Book Report
Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and
Imperialism
Sheldon Watts, Yale University Press, New Haven, 400pgs.
Review by: Dr Al Parmet
This book is a recounting of epidemic diseases that altered history: plague, syphilis, leprosy, cholera, yellow fever and malaria. It is also an interpretation of history from a very revisionist point of view. The subtitle tells the tale. Sheldon Watts is a social historian who teaches in Cairo and Ilorin, Nigeria. His viewpoint is decidedly leftist and anti-imperialist. It’s tough being an anti-imperialist these days, since there are no more empires, but you can always find someone to fill the role. So the author shifts his demons from Christian western Europeans and their empires to modern capitalists.
The theme here is that all epidemic diseases are the result of exploitation and oppression. It is an interesting viewpoint, not always supported by facts. Other times the facts are not in dispute. Certainly the spread of yellow fever and malaria to the western hemisphere was due to the slave trade. Watts ties the slave trade to replacement of workers due to the deliberate genocide of the native American Indian tribes, primarily through biological warfare. Certainly smallpox was the major reason for the success of the early Spanish conquistadors, a point I made more than ten years ago in writing a military medical history. The question is if these fifteenth and sixteenth century adventurers understood how diseases could be deliberately spread or prevented.
Smallpox decimated the native Americans and Watts tells this story quite well, noting that both the Aztec and Inca empires were defeated by disease, not by the Spanish army. Further effects echoed into North America and destroyed many other pre-historical tribes. However some of these facts are misleading. While the agricultural Mandan of the northern plains were pushed over the edge by smallpox (and venereal disease) they were pushed to the edge by the aggressive intruders, the nomadic Sioux. It does not fit well with your paradigm if you find that the noble savages are imperialist intruders as well, out to exploit the next tribe just as much as those wicked Europeans. What is interesting is the social views of the intruders, or how the Spaniards viewed the native Indians as animals or at most children.
Watts has problems with any ideas or credits going to westerners. The only Europeans worthy of sympathy are perhaps the Jews since they were oppressed by the Christians. So, anything you may have heard about Europeans (or "Euro-Americans" ) that was positive was something that was stolen. For example, Jenner did not discover vaccination, he stole it from a poor farmer. Except that the idea wasn’t new, it was just not organized and made publicly acceptable. An earlier version of vaccination, variolation, was not discovered by Cotton Mather, it was stolen from an African slave. Mather himself told the same story, so how did he "steal" the idea? Although all records demonstrate that an African slave first carried smallpox to Mexico, Watt goes to great efforts to debunk this and blame white, Christian sailors.
Having had many problems with the spin Watts places on the cause of these epidemics, there is no argument in the outcomes. Massive changes in society ensued from plague and syphilis, although Watts did fail to tie plague and syphilis together. Had not the Black Death altered social behavior, the Great Pox of syphilis would not have spread so far, so fast. Watts also skips the traditional history of great people, such as how Henry VIII Tudor line ended because of syphilis, to focus on the commonplace: powdered wigs become popular because of luetic hair loss.
Another important idea Watts introduces is the Construct Disease. This is the belief that a disease exists where there is no factual or scientific proof. This can take the form of Construct Leprosy: a creation of the medieval church. Here the Catholics create a disease without any objective proof beyond the testimony of two citizens. There is no medical knowledge required and indeed the history of medieval leprosy has nothing to do with disease, it becomes and echo of McCarthyism, blacklisting the undesirables for profit. There is the more recent Construct Yellow Fever, where Africans are presumed not to be susceptible to disease the way Europeans are. Watts missed the same calling for syphilis in the 20th century. While Construct Disease is an interesting idea, Watts makes a serious factual error in assuming that diseases are so local that to go over the hill to the next town exposes even the immune native to a different strain of illness to which they will have no immunity.
This is a powerful book with many interesting ideas and opinions. It is enough to boil the blood in some cases, but if you cannot stand the heat of the marketplace of ideas, stay in the managed care kitchen.
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