109. Rats, Lice, and History

"Swords and lances, arrows, machine guns…, have had far less power over the fates of nations than         the Typhus louse, the plague flea, and the yellow-fever mosquito. Civilizations have retreated from the plasmodium of malaria, and armies have crumbled under the onslaught of cholera spirilla... Huge areas have been devastated by the trypanosome that travels on the wings of the teste fly, and generations have been harassed by the syphilis of a courtier. War and conquest and that herd existence which is an accompaniment of what we call civilization have merely set the stage for these more powerful agents of human tragedy."

From the opening pages of Rats, Lice, and History, a chronicle of infectious diseases and their historical impacts, with special attention to the “Life History of Typhus Fever,” written by Harvard biologist Hans Zinsser, published in 1935. It’s a science book for the “lay reader.” Yes, the lay reader who can read German, French, and a little Greek—the quotes are not translated! Maybe, in 1935, the lay reader had a deeper background in the classics. 

The first outstanding bit of knowledge that I picked up from the book is that many thinkers—in ancient Egypt and Greece, Europe of the Middle Ages, to and through English and American physicians from 1200 to 1935—were meticulous in describing the diseases of their days. And that more modern—read 19th and early 20th century—scientific compilers found and grouped these ancient writings so that Zinsser could reiterate and regroup, and then make the argument that civilization carried with it the concentration of humans that in turn has given us epidemic infectious diseases. 

I’d long thought that history as I learned it and have been living it is made up of: the chronicles of kings and queens, emperors and dictators, generals with their armies, inventors with their inventions—of electrical transmission, cotton gins, and airplanes; but mostly of the growth of international trade and of nation-states, and the battles of political philosophy that have raged in my own lifetime among fascism, Marxism, Maoism, Nordic Socialism; the American New Deal, trickle-down economics and Reagan’s “government is the problem.”

But I’d been converted by Alfred Crosby and the idea that the “Columbian Exchange” of animals, plants, and diseases was a global pivot point as important as the actions of emperors and armies; I’d seen that history is made of people and their organizing principles, but also of volcanic eruptions, climate changes, and the marches of smallpox from old world to new, been converted to what I saw as a “new” environmental history. I see now that Jared Diamond and Alfred Crosby were preceded by a string of historians, from the ancient chronicler of the Peloponnesian Wars, Thucydides, to Zinsser in 1935, who have been forever telling us that the world we live in comes to us shaped by flies and rodents as much as it is by wars and politics.

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