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1 Thucydides, History, 2, 47–54, 58.
2 Jürgen Grimm, Die literarische Darstellung der Pest in der Antike und in der Romania, Munich, W Fink, 1965.
3 Lucian, How to write history, 15. Whether Crepereius was a historical figure, as most scholars think, or a product of Lucian's lively imagination is not clear.
4 Fridolf Kudlien, ‘Galens Urteil über die Thukydideische Pestbeschreibung’, Episteme, 1971, 5: 132–3.
5 James Longrigg, ‘The great plague of Athens’, Hist. Sci., 1980, 18: 209–25, provides a good survey of earlier literature, and is extended by Ann G Carmichael, ‘Plague of Athens’, in Kenneth J Kiple (ed.), The Cambridge world history of human disease, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 934–7. More recent suggestions include toxic shock syndrome and a variety of viruses.
6 Manolis J Papagrigorakis, Christos Yapijakis, Philippos N Synodinos, and Effie Baziotopoulou-Valavani, ‘DNA examination of ancient dental pulp incriminates typhoid fever as a probable cause of the plague of Athens’, Int. J. Infect. Dis., 2006, 10 (3): 206–14. The authors’ precise dating of the grave depends on Thucydides’ account: without Thucydides, the dating limits became considerably wider, to the fourth to fifth century bc. Cf. also Antoine, below, p. 112.
7 Many of these accounts are now available in English, with an excellent commentary, in Rosemary Horrox (trans. and ed.), The Black Death, Manchester University Press, 1994.
8 Principal among the older literature is Alfonso Corradi, Annali delle epidemie occorse in Italia dalle prime memorie fino al 1850, 5 vols, Bologna, Gamberini e Parmeggiani, 1865–94.
9 Vivian Nutton, ‘With benefit of hindsight: Girolamo Mercuriale and Simone Simoni on plague’, Medicina e Storia, 2006, 11: 5–19; Richard J Palmer, ‘Mercuriale and the plague of Venice’, in Alessandro Arcangeli and Vivian Nutton (eds), Girolamo Mercuriale, Florence, Olschki, 2008, pp. 51–65.
10 Vivian Nutton, ‘Books, printing and medicine in the Renaissance’, Medicina nei Secoli, 2005, 17 (2): 421–42, at p. 436.
11 Christian Gottfried Gruner, Nosologia historica ex monumentis medii aevi lecta animadversionibus historicis ac medicis illustrata, Jena, ‘in Bibliopolio Academico’, 1795; Kurt Polycarp Sprengel (ed.), Beiträge zur Geschichte der Medicin, Halle, Renger, 1794, pp. 36–116. For Gruner, see now Hans-Uwe Lammel, Klio und Hippokrates. Ein Liaison littéraire des 18. Jahrhunderts und die Folgen für die Wissenschaftskultur bis 1850 in Deutschland, Sudhoffs Archiv, Beiheft 55, Stuttgart, Franz Steiner, 2005, pp. 158–77, 198–200. For Sprengel, ibid., pp. 222–32, and ‘Kurt Sprengel und die deutschsprachige Medizingeschichtsschreibung in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Andreas Frewer and Volcker Roelcke (eds), Die Institutionalisierung der Medizinhistoriographie: Entwicklungen vom 19. ins 20. Jahrhundert, Stuttgart, Franz Steiner, 2001, pp. 27–38; Alain Touwaide, ‘Botanique et philologie; l’édition de Dioscoride de Kurt Spengel’, in Danielle Gourevitch (ed.), Médecins érudits de Coray à Sigerist, Paris, De Boccard, 1995, pp. 25–44, with a bibliography on Sprengel, pp. 198–99.
12 Sprengel (ed.), op. cit., note 11 above, p. 37. Sprengel's confessed motivation shows the difference in perspective between his generation and the developments in historical epidemiology after Hecker.
13 Justus Friedrich Carl Hecker, Der schwarze Tod im vierzehnten Jahrhundert. Nach den Quellen für Ärzte und gebildete Nichtärzte bearbeitet, Berlin, F A Herbig, 1832. On Hecker, the most up-to-date account is in Lammel, op. cit., note 11 above, pp. 304–25.
14 Faye Marie Getz, ‘Black Death and the silver lining: meaning, continuity and revolutionary change in histories of medieval plague’, J. Hist. Biol., 1991, 24: 265–89, oddly calling him Justin Hecker throughout. For the “gothic epidemiology”, ibid., p. 279.
15 Justus Friedrich Carl Hecker, The Black Death in the fourteenth century, trans. B G Babington, London, A Schloss, 1833; repr. as The epidemics of the Middle Ages, London, The Sydenham Society, 1844.
16 Julius Rosenbaum, ‘Die Epidemien als Beweise einer fortschreitenden physischen Entwicklung der Menschheit betrachtet. Eine Probevorlesung’, in Johan Christian August Clarus, Justus Radius (eds), Beiträge zur praktischen Heilkunde mit vorzüglicher Berücksichtigung der medizinischen Geographie, Topographie und Epidemiologie, Leipzig, Fleischer, 1834–37, vol. 4, pp. 1–18, discussed by Lammel, op. cit., note 11 above, p. 156.
17 Heinrich Haeser, Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Medicin und der epidemischen Krankheiten, Jena, Mauke, 1845. The work expanded with subsequent editions, 2nd ed., 2 vols, Jena, G Fischer, 1865; 3rd ed., Jena, G Fischer, 1885. I have cited it from the third edition, vol. III, pp. 97–188. Haeser also devoted several pages to it in his Historisch-pathologische Untersuchungen, Dresden, Fleischer, 1839–1841, vol. I, pp. 110–35.
18 For syphilis, and its “influence on social relations and medicine”, Haeser, op. cit., note 17 above, vol. III, pp. 314–17.
19 August Hirsch, Handbuch der historisch-geographischen Pathologie, 3 vols, Erlangen, Enke, 1859–64. He reprinted Hecker's studies on the Black Death and other epidemics as Die grossen Volkskrankheiten des Mittelalters. Historisch-pathologische Untersuchungen, Berlin, Enslin, 1865. Good studies of Hirsch's historical interests are lacking, despite Eugen Beck, ‘Die Historisch-Geographische Pathologie von August Hirsch. Ein Beitrag aus dem 19. Jahrhundert zum Gestaltwandel der Krankheiten’, Gesnerus, 1961, 18: 33–44, and Frank A Barrett, ‘August Hirsch: as critic of, and contributor to, geographical medicine and medical geography’, in Nicolaas A Rupke (ed.), Medical geography in historical perspective, Medical History, Suppl. 20, London, Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, 2000, pp. 98–120.
20 Haeser, op. cit., note 17 above, vol. III, p. 974.
21 For Creighton, see the introduction to the reprint of his History of epidemics in Britain, 2 vols, London, Frank Cass, 1965 (originally Cambridge University Press, 1891–1894). Creighton was responsible for the English translation of Hirsch's Handbook of geographical and historical pathology, London, The New Sydenham Society, 1883–6.
22 Haeser, op. cit., note 17 above, vol. III, p. 984. The final section, pp. 972–85, shows Haeser's difficulties in coming to terms with the new bacteriology. German doctors were very much divided, see Richard J Evans, Death in Hamburg, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1990, pp. 231–43. For the explanatory categories of mid-nineteenth-century epidemiology, see Christopher Hamlin, ‘Predisposing causes and public health in early nineteenth-century medical thought’, Soc. Hist. Med., 1992, 5: 43–70, whose discussion of exclusively British sources applies also to their German contemporaries. The link between epidemiology and medical history was specifically declared in the sub-title to the journal Janus: Archives internationales pour l'Histoire de la Médecine et la Géographie médicale, 1896–1941: 1–45, which published the latest news on plague and proposed changes in entry requirements as well as historical articles. The sub-title was dropped when the journal resumed in 1957 as a purely historical publication.
23 See, for example, Anna Foa, The Jews of Europe after the Black Death, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000; Michael R McVaugh, Medicine before the plague: practitioners and their patients in the crown of Aragon 1285–1345, Cambridge University Press, 1993. The titles of two successive Cambridge conferences neatly mark the division: Luis García-Ballester, Roger French, Jon Arrizabalaga and Andrew Cunningham (eds), Practical medicine from Salerno to the Black Death, Cambridge University Press, 1994, and Roger French, Jon Arrizabalaga, Andrew Cunningham and Luis García-Ballester (eds), Medicine from the Black Death to the French Disease, Aldershot, Ashgate, 1998.
24 Complaints against doctors can be found at almost any time, and Petrarch's sallies against them should not be taken too seriously. There is, to my knowledge, no evidence for the desertion of physicians and surgeons for other healers as a result of the Black Death. The process of medicalization continued apace, and the doctors and surgeons themselves could argue that the survival of patients proved the value of their treatments, see Samuel K Cohn Jr, The Black Death transformed: disease and culture in early Renaissance Europe, London, Arnold, 2002, pp. 235–8, and, for the later example of Simone Simoni in his plague tract of 1576, see Vivian Nutton, ‘“It's the patients’ fault”: Simone Simoni and the plague of Leipzig, 1575’, Intellectual Hist. Rev., 2008, 81 (1): 5–13. But the effect of this belief on historians is neatly shown by the essays in French, et al. (eds), op. cit., note 23 above, which concentrate largely on the period before 1370 or after 1493.
25 Haeser, op. cit., note 17 above, vol. III, pp. 183–8, 348–56, 407–17, 459–63, 518–24, 588–91.
26 Corradi, op. cit., note 8 above; Jean-Noël Biraben, Les hommes et la peste en France et dans les pays européens et méditerranéens, 2 vols, Paris, Mouton, 1975–1976.
27 Carlo M Cipolla, Cristofano and the plague: a study of public health in the age of Galileo, London, Collins, 1973; Public health and the medical profession in the Renaissance, Cambridge University Press, 1976; Faith, reason and the plague: a Tuscan story of the seventeenth century, Brighton, Harvester Press, 1979; Fighting the plague in seventeenth-century Italy, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1982; Miasmas and disease: public health and the environment in the pre-industrial age, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1992.
28 Important studies in English since the 1970s include Michael W Dols, The Black Death in the Middle East, Princeton University Press, 1977; Richard J Palmer, ‘The control of plague in Venice and Northern Italy, 1348–1600’, unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Kent at Canterbury, 1978; John Alexander, Bubonic plague in early modern Russia: public health and urban disaster, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980; Paul Slack, The impact of plague on Tudor and Stuart England, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985; Ann G Carmichael, Plague and the poor in Renaissance Florence, Cambridge University Press, 1986; Giulia Calvi, Histories of a plague year: the social and the imaginary in baroque Florence, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1989; Ole J Benedictow, Plague in the late medieval Nordic countries: epidemiological studies, Oslo, Middelalterforlaget, 1992; Edward A Eckert, The structure of plagues and pestilences in early modern Europe: central Europe, 1560–1640, Basle, Karger, 1996; A Lynn Martin, Plague? Jesuit accounts of epidemic disease in the sixteenth century, Kirksville, MO, The Sixteenth Century Journal Publications, 1996; Andrew Cunningham and Ole Peter Grell, The four horsemen of the Apocalypse: religion, war, famine and death in Reformation Europe, Cambridge University Press, 2000; William Naphy and Andrew Spicer, The Black Death: a history of plagues, Stroud, Tempus, 2000.
29 The phrase is generally used to refer to the events of the 1340s, or the later fourteenth century as well, and may even include the early fifteenth century, and thus sets this outbreak off from later recurrences. The ambiguity arises in part from the fact that the name was not applied to this epidemic until the seventeenth century, and it did not enter general use until Hecker. For contemporary names, see Cohn, op. cit., note 24 above, pp. 104–5.
30 The story of the identification of Pasteurella pestis by Yersin and his rivalry with Shibasaburo Kitasato is told with gusto by Edward Marriott, The plague race: a tale of fear, science and heroism, London, Picador, 2002, and, more soberly and with greater attention to later developments, by Cohn, op. cit., note 24 above, pp. 7–24. The standard biography of Yersin is by Henri H Mollaret and Jacqueline Brossollet, Alexandre Yersin, le vainqueur de la peste, Paris, Fayard, 1985.
31 Andrew Cunningham, ‘Transforming plague: the laboratory and the identify of infectious disease’, in Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams (eds), The laboratory revolution in medicine, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 209–44.
32 For Simond, and the debates over his theory, see Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau, Les Chemins de la peste: le rat, la puce et l'homme, Paris, Tallandier, 2007, pp. 34–57.
33 For the debate about pneumonic plague and the even more vexed possibility of human to human transmission via the human flea, Pulex irritans, see Cohn, op. cit., note 24 above, pp. 20–23, and Audoin-Rouzeau, op. cit., note 32 above, pp. 115–56, 169–210, 421–80.
34 E H Hankin, ‘On the epidemiology of plague’, J. Hygiene, 1905, 5: 48–83; Wu Lien-Teh, A treatise on pneumonic plague, Geneva, League of Nations, 1926; L Fabian Hirst, The conquest of plague: a study of the evolution of epidemiology, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1953; Robert Pollitzer, Plague, Geneva, World Health Organization, 1954; J F D Shrewsbury, A history of bubonic plague in the British Isles, Cambridge University Press, 1970.
35 This approach is adopted by all the historians cited in notes 28 and 60, and, more recently, by Ole J Benedictow, The Black Death, 1346–1353: the complete history, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2004; and John Kelly, The great mortality: an intimate history of the Black Death, the most devastating plague of all time, New York, Harper Collins, 2005. Audoin-Rouzeau, a specialist in rat archaeology, also privileges the medical evidence, although taking a more independent line.
36 “May have”. Or “should”? Or “would”? The subtle modalities of the English verb carry different connotations as to the validity of the initial hypothesis.
37 Getz, op. cit., note 14 above, briefly surveys these revisions by historians, singling out Elizabeth Carpentier, Une ville devant la peste: Orvieto et la peste noire de 1348, Paris, S.E.V.P.E.N., 1962, as an early example of the importance of local studies. For warnings against over-interpreting the consequences of the Black Death, see Bruce Campbell (ed.), Before the Black Death: studies in the “crisis” of the early fourteenth century, Manchester University Press, 1991; David Herlihy, The Black Death and the transformation of the west, ed. Samuel K Cohn Jr, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1997.
38 Philip Ziegler, The Black Death, first published London, Collins, 1969, and many times reprinted. It enjoyed the dubious honour of being heavily plagiarized by Robert S Gottfried, The Black Death: natural and human disaster in medieval Europe, London, Hale, 1983.
39 F P Wilson, The plague in Shakespeare's London, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1927. Early studies by historical demographers include: John Hatcher, Plague, population, and the English economy, 1348–1530, London, Macmillan, 1977; Robert S Gottfried, Epidemic disease in fifteenth-century England: the medieval response and its demographic consequences, Leicester University Press, 1978; and, for Italy, Carmichael, op. cit., note 28 above.
40 See, for example, Mary J Dobson, Contours of death and disease in early modern England, Cambridge University Press, 1997. Susan Scott and Christopher Duncan, Biology of plagues: evidence from historical populations, Cambridge University Press, 2001, is a collaborative work between a medical epidemiologist and a demographer.
41 Stuart Jenks, ‘The Black Death and Würzburg: Michele de Leone's reaction in context’, PhD Dissertation, Yale University, 1976.
42 In the 1980s, I saw a TV programme on the Black Death that located its source on the shores of, and even in, Issyk Kul, a lake in Kirghizstan, thereby actualizing the metaphor of reservoir.
43 George Christakos, Ricardo A Olea, Marc L Serre, Hwa-Lung Yu, Lin-Lin Wang, Interdisciplinary public health reasoning and epidemic modelling: the case of Black Death, Berlin and New York, Springer, 2005; George Christakos, Ricardo A Olea, Hwa-Lung Yu, ‘Recent results on the spatiotemporal modelling and comparative analysis of Black Death and bubonic plague epidemics’, Public Health, 2007, 121 (9): 700–20.
44 Audoin-Rouzeau, op. cit., note 32 above, pp. 81–92, although she suggests a potentially similar pattern of infestation to that of Xenopsyllus cheopis.
45 Graham Twigg, The Black Death: a biological reappraisal, London, Batsford, 1984. (The adjective is crucial.)
46 Susan Scott and Christopher Duncan, Return of the Black Death: the world's greatest serial killer, Chichester, Wiley, 2004. Their conclusions, which went back to Scott's doctoral thesis on mortality in Penrith, were adumbrated in their Biology of plagues.
47 Herlihy, op. cit., note 37 above.
48 Cohn, op. cit., note 24 above.
49 Other suggestions include Ebola virus, and other viral infections. For Cohn's response, see below, p. 100.
50 Kelly, op. cit., note 35 above, p. 300, concludes that the DNA evidence is “more trustworthy”.
51 Cf. Antoine, below. Note also William White, ‘Excavations at St. Mary Spital: burial of the “sick poore” of medieval London, the evidence of illness and hospital treatment’, in Barbara S Bowers (ed.), The medieval hospital and medical practice, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007, p. 61, for a possible other London site.
52 Didier Raoult, Gérard Aboudharam, Eric Crubézy, Georges Larrouy, Bertrand Ludes, Michel Drancourt, ‘Molecular identification by “Suicide PCR” of Yersinia Pestis as the agent of medieval Black Death’, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 2000, 97 (23): 12800–803.
53 Michael McCormick, ‘Toward a molecular history of the Justinianic pandemic’, in Lester K Little (ed.), Plague and the end of Antiquity: the pandemic of 541–750, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 290–312, p. 295.
54 Michel Drancourt, Michel Signoli, La Vu Dang, Bruno Bizot, Véronique Roux, Stéfan Tzortzis, Didier Raoult, ‘Yersinia pestis Orientalis in remains of ancient plague patients’, Emerg. Infect. Dis., 2007, 13 (2): 332–3.
55 Cf. Antoine, below, pp. 110 ff.
56 Robert Sallares, ‘Ecology, evolution and epidemiology of plague’, and McCormick, ‘Molecular history’, in Little (ed.), op. cit., note 53 above, pp. 231–89, 290–312. I am grateful to Daniel Antoine and Helen Donoghue for their advice on recent developments.
57 Scott and Duncan, op. cit., note 46 above, pp. 185–90, “a red herring”.
58 Jo N Hays, ‘Historians and epidemics: simple questions, complex answers’, in Little (ed.), op. cit., note 53 above, pp. 33–56, raises the question with a degree of clarity that his answer then confuses.
59 Little (ed.) op. cit., note 53 above, esp. Lester K Little, ‘Life and afterlife of the first plague pandemic’, pp. 3–32.
60 For the oriental sources, see Michael G Morony, ‘“For whom does the writer write?” The first bubonic plague pandemic according to Syriac sources’, in Little (ed.), op. cit., note 53 above, pp. 59–86. Lawrence I Conrad's PhD Dissertation, ‘Plague in the early medieval Near East’, Princeton University, 1981, has never been published, but his conclusions have appeared in many articles, e.g., ‘Arabic plague chronologies and treatises: social and historical factors in the formation of a literary genre’, Studia Islamica, 1981, 54: 51–93; ‘Die Pest und ihr soziales Umfeld im nahen Osten des frühen Mittealters’, Der Islam, 1996, 73: 81–112; ‘Epidemic disease in Central Syria in the late sixth century: some new insights from the verse of Hassa¯n ibn Tha¯bit’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1994, 18: 12–58. The Arabic sources for the Black Death were similarly neglected until Dols, op. cit., note 28 above.
61 Cf. Hays, op. cit., note 58 above, p. 52, although some of his speculations depend on disregarding his own warnings.
62 Audoin-Rouzeau, op. cit., note 32 above, is a vigorous plea for attention to the role of the animal vectors.
63 A Lloyd Moote and Dorothy C Moote, The Great Plague: the story of London's most deadly year, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.
64 Nutton, op. cit., note 9 above.
65 Palmer, op. cit., note 9 above.
66 Alison P Galvani and Montgomery Slatkin, ‘Evaluating plague and smallpox as historical selective pressures from the CCR5-Ä32HIV-resistance allele’, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 2003, 100 (25): 15276–9. The authors curiously assume that the Black Death only affected Europe, and hence that this explains the prevalence of this gene in Europeans. Cf. also Sallares, op. cit., note 56 above, p. 289.
67 R Devignat, ‘Variétés de l'espèce Pasteurella pestis: nouvelle hypothèse’, Bull. World Health Organ., 1951, 4: 247–63; idem, ‘La peste antique du Congo belge dans le cadre de l'histoire et de la géographie’, Mémoires de l'Institut Royal Colonial Belge, 1953, 23: 1–47.
68 Sallares, op. cit., note 56 above, pp. 246–50; Carniel, below, p. 120.
69 Cf. the slightly different formulations of Sallares, op. cit., note 56 above, pp. 250–51, and McCormick, op. cit., note 53 above, pp. 303–6. The latter shows clearly how historians’ preconceptions react with those of scientists, and vice-versa. But note the protest against Devignat by Wendy Orent, Plague, New York, Free Press, 2004, pp. 58–9, suggesting that his classifications are not the most important ones, as well as the qualifications by Carmichael, below, p. 17.
70 McCormick, op. cit., note 53 above, p. 306, draws attention to the frequency with which Yersinia pestis produces mutations, but also accepts the stability of Devignat's three biovars. The non-scientist may wonder whether this is not trying to have one's cake and eat it.
71 Above, note 54.
72 Audoin-Rouzeau, op. cit., note 32 above, pp. 358–94.
73 The importance of variations with molecular DNA is stressed by Florent Sebbane, Clayton O Jarrett, Donald Gardner, Daniel Long and B Joseph Hinnebusch, ‘Role of the Yersinia pestis plasminogen activator in the incidence of distinct septicemic and bubonic forms of flea-borne plague’, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sciences USA, 2006, 103 (14): 5526–30.
74 Nils C Stenseth, Noelle I Samia, Hildegunn Viljugrein, et al., ‘Plague dynamics are driven by climate variation’, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 2006, 103 (35): 13110–115.
75 The French plague specialist Henri Mollaret, in conversation with Dorothy and Lloyd Moote, emphasized the enormous uncertainties involved in the interaction between bacillus, flea, the rat primary host and humans under the influence of temperature variability, the availability of moisture, proximity to other humans, rats, and fleas, and variation in the virulence of Yersinia pestis, to which might be added the variation in human immune systems.
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