Pandemic History: The Bibliography

"[T]here remains the simple fact that the Black Death was, indeed, the greatest and most sustained demographic disaster in the history of the world."
John Aberth 

"Before that worldwide [influenza] pandemic faded away in 1920, it would kill more people than any other outbreak of disease in human history."
John M. Barry 

"[T]he disaster to Amerindian populations assumed a scale that is hard for us to imagine, living as we do in an age when epidemic disease hardly matters. Ratios of 20:1 or even 25:1 between pre-Columbian populations and the bottoming-out point in Amerindian population curves seem more or less correct, despite wide local variations."
William H. McNeill

"Variola was the deadliest killer in a terrible onslaught of alien microorganisms that, by some historical estimates, may have decimated as much as 90 percent of the precontact population of the Americas."
Michael Willrich

As I noted in Pandemic History, the books in this list were not selected by a rigorous criteria of historical relevance. Rather, these are the books that I have have on shelves in my home (or as ebooks on my iPad). I am still reading some of these books, some I finished recently, one I have yet to start, and some were consumed more than thirty years ago. These books vary in quality, cost, and relevance.

Today, the number of people worldwide confirmed to be infected with COVID-19 crossed two million. A minuscule portion of the population has been tested. The number of confirmed deaths is closing in on 130,000. The pandemic still seems to be on a steep upward climb. The most serious global impact, however, will be economic, rather than demographic. Advances in medicine and understanding of the possible consequences of epidemic disease protect us in immeasurable ways even as globalization has sped the process of epidemics becoming pandemics.

Screenshot form the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center

The Bibliography

Aberth, John. The Black Death: The Great Mortality of 1348-1350, A Brief History with Documents, 2nd ed. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2017.

This book is a text designed for college classes. As such, it has limited, but highly focused analysis, a good summary of the state of the research, and consists mostly of extracts from primary sources. Aberth also has authored a scholarly monograph concerned with the Black Death, another general book on plagues throughout history, and several works on the European Middle Ages.

Arnold, Catherine. Pandemic 1918: Eyewitness Accounts from the Greatest Medical Holocaust in Modern History. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2018.

Technically, this book is not shelved in my house, but rather on my electronic devices as an ebook. I started it in late March, but others keep getting in the way of my progress. It is well-written, but somewhat disappointing. The phrase "eyewitness accounts" in the title led me to expect more in the way of excerpts from primary sources (see "Reflective Thinking, Teaching and Learning" [2009]). The author quotes many sources at length, but the book is her narrative. Arnold offers a compelling account of the lives of people who struggled to survive a devastating pandemic. She draws on some of the best secondary works by historians, such as Alfred Crosby, America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918 (2003) and John Barry (see below), and she draws from a range of primary sources that include works of fiction written by survivors. Nonetheless, as I am reading the book I am marking a few passages that I intend to return to with more attention because I have a hunch they contain some gross inaccuracies.

Barry, John M. The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. New York: Viking Penguin, 2004.

My bookmark reveals that I had read just over one-third of this book before it gathered dust on my shelf for a decade. I started it anew in early March as COVID-19 could no longer be ignored. I finished it last week. About 20 March 2020, I saw that it had risen to a number one bestseller in several categories tracked by Amazon, including history of medicine. Barry narrates stories of the physicians who battled the pandemic in the context of a history of science. He asserts that the 1918 eruption of influenza "was the first great collision between nature and modern science" (5). The Great Influenza concentrates on the work of Paul Lewis, Simon Flexner, William Crawford Gorgas, William Henry Welch, and a host of others who built medical institutions and who struggled to find both cure and cause of influenza.

Brown, Jeremy. Influenza: The Hundred-Year Hunt to Cure the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018.

Jeremy Brown is a medical doctor with decades of experience in emergency rooms. This book, which I read on my iPad the week I was also finishing Barry's The Great Influenza, does an excellent job of presenting the medical history of influenza. Brown then builds on the medical history to discuss both the strengths and weaknesses of how the US government stockpiles medicines and other resources for combating pandemics. He shows how political influence of certain pharmaceutical companies tilt some of these preparations towards medicines of little to no value. Reading this book while under partial-quarantine is a chilling reminder of the failures of political leadership in a nation with a hostile relationship to science and expertise.

Crosby, Alfred. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Company, 1972.

I have characterized this book as among a small number that every historian of America knows, whether by reading or by the references made to it by others. If Crosby and this book did not introduce the term "Columbian Exchange" into the vocabulary of historians, then he is at least responsible for promoting it. His thesis asserts the significance of disease in facilitating the European conquest of the Americas, but also highlights the role of flora, fauna, and ideologies. The exchange went both directions--Europeans acquired tobacco, tomatoes, and quinine, among many other things. The Columbian Exchange enriched the world, while impoverishing indigenous Americans. The core ideas from this book are expanded to global history in Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Also, Crosby's "Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America," William and Mary Quarterly 33 (April 1976): 289-299 was, the last time that I checked, the most cited article in American history writing. Crosby is essential reading.

See also "The Columbian Exchange" (2014).

__________. America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918, 2nd. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

This book just arrived. I am looking forward to reading it.

Crosby, Molly Caldwell. The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, the Epidemic that Shaped our History. New York: Berkley Books, 2006.

The Yellow Fever epidemic that struck Memphis, Tennessee in 1878 was not the first outbreak of the disease in American history. The 1793 epidemic in Philadelphia is better known. A graduate school colleague wrote his dissertation on the topic (Arthur Robinson, "The Third Horseman of the Apocalypse: a Multi-disciplinary Social History of the 1793 Yellow Fever Epidemic in Philadelphia," 1993). Caldwell Crosby starts with a compelling story of Memphis as the disease kills nearly everyone she introduces (some readers have found the narrative difficult on this account), and then follows Yellow Fever to Cuba two decades later. There Walter Reed identified the mosquito that transmits the virus. Caldwell Crosby is a journalist who writes well, but there have been some critical concerns raised with respect to her accuracy.

Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.

I read this book at the end of the twentieth century after it came out in paperback. When I mentioned it as a guest lecturer in spring 2000, the professor and a few students had heard of it. When I mention it in college classes today, a few students have seen the PBS documentary based on the book (2005). Jared Diamond's work synthesizes and popularizes the work of others with his own meta-narrative. His answer to the question of why Eurasia, and more particularly Europe, became dominant in global affairs begins with the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution. Most of the virulent epidemic diseases that have tilted the balance of world history emerged from human associations with domesticated livestock. Long association with these diseases led to relative immunity for Eurasians that conferred an advantage over virgin populations in the Americas. Central to his argument is the east-west axis of the geography of Eurasia and the north-south axis of the Americas. The east-west axis facilitated the spread of crops, animals, diseases, and technologies. However, his extension of this contrast to Eurasia's advantage over Africa is less convincing. Africa is nearly as wide east to west, as it is long north to south. See the YouTube video, "African History Disproves 'Guns, Germs, and Steel' by Jared Diamond" (2019).

Dobyns, Henry F. Their Numbers Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983.

This book is groundbreaking and controversial. Henry Dobyns' research is broad and deep, his inquiry imaginative, and his importance to the historiography of disease in the Americas undeniable. Dobyns has led the way in revising estimates of the pre-Columbian populations of the Americas upward. Few scholars agree with him, but the opposite extreme embraced by American conservatives from Rush Limbaugh to the authors of A Patriot's History of the United States is vastly less credible. Dobyns deserves credit for raising the critical questions, even if his answers are disputable. I recall that his efforts to assess carrying capacity of the land reshaped some of my thinking about history in fundamental ways, but also that several of us in the graduate seminar found his estimates a little too generous, as it seemed that a sense of ecological balance was missing.

Reconsideration of what should now be considered thoroughly discredited estimates begins with Dobyns, “Estimating Aboriginal American Population: An Appraisal of Techniques with a New Hemispheric Estimate,” Current Anthropology 7 (1966): 395-416. See also "Indian Population 1492: John D. Daniels", where I assess some of the flaws of the most comprehensive overview of the topic.

Fenn, Elizabeth A. Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001.

Fenn's Pox Americana highlights the significance of smallpox to the American Revolution, controversies over early efforts to inoculate against it, and carries the story into the allegations of biological warfare (the notorious "orders" of Sir Jeffrey Amherst [88-89]), and the long-term impacts as smallpox spread across the continent, devastating native communities. Unfortunately, I can say little about this book. I started it while proctoring a final exam in American History: A Survey--reading that was frequently interrupted by students telling me how much they enjoyed the course (a job hazard). By the time I finished grading those exams, I had moved on to reading several other books (a hazard of my reading habits). I recall that I read the first few chapters with great enthusiasm for the quality of Fenn's research and analysis, and also that the book is well-written.

Johnson, Steven. The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. New York: Riverhead Books, 2006.

John Snow was a physician before he became one of the heroes of Game of Thrones. He believed that cholera spread through contaminated water, not through foul air (the miasma theory of disease that was orthodox science at the time). Snow, thus, stands as an important figure in the development of the germ theory disease that would be articulated with solid evidence later in the nineteenth century by Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch. Snow appears to have understood the germ theory, argued it through the 1850s, and later produced a map of London's epidemic that helps to demonstrate the source of the tainted water and the spread of the disease. Johnson writes well.

Lapham, Lewis H., ed. "Medicine". Lapham's Quarterly, vol. II, no. 4, Fall 2009.

Lewis Lapham compiled and organized into this issue of his quarterly an astounding range of excerpts from ancient times to the present. All excerpts concern the quest for health amid sickness, the arts of healing, the nature of medicine across ages and cultures. Writers range from Emily Dickinson, Marcel Proust, and Ken Kesey to Hippocrates, Plato, Oliver Sacks, Louis Pasteur, and the unknown writer of The Plum in the Golden Vase from the late Ming Dynasty. The issue is absorbing, surprising, and insightful. Lapham's sequencing is well considered. The issue was published against the backdrop of Barack Obama's presidency and the promise of what became the Affordable Care Act.

McNeill, William H. Plagues and Peoples. New York: Anchor Books, [1976] 1998.

This book was vital in the process of bringing disease epidemiology into the consciousness of members of the history profession. William McNeill is concerned with the whole of human history from the evolutionary success of homo sapiens to global dominance by a few large bureaucratic states in the modern world. Diseases spread by invisible microparasites affect human societies in much the same way as macroparasites--humans preying upon other humans. Parasites survive by reaching equilibrium with their host populations just as governments built upon exploitation of subject peoples must protect them from more virulent threats (72). In the astounding success of European expansion in the wake of Columbus that largely set the structure of the modern world, "bacteriology was at least as important as technology" (235). This book sat on my shelf nearly untouched for more than a decade. Then I started examining it with the expectation that it would offer a quick and broad overview of the state of disease history half a century ago. Instead, I found a provocative approach to the subject as fresh as it was when first published. See also "Only a Quote" 2020.

Parker, Samuel. Journal of an Exploring Tour Beyond the Rocky Mountains. Ithaca, N.Y.: Self-Published, 1838.

This book is a primary source with minimal information useful to the study of disease. Nonetheless, it is a text that I often refer to it while lecturing on the topic of disease. Samuel Parker was a missionary with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions--the American West was foreign territory when he traveled there 1835-1837. Prior to his journey, he acquainted himself with the writings of explorers and fur traders who had been in the region. During his travels, he learned what he could from observation and through conversations with others. He observed the population of Native villages along the lower Columbia, noted that the number of people was substantially below what had been reported by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, and discussed the matter with John McLoughlin, Chief Factor of the Hudson's Bay Company. Parker reports his estimate that 7/8 of the Chinook had perished, and mentions McLoughlin's estimate of 9/10. Many scholars have suggested that the epidemic that ravished the Chinook 1829-1832 was malaria. Others are less certain of the identity of the disease. Parker, and others of his time uses the term, "fever and ague" (178). Whatever the disease, the Chinook had controlled trade between the Pacific Coast and the interior before the epidemic, and effectively ceased as viable communities after.

Rosen, William. Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe. New York: Penguin Viking, 2007.

William Rosen seeks connections between and among microbiology, ecology, geography, military history, architecture, and other areas. His concern is for the large questions, such as whether the fall of the Roman Empire was a consequence of a flea-borne plague. The answer is nuanced. He asserts that the pandemic changed history, but labors to avoid overstating the case. Rosen seems to spurn a linear narrative. Those who grow frustrated with an author's extensive pursuit of what seems tangential to the central narrative should look elsewhere.

The author has a website with excerpts from the book, reviews (including a negative one), maps, errata.

Welch, James. Fools Crow. New York: Penguin, 1986.

Fools Crow was Blackfeet writer James Welch's third novel. It is a coming of age novel focused on a year in the life of a Piegan teenager. Welch makes him part of the Lone Eaters Band, a fictional group grounded in history. The fiction is set against the backdrop of a smallpox epidemic and the Marias River Massacre. As Welch noted in several interviews, after the massacre, the Blackfeet never lifted arms against the United States again. Welch stated that he read what historians wrote about this era, and also drew from Blackfeet oral tradition. My dissertation, "Spring Wind Rising: The American Indian Novel and the Problem of History", has a chapter that examines the interplay of Welch's first four novels with history. I suggested that this novel inscribes history that is more accurate than government sources, but was insufficiently clear that it contains fewer errors than the most popular secondary histories on the topic as well.

Willrich, Michael. Pox: An American History. New York: Penguin, 2011.

The smallpox epidemic that struck parts of the United States at the end of the nineteenth century was notable for its lack of severity. Even so, it came on the heels of a transformation of medicine, was met with widespread efforts to vaccinate large populations, and had a tremendous impact. I'm 10% into the Kindle version of this text and may revise this annotation at a later date.

Pandemic History

Epidemic disease has been a decisive factor in many of history's turning points. The "black death" (bubonic plague) has been credited with stimulating the end of the Middle Ages and ushering in the Renaissance.* Smallpox and other epidemic diseases infecting "virgin soil populations" was the decisive factor in the European conquest of the Americas.

In the present, the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) that causes COVID-19 provoked American universities to move most instruction online in the course of a few weeks in late February and early March 2020.** Further measures developed day-by-day as I was writing this post over the course of two weeks in late March while finishing winter quarter grading and beginning to record my spring quarter lectures. On 23 March 2020, Governor Inslee (Washington) ordered "stay-at-home" effective 48 hours later, closing all but essential businesses for two weeks, with the possibility that the partial quarantine could be extended. It has now been extended into May.

COVID-19 may also prove to be the defining moment in the Presidency of Donald J. Trump. Initially, Trump dismissed the epidemic as "under control", but as matters developed his views appeared to shift.*** Predictable partisan dissension made it impossible from the midst of the crisis to understand how well the United States was prepared, and whether actions had been taken, or not taken, that exacerbated or slowed the spread.

The number of confirmed cases globally topped half a million 27 March, while it had been under 200,000 the weekend before Saint Patrick's Day.  Confirmed cases topped one million 2 April, and the number of deaths passed the 50,000 mark that day also. The accuracy of the numbers are open to question as testing protocols vary. There are also suspicions that some countries might deliberately report inaccurate numbers. For up-to-date information on the COVID-19 pandemic, I recommend Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.

Some of my Disease History Books

Disease in history long has been a personal interest--sometimes it is my main focus, sometimes it sits in the back of my mind while I pursue other questions. Emphases often shift in the life of a historian. These days, my central concerns are the global history of science and technology. This focus brings me back to the impact of bubonic plague, a topic I have neglected. My Amazon order of John Aberth, The Black Death, the Great Mortality of 1348-1350: A Brief History with Documents (2016) will arrive about four weeks from the date of the order because I chose to pay for faster shipping. Amazon is backed up due to the pandemic, and has prioritized shipment of medical supplies.

As someone who focused on American Indian history and culture in graduate school, I could not avoid the study of disease epidemiology (see "depopulation" in the index). Moreover, the origins of Patriots and Peoples (this site) stem from a challenge in A Patriot's History of the United States (2004) to generally accepted understanding of the impact of disease on indigenous populations (see "Patriots' and Peoples' Histories" [2007]). The authors of A Patriot's History favor the lowest estimates of pre-Columbian indigenous populations and dismiss claims that disease epidemics were a significant factor. In the course of their arguments, they violate nearly every standard of honest scholarship.

This post continues with "Pandemic History: The Bibliography", published nearly two weeks later. It offers short annotations to a list of books on the history of disease that were selected on the whimsical base that I can find them on the shelves in my home within a few minutes.

My Journey

My introduction to the topic of disease in history began spring 1988 as both a teaching assistant for American Indian History, where the professor assigned Francis Jennings, Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (1976) as one of the texts, and in a graduate seminar, "Ethnohistory and the New Social History" with the same professor. Jennings' book (not annotated in the companion post) offers:

Not even the most brutally depraved of the conquistadors was able to purposely slaughter Indians on the scale that the gentle priest unwittingly accomplished by going from his sickbed ministrations to lay his hands in blessing on his Indian converts. As the invaders were descendants of the toughened survivors of the Middle Ages, so the Indians of today descend from those who could live through the trauma of a European handshake.
Jennings, Invasion of America, 22.

In the seminar, the one dozen assigned books began with Their Numbers Become Thinned (1983) by Henry F. Dobyns. That seminar concluded with a social gathering that included dinner with William R. Swagerty, Dobyns' co-author for the longest chapter in the book. It was a good introduction to some of the controversies in efforts to estimate in impact of disease in the Americas.

In that seminar, we each selected one of the books and led that week's discussion, created and distributed an annotated bibliography that put the book in context, and then wrote a paper. My text was James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (1985). Four years later when I started teaching the upper-division American Indian History course for which I had been a TA in 1988, I assigned it as one of the texts. Axtell's book focused on Christian missions to indigenous Americans. Disease epidemics proved vital to the topic. His thesis concerning the sources of indigenous perceptions of European power identifies two principle factors: Europeans, especially priests, were akin to "the Indians' own shamans and conjurers" because they seemed to be "purveyors or preventers of disease" (10). Then he claims, European technological superiority was more vital.

Since reading The Invasion Within early in graduate school, I have frequently revisited Axtell's assertion. I have expanded and developed my agreement of the central significance of disease, while qualifying and critiquing his assumptions of technological superiority. A thesis statement I wrote for an encyclopedia article twenty years ago appears several times on Patriots and Peoples.

Epidemic disease was the decisive factor in the European conquest. Epidemics not only eliminated entire communities, but the resulting sociocultural disruption created conditions that made Native peoples more receptive to European trade items and religious ideas.
James Stripes, "Native Americans: An Overview," Encyclopedia of American Studies, vol. 3 (2001), 198.

In fall 1989, I worked up a twenty minute lecture on the impact of epidemic disease on Native populations as part of my responsibility as a teaching assistant. Twenty minutes exhausted most of what I knew at that point. By 2004, this kernel had grown into a three hour PowerPoint presentation. I use Axtell's title, The Invasion Within, as my lecture title. In the course of the presentation I venture into Dobyns' work and some of the views of his many critics. Often while presenting this lecture, I struggled to focus on the prepared material because I sensed that the whole three hours merely brushed the surface. I developed an extended version of this presentation for American Indian History (a course I created at Whitworth University) and a shorter version for Pacific Northwest History. For a course in Atlantic History, I created a Prezi presentation that qualified somewhat my assertion in Encyclopedia of American Studies (See "The Decisive Factor" [updated 17 August 2017]).

For Technology in World Civilization, a course that is now my teaching focus, I cut this lecture down to ten minutes to expand and critique assertions in chapter four of Arnold Pacey, Technology in World Civilization (1991), one of the two texts. Pacey also has a section on the impact of bubonic plague. The other current text, Society and Technological Change, 8th ed. (2017) by Rudi Volti, has a section concerned with medical technologies and in my lectures I find it apropos to highlight success in the battle with infectious diseases. Moving this course online during the current pandemic causes the medium and the message to intertwine in ways that Marshall McLuhan anticipated.

In short, my study of epidemic disease and histories of pandemics has been broad, sometimes deep, and has occupied a fair portion of the past four decades. Nonetheless, I am a mere dabbler compared to those who have specialized in this area. In the past few weeks, I have been dabbling with greater attention, reading quite a bit about the Influenza Pandemic that struck in 1918.


*See Samuel Kline Cohn, "Plague and its Consequences," Oxford Bibliographies (updated 10 May 2010), www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195399301/obo-9780195399301-0062.xml

**World Health Organization, "Naming the Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) and the Virus that Causes it," WHO.int (accessed 3 April 2020), https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/technical-guidance/naming-the-coronavirus-disease-(covid-2019)-and-the-virus-that-causes-it?

***"CNBC Transcript: President Donald Trump Sits Down with CNBC's Joe Kernan at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland," CNBC.com (22 January 2020), www.cnbc.com/2020/01/22/cnbc-transcript-president-donald-trump-sits-down-with-cnbcs-joe-kernen-at-the-world-economic-forum-in-davos-switzerland.html

Fresh Roasted Martian Coffee

I rarely agree with my Representative in Congress. We do not share the same political commitments, nor the same priorities. Even so, she is among my "friends" on Facebook. As a consequence, I saw the update when she spoke at the ribbon cutting for the opening of the North Spokane Corridor, the first drivable leg of the North-South Freeway first proposed in 1946. She (or a staffer) posted a photo on TwitPic, and her Facebook page offered a link.

There are plenty of reasons to question new freeway construction, such as the role it plays in the development of sprawl. I tend to think the construction is too little, too late as far as relieving congestion, but the project offers the opportunity to raise some other questions of my Congresswoman. So, I asked a question of her through this social networking site, although I'm skeptical that she will respond.

Cathy, what are you doing to make certain the project gets completed while there is still petroleum on the planet, and to support the development of vehicles that run on other fuels so the new freeway connecting I-90 to Wandermere will not have been an egregious waste of taxpayer money?

In the ensuing conversation with other "friends" of Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, others had questions too.

Garlan Cutler: I was not there but I hope you reminded the folks that, President Obama's mandated health care reform, He will make it work. . Seniors Citizens at 68 years of age will be mandated to CHECK OUT OF MEDICARE to reduce the growth in cost of END-OF-LIFE HEALTH CARE SPENDING. If you are still around at age 70 you will be mandated to CHECK OUT OF THE SOCIAL SECURITY SYSTEM, that is all the longer that he is guaranteeing you to live.

There should be no doubt that Representative McMorris Rodgers opposes H.R. 3200, as well as nearly everything else President Obama favors. Her constituents, by and large, believe that Obama's central goal is to render the United States of America a socialist state, particularly with respect to health care. She supports these constituents well.

Garlan Cutler is preaching to the choir, as they say. I did not argue with this nonsense. But others took up the mantle. One "friend" of Representative Rodgers told Cutler that he was "sadly misinformed." Another stated, "[s]ome liar has scared you to death"; medicare is safe. Cutler read these efforts to console, and responded with a clear summary of history.

Garlan Cutler: Just look that the history of the world governments and read between the lines and dont be fooled

There's not much to respond to. there. History, as one legal scholar put it so well, "is a protean activist useful for legitimating a predetermined result." If history itself can prove anything, how will anyone be able to pin down what is read "between the lines"?

In the responses to Representative Rodgers' "status," the health care debate was temporarily suspended to allot space for a question directed at yours truly.

Mike Hen: James, do you really think that we will run out of oil? Are you familiar with the new reserves found in Brasil? Are you familiar with the seeps in California or the Gulf of California? Do you really think the project will take a couple of hundred years?

I replied, but without much specificity as the comments went into a second day. My creed with respect to the oil reserves is this: whether they will run out is not a question; there is a question of when. Will I live to see their exhaustion? Petroleum, I had learned in my youth, derives from dead organic matter--brontosaurus and tyrannosaurus rex and their social network--compressed for millions of years. Oil is mined from the earth; it is not renewable.

I added my own lesson from history, with a bit of future projection thrown in, and a smiley.

The world that oil wrought was the twentieth century. That the twenty-first will differ in the main is crystal clear--just look into the ball ;-).

Mike Hen continued with questions and more links; my belief in dinosaur origins was put to the test.

Mike Hen: James, perhaps you'd like to comment on this. There are a number of theories out there that might lead to a reduced concern for the future. One of the considerations is that the atmosphere of Titan is chock full of the organics that are being talked about here. Nature in the raw as it were.

First, I attacked the source, calling WorldNet Daily less than credible, but acknowledged that the story, if true, could lead to revisions of my theory. Then added some practical concerns: I'm not ready to pay for spaceships through a tax on my Chevron Card.

Mike, thanks for the links, although it would be nice to see a source more credible than WorldNet Daily for the possibilities that science might need to significantly revise our understanding of how crude oil is formed. As for tapping reserves in outer space, the consequences for prices at the gas pump seem likely to be unpopular.

Still, it's something to think about.

Then, I did some web surfing, and came up with a science site that corroborated the WND story, albeit with the skepticism endemic to scientists. The LiveScience article also enriched my volcabulary with some new terms that I immediately put to use.

[I]t is a science source rather than an opinion oriented "news" source. According to LiveScience, abiogenic petroleum likely requires thousands of years, just as biogenic petroleum.

Hen thanked me--the civility of our discourse might serve as a model for some of those in Congress--and he continued the interrogation.

Mike Hen: James, an interesting article. The main thing that I came away from it with is 'we don't know how it's done or how long it takes.' It seems the scenario is not quite as bleak as you originally painted it.

BTW, do you have any energy sources that can handle the current requirement without disrupting today's society? If not then I'll have to stick with the current source and I believe that others will reconsider their earlier stand on the green revolution.

BTW 2, I looked at the author not the media presenter, in the WND story. I have no affinity for WND and considered the story in terms of the author's quals.

BTW 3, [;)] Boy do I wish we could drill on Titan, and maybe vacation on Mars.
Enough of my flights of fantasy! Have a good one.

I imagine sitting in a Starbucks on Mars, continuing this conversation with another as unpersuaded by my arguments as I am of his.

Mike, we seem to view the world, especially the past and future, from substantially different perspectives. I do not see the complete depletion of petroleum as "bleak," nor societal change as disruptive. Society has never been static. To say that the twentieth century was petroleum centered and that the twenty-first likely will not have been so when we are dead and it is history is not to paint a bleak picture of the future, but to imagine possibilities--I'll warrant that drilling on Titan is also imagining possibilities, as is sipping fresh roasted Martian coffee!*

My original question to Representative Rodgers might be rephrased thus: Are you pursuing legislation that is not rooted in static notions of twentieth century realities as normative for our future? I hope not, although I fear that such is precisely the case.

That's where I left it this morning, except that I pasted the whole conversation into this space with a brief headnote.

My title deserves more. The original post is embarrassing.

This afternoon, I rewrote the blog post. Being the archivist that I am, I preserved the original in a post with a date nearly two years ago. Blogger's editing quirks permit a few liberties that I'm beginning to explore. Follow the hyperlink to my archive of the original post if you wish to make fun of my copy and paste laziness.


Addenda 25 August 2009

Last night, Mike Hen added a final note to our conversation. It's clear that we have some agreement regarding our disagreement, and some shared values and perspectives, despite seemingly adverse political priorities.

James, I'll accept your analysis on our viewpoints as accurate, although I'm not against a change in energy sources in the slightest. What I am against is change that would damage our society in any way.

The lure of the uncertain future is best answered on an individual basis with little change, in society, being felt until it has been vetted by forerunners.

Again I ask, what can you put in my tank tomorrow so that I can get to work. Twenty years in the future is well past the point that I'm willing to wait in order to keep from losing my present job.

I'll also agree that the only thing that is constant is change, the only thing we're quibbling about is the speed.

Thanks Mike. I enjoyed the exchange.


*The link to this coffee company was added after I Googled "Martian coffee" and found my blog on page two. This coffee company was next in their list. Their correction to some misconceptions concerning The War of the Worlds deserves a visit.

Origins of Malaria

Agriculture and Malaria

In July 2001, The Economist notified its readers of two articles in Science published that month concerned with the origins of malaria. Both articles, the news magazine noted, employed studies in genetics to explore a hypothesis put forth more than forty years earlier by Frank B. Livingstone in American Anthropologist. In “Anthropological Implications of Sickle Cell Gene Distribution in West Africa,” Livingstone suggested that the development of agriculture in western Africa brought Plasmodium falciparum as a parasite into human populations, and “the spread of this agriculture is responsible for the spread of the selective advantage of the sickle cell gene” (555). He concludes:

The agricultural revolution has always been considered an important event in man's cultural evolution, but it also seems to have been an important event in man's biological evolution. … [Disease became a significant limiting factor in population growth.] Two results of the agricultural revolution seem to account for this change in the role of disease in human evolution: (1) the great changes in the environment, and (2) the huge increase in the human population. Both of these seem to be involved in the development of holoendemic malaria. First, when man disrupts the vegetation of any area, he severely disrupts the fauna and often causes the extinction of many mammals, particularly the larger ones. When this happens, there are many known instances of the parasites of these animals adapting to man as the new host. It is thus possible that the parasitization of man by P. falciparum is due to man's blundering on the scene and causing the extinction of the original host. Second, concomitant with the huge increase in the human population, this population became more sedentary and man also became the most widespread large animal. Thus, he became the most available blood meal for mosquitoes and the most available host for parasites. This change resulted in the adaptation of several species of the Anopheline mosquito to human habitations and the adaptation of many parasites to man as their host.
Livingstone, “Sickle Cell Gene Distribution,” 556.

One of the Science articles presented research by the Harvard-Oxford Malaria Genome Diversity Project. Sarah K. Volkman, Alyssa E. Barry, and the others on the team analyzed “25 introns from eight independent isolates” (482) which they found deficient in single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Their data led to an estimated age of 3200 to 7700 years for the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of extant P. falciparum, and 9500 to 23,000 for the age of MRCA when two “suspect SNPs” are included.

[T]he establishment of slash-and-burn agriculture in the African rainforest less than 6000 years ago … could have provided suitable expansion conditions for the mosquito vectors of P. falciparum and adequate human population size to maintain transmission.
Volkman, et al., “Recent Origin of Plasmodium falciparum,” 483.

The other article examined “genetic defense mechanisms … for resisting infection by Plasmodium” (455). Estimating the ages of two glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD) alleles that “are restricted to specific geographic regions,” Sarah A. Tishkoff and her co-authors note the ages correspond with the development of agriculture. They estimate that G6PD “A- mutation arose in the past 3840 to 11,760 years” (459) and the Med allele 1600 to 6640 years ago. They note that the age of the A- allele partly supports the hypothesis of Frank Livingston, but that “an increase in both temperature and humidity between 12,000 and 7000 years ago” in Africa may have contributed to malaria’s spread earlier in the Sahara and east Africa (460). They note that malaria had been present in human populations much longer, but that “more severe malaria did not become hyperendemic until the past 10,000 years” (460). They also state:

It is possible that the recent and rapid spread of the Med allele across a broad geographic region may correspond with the spread of agriculture during a Neolithic expansion and migration across Europe from the Middle East 10,000 to 5000 years ago.
Tishkoff, et al., “Haplotype Diversity and Linkage,” 460.

These two articles were not published without skepticism from other researchers in genetics, epidemiology of malaria, and related subjects. In “Malaria's Beginnings: On the Heels of Hoes?” in the same issue of Science, Elizabeth Pennisi outlined some aspects of the controversy. The “prevailing view has long favored ancient origins,” she notes, but several studies in recent years have supported the “link between malaria and agriculture” (416-417).

Two years after the flurry of articles in Science in 2001, another article offered additional support both for the ancient origin and for the more recent expansion of P. falciparum. Deidre A. Joy and her co-authors “reject the claim that the parasite originated 6000 years ago,” but suggest that the population of the parasite likely remained small for a long period. Their data “provide[s] strong evidence for a recent and rapid population expansion in Africa followed by migration to other regions” (321).

Historical Significance

If P. falciparum, the parasite that causes the most virulent form of malaria, expanded in concert with agriculture, it joins many other maladies that have made gatherings of humans into towns and cities unhealthy places for most of human history.

As the development of agriculture made possible the rise of cities, food became cheaper but often less varied. The rise of towns and cities with the expansion of agriculture reduced the overall health of human populations. Deleterious effects of the Neolithic revolution included sedentary lifestyles, repetitive physical tasks (swinging a scythe, for example, or pounding grain into flour), ecological degradation, and new illnesses. Cities were terribly unhealthy abodes for humanity until the twentieth century developments of modern water and sewage treatment, plumbing, and garbage disposal. These themes are central to the arguments in The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere (2002), edited by Richard H. Steckel and Jerome C. Rose, and of Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997).

In general, the healthiest populations were hunter-gatherers, and the least healthy lived in large settlements supported by systematic agriculture. Our statistical analysis of the health index identifies settlement size and use of domesticated plants as the two most important factors associated with the long-term decline in pre-Columbian health.
Steckel and Rose, “Conclusions,” The Backbone of History, 587.

Sedentary farmers became surrounded not only by their own feces but also by disease transmitting rodents, attracted by the farmers’ stored food. The forest clearings made by African farmers also provide ideal breeding habitats for malaria-transmitting mosquitos.
Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, 205.

Civilization made us sick, but it also made us more numerous so we could impose our will on those otherwise more fortunate. The maladies that afflicted Europeans contributed in significant measure to their global expansion.

Death in Jamestown

Fyndeinge of fyve hundrethe men we had onely Lefte aboutt sixty, The reste beinge either sterved throwe famin or Cutt of by the salvages.
George Percy, “A Trewe Relacyon”

In early 1610, sixty English colonists remained from the previous year’s population of five hundred. After two years, the colony at Jamestown had not yet established itself as a viable settlement. Approximately 90% of the colonists to Virginia had died—killed by Indians, starved, fallen to disease—or run away and disappeared into the wilds of America. Conditions were so grim that the surviving remnant prepared four boats and set out to return to England. Some considered burning the small fort where they had suffered, but were persuaded that it might yet be occupied by others who would follow them. As they sailed downriver, they met Lord De La Ware’s ship loaded with supplies and more than three hundred additional colonists. They returned to Jamestown.

The colonists would continue to die. Each ship that arrived in Virginia brought more colonists and most died within two years. Of the many thousands who arrived year after year, perhaps 900 occupied Jamestown and the surrounding area in 1620 (Gately, 73). So many colonists died that an investigation by the Royal Council in 1624—the year that John Smith published his Generall Historie—asked, “What has become of the five thousand missing subjects of His Majesty?” (Morison, 54).

John Smith described the conditions in 1607. Food consisted of meager rations from the common store.

… halfe a pinte of Wheat, and as much Barly boiled with water for a man a day, and this having fryed some six and twenty weekes in the ships hold, contained as many wormes as graines
Smith, “Description,”

Hunger was aggravated by thirst. The colonists were reduced to drinking water from the river.

… when they [Captain Newport and the ships] departed, there remained neither Taverne, Beere-house, nor place of reliefe but the common kettell. … our drinke was water.
Smith, “Description”

George Percy noted the abysmal conditions of the water.

… our drinke cold water taken out of the River, which was at a floud verie salt, at a low tide full of slime and filth, which was the destruction of many of our men.
Percy, “Observations”

Earlier in this paragraph, Percy gives us the earliest diagnosis of the maladies that would continue to devastate the Virginia colony for more than a decade.

Our men were destroyed with cruell diseases as Swellings, Flixes, Burning Fevers, and by warres, and some departed suddenly, but for the most part they died of meere famine.
Percy, “Observations”

Flixes seems most likely a reference to dysentery, but what caused the fevers?


Malaria?

In A Patriot’s History of the United States, Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen clearly identify one of the principal causes of death.

Disease also decimated the colony. Jamestown settlers were leveled by New World diseases for which they had no resistance. Malaria, in particular, proved a dreaded killer, and malnutrition lowered the immunity of the colonists.
Schweikart and Allen, A Patriot’s History, 17.

The identification of malaria as a principal malady killing the settlers is neither surprising nor original. The textbook I read in my first college course in early American history also identified malaria, which the authors linked to the poor choice of location for the settlement.

The town was located on marshy ground where mosquitoes flourished during the summer, and a hundred of the first settlers died from malaria.
Weinstein and Wilson, Freedom and Crisis, 63.

An article in The Pilgrim Newsletter published in recognition of the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown continues this common assertion, “Malaria and other mosquito born illnesses were rampant in the colony” (Stacy, 17). School children at Jamestown Elementary School in Virginia incorporated this idea into a Rap song written as part of a school project.

Although the identification of malaria as a killer of colonists is not uncommon, Schweikart and Allen's add a new twist with their assertion that it was a “New World disease” against which the English lacked immunities. In contrast to this original idea, a statement from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health reflects the current state of knowledge concerning malaria in the New World.

Plasmodium vivax stowed away with the English going to Jamestown, while P. falciparum rode along with slaves from Africa.
“Background History on Malaria”

P. vivax thrived in northern Europe for centuries, but it killed very few. P. falciparum is far more deadly. Indeed, it is one of the world's leading killers even today. If the English colonists succumbed to malaria, it came with them. But they were unlikely to succumb until a more virulent strain was brought in with imported servants from Africa. The first of these arrived in 1619 by which time the English population at Jamestown was growing and reasonably healthy.


If not Malaria?

The common assertion that malaria killed the Jamestown settlers rests on a weak foundation. In Malaria: Poverty, Race, and Public Health in the United States (2001), Margaret Humpheys suggests that the English colonists might have brought malaria with them. The strain of malaria they brought—P. vivax—was less virulent than that likely brought sometime after 1619 from Africa—P. falciparum. Humphreys earned a medical degree from Harvard as well as her Ph.D. in the history of science. Her qualifications for assessing the epidemiology of colonial Virginia would seem more than adequate. It thus comes as no surprise that her book is thorough and well argued, and offers only tentative conclusions in recognition of the absence of the sort of medical data required to make a definitive diagnosis.

Humphreys leaves Schweikart and Allen’s novel allegation in shambles: there is no credible reason to believe that malaria was a New World disease. She also offers good reasons to doubt their commonplace assertion that malaria was the cause of the fevers about which Percy and Smith wrote.

The Jamestown settlers came from England, including parts of England where vivax malaria was common. They certainly could have brought it with them. But one would not expect such a nonvirgin population, however malnourished, to experience a major outbreak of vivax malaria with that level of mortality.
Humphreys, Malaria, 24.

Humpreys suggests that the level of mortality is more consistent with typhoid fever than malaria. Typhoid fever had been put forth as an explanation in the work of Wyndham Blanton in the first half of the twentieth century and by Carville Earle in the second half of the century. Earle notes that the parasites Salmonella typhi and Endamoeba histolytica were present in the “slime and filth” that Percy observed in the water.

Ironically, most of them died needlessly, for on at least two occasions, Virginians understood the nexus between site and mortality, and they eliminated that link through the preventative medicine of settlement dispersal only to have their costly insights overturned by company agents freshly arrived in Virginia.
Earle, “Pioneers of Providence,” 482.

Of course, settlement dispersal rendered the colonists more vulnerable to Indian attack. It was bad enough that the English were economically dependent upon the Natives for many of their provisions, whether through trade or abundant theft. The Indians frequently found cause for hostilities—Percy mentions for example an accidental shooting of a Native when a “pistoll suddenly fyered and shotte the salvage” (Nicholls). Moreover, archaeological excavations and “tree-ring analysis of cypress trees” suggest that the Natives were already suffering scarcity of crops due to a severe drought during the years 1606-1612 (Sheler). The additional burden of feeding the helpless English during hard times did not bode well for peaceful relations.


Plausible Deniability

Schweikart and Allen’s statement that malaria killed the Virginia colonists could be true, but more than likely it is false. Their original claim would merit consideration if they offered some evidence in support. The most convincing scholarship available when they were writing their book suggests an alternate hypothesis that seems more likely. They ignore Humpreys' text. Perhaps the belief that malaria killed the colonists should go the way of Smith’s alleged rescue at the hands of an eleven year old Indian child—a useful myth that is probably false but cannot be proven false beyond all doubts.

Their identification of malaria as a New World disease, on the other hand, is absurd. Even so, they do not state unequivocally that it was. The transition from “New World diseases” to “[m]alaria, in particular” in the next sentence certainly implies that malaria was a New World disease, but they do not list it among those “diseases thought to be ‘transmitted’ from Europe” several pages earlier (Stripes). The relationship between the two sentences could be a misleading non sequitur conferring plausible deniability. It could be clever politics; it could be incompetent editing.


Citations

“Background Information on Malaria.” Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. http://www.jhsph.edu/Malaria/Malaria_Background.html. Accessed 4 February 2008.

Earle, Carville. “Pioneers of Providence: The Anglo-American Experience, 1492-1792.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82, no. 3 (1992), 478-499.

Gately, Iain. Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization. New York: Grove Press, 2001.

Humpheys, Margaret. Malaria: Poverty, Race, and Public Health in the United States. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Morison, Samuel Eliot. The Oxford History of the American People. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965.

Nicholls, Mark. “George Percy's ‘Trewe Relacyon’: A Primary Source for the Jamestown Settlement.” Virginia Magazine of History & Biography 113, no. 3 (2005), 212-275.

Percy, George. “Observations gathered out of a Discourse of the Plantation of the Southerne Colonie in Virginia by the English, 1606.” In Purchas his Pilgrimes, vol. 4 (1625), 1685-1690.

Schweikart, Larry. “Why It’s Time for A Patriot’s History of the United States.” History News Network. http://hnn.us/articles/9536.html. 31 January 2005.

Schweikart, Larry, and Michael Allen. A Patriot’s History of the United States: From Columbus’s Great Discovery to the War on Terror, updated ed. New York: Sentinal, 2007.

Sheler, Jeffrey L. “Rethinking Jamestown.” Smithsonian 35 (October 2005), 48-54.

Stacy, Ann Hooper. “Jamestowne 1607 in Celebration of its 400th Anniversary.” The Pilgrim Newsletter 91, no. 2 (2007), 16-19.

Stripes, James. “Larry Schweikart’s Claim.” Patriots and Peoples. http://historynotebook.blogspot.com/2008/01/larry-schweikarts-claim.html. 30 January 2008.

Smith, John. “The Description of Virginia by Captaine John Smith.” In Purchas his Pilgrimes, vol. 4 (1625), 1691-1704.

Weinstein, Allen, and R. Jackson Wilson, Freedom and Crisis: An American History 2nd ed. New York, Random House, 1978.

Footnote to Larry Schweikart’s Claim

Tuberculosis

In A Patriot's History, Schweikart and Allen’s claim that “[t]uberculosis existed in Central and North America” (8) appears slightly inaccurate in light of research published after their text. It is not clear, however, that their claim contradicts “research from the hard sciences” available to them, even though support for their claim remains elusive.

An excellent summary of the medical science regarding the presence of tuberculosis in pre-Columbian America appeared in Philip A. Mackowiak, Vera Tiesler Blos, Manuel Aguilar, and Jane E. Buikstra, “On the Origin of American Tuberculosis,” Clinical Infectious Diseases (15 August 2005), 515-18.

The article asserts, “it is now firmly established that tuberculosis existed in the New World before the arrival of Columbus” (516), but the origins, spread, and cause (M. tuberculosis or M. bovis) remain unknown. Moreover, conclusive evidence of tuberculosis in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica “has yet to be found” (516).


Richard H. Steckel and the Backbone of History

In his article for History News Network, “Why It's Time for a Patriot's History of the United States,” Larry Schweikart claims: “[we] note that considerable new research in the hard sciences and medicine shows that some diseases thought to be ‘transmitted’ from Europe likely were already here.”

Economist Richard H. Steckel coordinated the work of a large group of scholars that resulted in several publications, including two texts cited by Schweikart and Allen. As noted yesterday, I have not yet been able to access these books. However, several summaries of the work suggest that Schweikart and Allen correctly formulate a central generalization of this work, but then grossly distort the specifics. They correctly quote the work of this group as suggesting that the health of indigenous Americans was on a “downward trajectory” before Europeans arrived. On the other hand, errors range from semantic inaccuracies to substantive misrepresentations.

Schweikart and Allen note a study of “12,500 skeletons from sixty-five sites” (8). Steckel’s summary differs:

The combined data sets include 12,520 skeletons from 218 archeological sites representing populations who lived in the Western Hemisphere from about 4,000 B.C. to the early 20th century. For purposes of the present analysis, the samples were combined into 65 groups based on their chronological and ecological similarity.
Steckel, et al, “Variation in Health,” 270.

Steckel and his coauthors highlight complexities in their generalization that there was a general decline of health in the Americas.

The average values for the health index ranged from 64.0 for Native Central Americans to 78.1 for Native North Americans from the Eastern Woodlands. As measured by the index, the examples of very good health in the 65 samples were for coastal Brazil, coastal Ecuador, and coastal Georgia, while the worst health was found at Hawikku, New Mexico, and among plantation slaves of South Carolina. Some of the best and worst health conditions were found in pre-Columbian Native American communities.
Steckel, et al, “Skeletal Health,” 149.

Much of the decline in health appears to have stemmed from “improvements” in agriculture and the consequent growth of urban areas. Those very features of indigenous American life that Schweikart and Allen labor to conceal are the source of the decline they trumpet.

Groups living in paramount towns or urban settings had a health index nearly 15 points (two standard deviations) below that expressed for mobile hunter-gatherers and others not living in large permanent communities. Clearly, there is something about living in a large community that is deleterious to health. … these larger communities are fueled by an agricultural economy. Diet was also closely related to the change in the health index, with performance being lower under the triad of corn, beans and squash compared to the more diverse diet of hunter-gatherer groups.
Steckel, et al, “Variation in Health,” 272.

One of the key findings to emerge from the study is the downward trajectory of health prior to the arrival of Europeans. Historians, economists, and other social scientists have long celebrated the contributions of technological change for improvements in the human condition. However, our research underscores the importance of distinguishing between material and health aspects of the quality of life.
Steckel, et al, “Variation in Health,” 274.

Because indigenous Americans were civilized, their health was in decline. Hunter-gatherers were generally healthier. Indeed, nineteenth-century equestrian nomads were so healthy that they distort the general data on the improvement in health of Native Americans following colonization.

The transition to agriculture has been widely considered a benchmark development for humanity, laying the groundwork for “civilization” and all of its elements, such as democracy, learning, art, literature, and architecture. From this perspective, humans underwent a transition from a way of life that was “nasty, brutish, and short” to one brimming with leisure and excess. The findings from the Western Hemisphere project argue that, in fact, the reverse was closer to reality. This is not to say that life went from rosy and healthy to bleak and unhealthy. That is not the case. There is a misperception by much of the public—at least the American public—that prehistoric Native Americans were the original ecologists, whose impact on the environment was minimal. Moreover, it is commonly believed that few diseases existed before the arrival of colonizing Europeans, who carried with them a suite of infectious pathogens that wiped out many native peoples. In fact, pre-Columbian people show plenty of evidence of disease. Some were among the healthiest in the study, whereas others were among those with the greatest burden of disease.
Steckel, et al, “Skeletal Health,” 152.

Steckel and company are clear that America was not a disease-free paradise, but they do not support the counter myth that American indigenes were on the whole “fierce savages, whose occupation was war, and whose subsistence was drawn chiefly from the forest” (Chief Justice John Marshall, Johnson v. McIntosh [1823]). Schweikart and Allen do not quote Marshall, but they distort the process of disease transmission when, after acknowledgment that European introduced microbes “generated a much higher level of infection,” they state, “warring Indian tribes spread the diseases among one another when they attacked enemy tribes and carried off infected prisoners” (17).


Full Citations

Richard H. Steckel, Jerome C. Rose, Clark Spencer Larsen, and Phillip L. Walker, “Variation in Health in the Western Hemisphere: 4000 B.C. to the Present.” In M. Schultz, et al., eds., Homounsere Herkunft und Zukunft: 4. Kongress der Gesellschaft für Anthropologie (GfA)Proceedings (Göttingen: Cuvillier Verlag, 2001), 270-75.

Expanded as

Richard H. Steckel, Jerome C. Rose, Clark Spencer Larsen, and Phillip L. Walker, “Skeletal Health in the Western Hemisphere From 4000 B.C. to the Present,” Evolutionary Anthropology 11 (2002), 142-155.

Larry Schweikart’s Claim

In his article for History News Network, “Why It's Time for a Patriot's History of the United States,” Larry Schweikart makes a number of claims regarding the content and merits of A Patriot’s History. I’ve been spending some time examining one: “[we] note that considerable new research in the hard sciences and medicine shows that some diseases thought to be ‘transmitted’ from Europe likely were already here.” This claim raises two immediate questions. Which New World diseases were thought to be Old World diseases? What research in the hard sciences supports their claim?

New World / Old World

Which New World diseases were thought to be Old World diseases? Schweikart and Allen offer two answers:

Native populations had epidemics long before Europeans arrived. A recent study of more than 12,500 skeletons from sixty-five sites found that native health was on a “downward trajectory long before Columbus arrived.” Some suggest that Indians may have had a nonvenereal form of syphilis, and almost all agree that a variety of infections were widespread. Tuberculosis existed in Central and North America long before the Spanish appeared, as did herpes, polio, tick-borne fevers, giardiasis, and amebic dysentary.
Schweikart and Allen, A Patriot’s History, 8.

Disease also decimated the colony. Jamestown settlers were leveled by New World diseases for which they had no resistance. Malaria, in particular, proved a dreaded killer, and malnutrition lowered the immunity of the colonists.
Schweikart and Allen, A Patriot’s History, 17.

I’m nearly ready to present a posting here at Patriots and Peoples showing that research in the so-called hard sciences favors an African origin for malaria, at least for its most virulent strain, and that this research was widely disseminated roughly during the time that Schweikart and Allen should have been finishing the research for their text. Of course, the scientific answers regarding the origins of malaria are inconclusive, as is customary for scientific research. Scientists are a skeptical tribe and they present their research with a degree of uncertainty that is misread to produce the distortions propagated by anti-intellectual crusades against such “truths” as evolutionary theory, the necessity of habitat protection and restoration, and models of climate change that reveal the effects of carbon dioxide emissions.

I will deal with malaria and Jamestown in "Death in Jamestown" which should be posted in a matter of days. In addition, “Origins of Malaria” will address some of the latest work in the hard sciences (at the time A Patriot's History was in preparation) with respect to malaria. While I’m moving forward on these two articles, I’m pursuing other aspects of Schweikart’s claim. The existence of a variety of infections, including nonvenereal syphilis, comes as no surprise to anyone with the faintest knowledge of the vast literature on Indian health, demography, and depopulation. Indeed, except for malaria, none of the maladies listed by Schweikart and Allen are among those listed by Henry Dobyns as Old World diseases that decimated indigenous populations in the Americas.

Hard Sciences

What research in the hard sciences supports their claim? I can find no citations to medical journals or the like in Schweikart and Allen’s bibliography. There are two texts that include work in a field called macrobioarchaeology, and two short articles in popular scientific journals. The two citations to science journals are both “[a]mong those who cite higher numbers” (9), and neither supports their claim. That leaves The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere, edited by Richard H. Steckel, and Jerome C. Rose; and Michael R. Haines and Richard H. Steckel, A Population History of North America. Steckel calls his work social science (i.e. “soft science”), but his work must be the “hard science” to which Schweikart refers.

It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. –Sherlock Holmes
A. Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes, 315.

According to the publisher, The Backbone of History “gathers skeletal evidence on seven basic indicators of health to assess chronic conditions that affected individuals who lived in the Western Hemisphere from 5000 B.C. to the late nineteenth century.” This book is the source for the language “downward trajectory,” a phrase available in numerous reviews, such as the New York Times article, “Don't Blame Columbus for All the Indians' Ills,” also cited by Schweikart and Allen. However, the New York Times article is clear that Steckel and Rose “say their findings in no way diminish the dreadful impact Old World diseases had on the people of the New World.” This assertion runs counter to the thrust of the argument in A Patriot’s History.

A Scholar’s Frustration

I do not own either of Steckel’s books cited by Schweikart and Allen. The Backbone of History is unavailable in my public libraries—city and county; nor does it exist in either university library in my city. The nearest copy I’ve located is 85 miles south of my home at my alma mater. A Population History does exist at one local library, but when I checked there in December, it was checked out until the end of January (their online catalog indicates that it is there today, so perhaps I can examine it later this week). Thus I’ve been forced to defer full examination of Schweikart and Allen’s professed sources, but initial forays into summaries offered in book reviews, and articles accessible through JSTOR are pushing me towards an assessment nearly identical to that offered in “America was not a disease-free paradise”: superficial reliance on quotable comments from books that argue the opposite of the larger claims in A Patriot’s History. I keep seeking credible scholarship in Schweikart and Allen’s text, but it eludes me.

Gone Fishing: Mosquitoes, Malaria

In the summer I eat fewer bananas and catch more fish. I cut down on fruit that seems to make me more attractive to the mosquitoes that inhabit wetlands near my favorite trout streams. It’s folk wisdom, and it may be proven false by science, but as with the flies I tie on the end of my tippet, my belief is the critical factor. I think that fewer bananas (and more garlic) renders me relatively unattractive to blood sucking insects, and so the evidence of my experience bears me out.

In the winter I do more angling in the library than along streams. There I recently netted an article of interest on the introduction of malaria in the New World: Corinne Shear Wood, “New Evidence for a Late Introduction of Malaria into the New World,” Current Anthropology 16 (March 1975), 93-104. Wood’s abstract at the end of the article sums the argument.

The unique, overwhelming group-O frequency present among indigenous American populations is seen as a result of mother-child ABO incompatibility effects operating in the absence of the positive selection pressures by malaria vectors favoring enhanced survival for genes A and B that the investigation findings suggest. It is proposed that had malaria been present to act upon the original gene pool, a balanced ABO polymorphism would be found in the New World Indians today.
Wood, “New Evidence,” 5.

Comment by sixteen scholars follow Wood’s article, taking up more pages than her report. There are several criticisms that urge caution in reasoning from her preliminary results, and most suggest the need for further studies. None of them fault her assessment of the historical literature up to the time of her study. It had been inconclusive, but was leaning toward Old World origins.

There should be no doubt from the responses, and her reply, that her study does more to raise questions than offer answers. As the article was published more than thirty years ago, we might expect to find corroborating or refuting evidence by now.

A much more recent study brought to my attention by John Hawks offers a conclusion supporting at least one aspect of Wood’s contentions, that malaria could have impacted selective pressure regarding blood groups:

This work provides insights into malaria pathogenesis and suggests that the selective pressure imposed by malaria may contribute to the variable global distribution of ABO blood groups in the human population.
J. Alexandra Rowe, et al, “Blood group O protects against severe Plasmodium falciparum malaria through the mechanism of reduced rosetting,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104 (October 2007), 17471-17476.

In addition, some genetic analysis published a few years ago, also inconclusive, leans towards origins of malaria in Africa. See Jennifer C. C. Hume, Emily J. Lyons, and Karen P. Day, “Archaeology of Epidemic and Infectious Disease,” World Archaeology, 35 (October 2003), 180-192.

This kettle of fish increases skepticism regarding Larry Schweikart’s claim, that “considerable new research in the hard sciences and medicine shows that some diseases thought to be ‘transmitted’ from Europe likely were already here,” if this claim applies to malaria.

I’ve addressed this question from another angle near the end of “America was not a disease-free paradise.” Schweikart and Allen name malaria once, as a New World disease that struck down English colonists that “had no resistance” (A Patriot’s History, 17).