether farming populations replaced hunter-gatherers or hunter-gatherers adopted farming technologies. The pendulum has swung back and forth, and the truth clearly involves some mixture of both. But as ancient DNA has come to loom large in the debate, the demic explanation has found strong support.”
― Kyle Harper, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History

“Agriculture is a way of harnessing the photosynthesis of digestible plants to convert sunlight into people.”
― Kyle Harper, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History

“No present-day hunter-gatherer society is a Pleistocene time capsule.”
― Kyle Harper, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History

“The hominin family has been aptly compared to a braided river, its streams overlapping, combining, and running dry until only one rivulet still runs—us.

[...The braided stream analogy was proposed by Xinzhi Wu (e.g., Athreya and Wu 2017).]”
― Kyle Harper, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History

“To look at human energy consumption in another way, in a developed society today, every individual consumer is the rough ecological equivalent to a herd of gazelles.”
― Kyle Harper, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History

“Germs have a selfish interest in their natural host’s survival, but in spillover species, that selfish restraint is missing.”
― Kyle Harper, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History