Tag Archives: disease

Epidemics – measles

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I felt I had to include measles as one of the epidemics that use to ravage human populations. In fact, the measles had a significant outbreak in the United States just last year, in 2019.

Now commonly thought of as a childhood disease, measles is highly contagious. Nine out of ten people who are exposed will contract the disease. It is airborne and is spread by infected droplets from coughs or sneezes. Although not as lethal as smallpox (the subject of my next post), it can cause death and/or blindness.

Contracting the disease usually confers lifelong immunity.

The most obvious symptom is a red rash that begins on the abdomen. It is flat red spot that I can tell you from personal experience itches like crazy. Now there is an effective vaccine to prevent the illness.

Like many of the diseases that afflict humans (including Ebola and the coronaviruses), measles mutated from rinderpest and jumped to humans. Unlike TB or smallpox, which both have a long human history, measles is fairly recent. One source lists the first recorded mention of measles as 500 AD.

Next up: smallpox.

Epidemics – Yellow Fever

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ellow fever

Yellow fever is a viral disease spread by an infected female mosquito. It began in Africa and was transported to the New World via the slave trade. Because it was so prevalent in Africa, many Africans had some immunity to it. But so many white men died in what is now Nigeria, it was called ‘white man’s grave.’

In most cases, symptoms include the usual: fever, chills, loss of appetite, muscle pains particularly in the back, and headaches, exactly like other diseases such as the flu. Symptoms typically improve within five days. In about 15% of people, within a day of improving the fever comes back, abdominal pain occurs, and liverdamage causes jaundice. Because of this, yellow fever has been nicknamed Yellow Jack and Bronze John. Death occurs in up to half of those who get severe disease. A vaccine exists for yellow fever and some countries require it before travel.

 Although yellow fever is most prevalent in tropical-like climates, major epidemics have occurred in Africa, Europe and the Americas.  New York City had an outbreak in 1668 and other cities such as Philadelphia and Baltimore had outbreaks in 1669. All three saw other occurrences in the 18th and 19th centuries. In 1793, Philadelphia, which was then the capital of the country saw an epidemic. Several thousand people died. (The government at that time fled the city.)  Dr. Benjamin Rush gained fame during this disaster. A great book to read about this episode in Laurie Halse Anderson’s Fever 1793.

Since the disease traveled along steamboat routes, New Orleans suffered many major epidemics during the 19th centuries, causing 100,000 – 150,000 deaths in total. It was greatly feared and the wealthy abandoned the city to summer homes to escape the disease. The more things change, the more they remain the same. Barbara Hambly’s Benjamin January series refers to Yellow fever throughout.

Superstition and Disease

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The current furor over the Ebola outbreak prompted me to consider the role of disease in the past. During the Middle ages there was no conception of the role bacteria and viruses play in the transmission of disease so everything was ascribed to God, the Devil, or witchcraft. The birth of a deformed calf, destruction of crops, soured milk or ale or an outbreak of some disease could mean a witch had set a curse. As I mentioned in a previous post, witch hunts continued in the United States until the middle of the 1800s. (And belief in the supernatural did not end then. There was tremendous interest in spiritualism, attracting no lesser a personage than Arthur Conan Doyle, and belief in fairies encouraged by faked photographs. But I digress.) Paradoxically, it is believed that some of the worst incidents of witch hunts and trials were magnified by poor harvest (so people were hungry and scared) and by the growth of ergot on the grains (so people were also tripping). Talk about a perfect storm.

I suspect Granny medicine – the old wise women who knew treatments from trial and error – like that certain kinds of mold could cure infection also played a part in tarring these women with the taint of witchcraft.  A host of measures to counter spells were in use. Some of the measures employed to keep a witch out of a house: storing apples (really!), a bag of salt under the master bed, a horseshoe or a clove of garlic hung over each entrance. Of course, if a spell was cast upon you, you had to employ certain methods to counteract that spell. To counteract a spell one would put seven drops of vegetable oil in a dish of water with some iron and rub the outside of the dish clockwise for three minutes. Doing so seven days would completely break the spell.

Of course such treatments had no effect on diseases. Diptheria, cholera, smallpox, the list of diseases is long. Smallpox, although us moderns have never seen a case, has been around so long scientists are not sure when it began. The theory is, though, that this disease also came out of Africa (like Ebola) and spread via trade routes.. Mummies with smallpox scars have been found in Egyptian tombs so it has been around for millennia. By my character, Will Rees’s time, advances in treating disease were beginning. At the beginning of the 1700s, vaccination as a treatment for smallpox was spreading. ( Live smallpox virus from an infected person was used – Yipes!!) The death rate for vaccination was 2%, unvaccinated and infected naturally = 14%. Edward Jenner, an orphan, was vaccinated as a boy. He had heard tales that dairymaids infected with cowpox never got smallpox. A few experiments later and in 1796 vaccination with cowpox as a treatment for smallpox was born. Rees would have seen many people with the characteristic round scars left by smallpox.   Except for some vials that are in storage, smallpox has been eradicated. I suspect Ebola will be also, eventually.