Plagues and Pandemics!

The Great Plague of Athens

• struck Greece in 430 BC, during the Peloponnesian War.

• According to the historian Thucydides, the disease spread to Athens from Ethiopia and killed up to 25% of the city’s population

  • including its leading statesman, Pericles.

• Though the illness spread to other cities, its particular impact on Athens helped Sparta become the foremost city in Greece.

• The cause of the plague remains unknown

  • speculation that it may have been typhus or an unknown type of hemorrhagic fever by some historians

The Antonine Plague

• spread across the Roman Empire from AD 165 to 180.

• Roman troops brought the disease into the Mediterranean world after returning from war against Parthia in Mesopotamia.

• named for the Antonine dynasty, which ruled Rome at the time under co-emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus (the latter of whom likely died of the plague)

  • the dynasty’s founder, Antoninus Pius, had died in AD 161.

• Galen (a physician) wrote detailed accounts of the outbreak, allowing modern scholars to determine that the plague was likely smallpox or measles.

The Plague of Justinian

• a common name for the first plague pandemic that swept Europe and Asia beginning during the 540s.

• struck Constantinople during the reign of Justinian I, who was attempting to reassert Roman control over the Mediterranean.

• caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, the same agent that later caused the Black Death.

• The plague and its many recurrences devastated Byzantium and neighboring countries like the Sassanid Empire.

• The weakened states of Byzantium and the Sassanid Empire helped enable the Muslim conquests in the 7th century.

The Black Death

• common name for the second plague pandemic which spread in the mid-14th century.

• Mongol forces likely introduced the plague to Europe while besieging the Genoese colony of Kaffa in Crimea.

• Over the following decade, the disease killed roughly half of the continent’s population. It also

• sparked major social disruptions, including:

  • peasant revolts in England and France

  • mass anti-semitism, due to many blaming the plague on Jews

• frame story for Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron involves ten people fleeing the plague in Florence.

• Scattered plague outbreaks continued across Europe for the next 300 years, including the Great Plague of London in 1665.

• It is likely the deadliest pandemic ever.

Syphilis

• sexually transmitted disease, spread across Europe beginning in the 1490s.

• its origins are disputed but many Renaissance and contemporary scholars believe it came to Europe from the Americas after Christopher Columbus’s voyages.

• first described among French troops invading Naples in 1495 and known then as the “great pox.”

• remained a major public health threat in the western world until the introduction of penicillin in the 1940s.

• In the 20th century, the U.S. government conducted a study in Tuskegee, Alabama that involved intentionally and inhumanely not treating hundreds of Black men infected with the disease.

Typhus

• infectious fever carried by lice, spread across Europe in the late 1400s.

• first conclusively identified among Spanish troops attacking Granada near the end of the Reconquista (15th century)

• Later epidemics often coincided with military conflicts:

  • caused most of the deaths during the Thirty Years’ War & Napoleon’s invasion of Russia

  • killed many victims of the Holocaust, including Anne Frank.

Smallpox

• disease caused by the variola virus, circulated as early as 1500 BC.

• While the disease became endemic across Europe and Asia, it caused devastation when introduced to new populations.

• came to the Americas through Spanish conquistadors, causing millions of deaths among indigenous civilizations like the Aztecs and Incas.

• Later colonial efforts caused the disease to reach and decimate Aboriginal Australians and other native peoples.

• Chinese doctors developed strategies for inoculating against smallpox in the 1500s

• Edward Jenner created the first ever vaccine to prevent it in 1796 using the similar cowpox virus.

• A successful 20th-century campaign by the World Health organization led to the eradication of smallpox in 1980.

Cholera

• an intestinal infection that originated in India,

• largely as a consequence of British colonialism, it swept the globe during six pandemics in the 19th century.

• In the U.S. the disease killed former president James Polk and caused many deaths along the Oregon Trail.

• While studying this disease in London, epidemiologist John Snow recognized the Broad Street pump as the common link in an outbreak and concluded that the disease was water-borne.

• Though now less fatal due to available treatments, cholera persists in large parts of the world

  • killed over 10,000 people during a 2010s outbreak in Haiti.

The Spanish Flu pandemic

• killed up to 100 million people from 1918 to 1920.

• Caused by the H1N1 strain of influenza, the disease was first documented in a U.S. army camp in Kansas.

• It acquired its misleading name because Spain was one of the few countries not to censor information about it amid World War I, a conflict that drove the disease’s spread.

• Because Spanish flu often caused cytokine storms in its victims, it disproportionately affected younger people.

• Notable victims of the pandemic included Gustav Klimt and Max Weber.

AIDS

• condition caused by HIV (the human immunodeficiency virus), triggered a pandemic beginning in 1981.

• Originating in monkeys, the virus jumped to humans in the early 20th century but did not spread widely until decades later.

• It is primarily sexually transmitted and devastated gay communities across the world in the 1980s and ’90s, largely due to intentional government inaction.

• The AIDS epidemic has also devastated sub-Saharan Africa; a 2013 study estimated that nearly 80% of all people currently living with HIV were from southern Africa.

• Gay journalist Randy Shilts chronicled the early pandemic and government indifference in his book And the Band Played On; he later died of AIDS himself.

• Public awareness of HIV/AIDS increased as it killed celebrities like Rock Hudson.

• The introduction of the drug AZT in 1987, later accompanied by other drugs, slowly helped reduce the disease’s mortality rate from nearly 100%.

• The pandemic spurred many works of art and literature, including the play Angels in America and the massive AIDS Memorial Quilt.