110. The Curve

Dr. Wheelwright was the grand old man of the philosophy department at my college. We jockeyed to get into his limited seminars, even though we knew the grading was tough. Once, as we went over test results, a student asked how it was that he graded on a curve, but had given out no A’s. “I do grade on the curve,” said Dr. Wheelwright, “and it’s 30 years long. Some years there aren’t any A’s.”

 

In Rats, Lice, and History, author Hans Zinsser says the biologist’s task is to make the incremental discoveries that, over time, will lead to an understanding of diseases and their historical roles. He quotes another philosopher, Henry Bergson, that “a very small element of a curve is near being a straight line… [but] life is no more made up of physical-chemical elements than a curve is composed of straight lines.” 

 

The detail that Zinsser assembles in piecing together a “biography of Typhus Fever” and making the argument that infectious diseases have had greater impacts on history than have the movements of armies and the actions of generals—is prodigious. Tracing ancient texts from China to Egypt to Greece—many ancient plagues were thought to have originated in Ethiopia—and combing records for the appearances of lice and mosquitoes, and the “domestication” of rats, he concludes that infectious diseases are never static, and that the movement and mutations of these diseases to and from animal and insect populations will never end. The biologist—and the historian--work to grasp the inflections of the curves that have changed and might change the behavior of diseases, and the course of history.

 

The domestication of rats is due to affluence. I.e., with sufficient food supplies, rats do not need to travel as far for their own basic needs, and the diseases they carry are thus held to small human populations. And “were it not for the single and simple procedure of the Jennerian vaccination,” smallpox epidemics would be with us still, “attacking each new generation.”

 

It’s interesting to think now about where we are on the coronavirus curve. And to think about the impacts it has already had and will have on national and international politics. It succumbed to religious and political pressure in India, which resulted in super-spreading and a disease out of control. In Brazil, political divisions are deep with a president who scorned the disease. It had its role in our recent election, and President Biden has made overcoming it a keystone of his early presidency. 

 

Is it hidden in the violent outbreaks in Israel and Ethiopia? And has our Governor Brown made the right bets on closing and opening schools and the economy? Where are we on the curves?

 

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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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