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Episode: 3185
Title: HPR3185: Pandemics In History
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3185/hpr3185.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 18:27:37
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3185 for Friday 16 October 2020. Today's show is entitled
Pandemics in History
and is part of the series, Health and Health Care. It is hosted by Ahuka
and is about 18 minutes long
and carries a clean flag. The summary is
Infectious disease is one of the most important factors influencing human history.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by Ananasthost.com
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code
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Hello, this is Ahuka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode in our health care series.
And what I want to do is a little bit different this time.
We're all dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic.
And I thought it was useful to get a little historical perspective on why this matters.
And the reason I think we need to pay attention to this is a lot of people are not aware of the fact that
there is no single factor more responsible for affecting the course of human history than disease. Infectious disease.
It has killed more humans in the history of the human race than any other cause.
War doesn't even come close, neither does famine.
And even when soldiers die in a war, as often as not, they're dying from disease rather than bullets.
And disease pandemics have changed history over and over again. And I'm going to run through some examples just to fill in the historical background here.
So I will cheerfully admit this is a kind of a Eurocentric or Western centric look because I'm more familiar with that.
I don't know as much about the history of China and the Far East.
Although since many of these diseases originate in Central Asia, I would have to assume that if we start looking at some of the Asian countries, we would see similar things historically.
But it is what it is.
So the first one I want to look at is the plague of Athens 430 BCE.
And that's one of the earliest examples where Athens fell in the Peloponnesian War.
And the single greatest cause of that was a plague.
Now, you probably know that Sparta defeated Athens in this Peloponnesian War.
And some people think of it as a kind of civil war.
It wasn't really because the Greek city states were all regarded as independent entities.
So it was no more a civil war than a war between two countries would be.
But Athens and Sparta had united to stop the Persian Empire.
So they had at least an ally relationship.
Sparta laid siege to Athens.
And what you have to understand is that in ancient and really up through the medieval period,
most of the inhabitants lived outside the city in the surrounding countryside.
But when war came, they would seek shelter by going inside the city walls.
So the population of Athens, the city of Athens inside the city walls swelled.
And nothing promotes epidemics better than jamming a lot of people into a small space.
So the plague of Athens killed around 75 to 100,000 people in Athens.
That's about 25% of the population.
And among the notable casualties was the Athenian leader, Paracles.
You may have heard of Paracles.
It was reputed to be a pretty good leader.
The Athenians might well have won this conflict if it were not for the plague.
But what happens to them as a result of this disease made the defeat inevitable.
Now, next one I want to talk about is something called the Antenine Plague.
165 to 180 CE.
And the Antenine Plague was running rampant in the Roman Empire in this time.
It gets its name from the Antenine family.
One of whose members, Marcus Aurelius Anteninus, was emperor at the time.
He was estimated to have killed as much as one third of the population in some areas.
And it absolutely devastated the army.
Historians have noted that it brought an end to the Pox Romana.
That was the Roman piece that had held throughout the Mediterranean area for several centuries.
And ushered in the instability that ultimately brought down the Roman Empire in the West.
Estimates are that 5 million citizens of the Empire died.
May even have helped the rise of Christianity in the Empire.
And there are some scholars who think it was a significant factor there as well.
Now, Marcus Aurelius had planned military actions in the Balkans to stabilize and extend Rome's borders.
But he died of the plague and his plans were abandoned.
Then the plague of Cyprian, 250 to 271 CE, named for the Bishop of Carthage who wrote about it,
it is a major cause of the crisis of the third century.
And by the way, I've got links to all of this stuff in the show notes.
So, if you're interested in you want to follow up, the crisis of the third century,
the Roman Empire came very close to collapsing then.
In fact, it did hang on a little while longer.
But during this crisis of the third century, the Empire split into three different parts.
And the plague devastated both agricultural production and the army.
And agricultural production was extremely important in the Roman Empire as was the army.
At the height of this plague, 5,000 people a day were dying in Rome.
Then the Justinian plague, 541 to 549 CE.
This was the first of repeated waves of plague outbreak, and we've identified this.
We can't always with these ancient ones, but we were able to find evidence based on DNA study of corpse remains that it was the Bibonic plague.
And this was a very serious outbreak.
The immediate impacts were serious enough.
I say we had waves of this over about a 200 year period.
Both the Roman Empire and the East, we sometimes call it the Byzantine Empire,
though to be clear, the people who lived in it always called themselves Romans.
And the Sassanid Persian Empire was their chief rival.
And both of these empires were devastated.
And this first wave of 541 to 549 had, among other effects,
it stopped Justinian's plan to bring the Western part of the Roman Empire back under imperial control,
which his general Belisarius was putting plans together to do that.
And he had to abandon that.
And that kind of put the Western part firmly in the slide into the dark ages.
The other thing, though, because there were waves over 200 years,
this is probably a primary reason for the success of the Arab conquests in both Roman and Persian territory,
and the Arabs were fighting greatly weakened states.
Then, of course, there's the Black Death.
Probably the worst pandemic in recorded history,
killing as many as 200 million people in Eurasia and Africa,
or about one-third of the global population.
In Europe, up to 60% of the population is estimated to have died.
Social effects were profound because of the severe labor shortage that resulted.
Europe's population did not get back to the level it had in 1300 until 1500.
200 years took to recover that.
Among other things, undermined the feudal system and helped usher in the age of capitalism.
Now, the Americas.
And overall, this covers everything from 1492 on.
I don't know what end date you want to put on this.
But it's certainly one of the most, perhaps the most consequential,
examples of disease-changing history when the Europeans came to the Americas.
Now, a lot of people who don't know anything about history picture the Americas as lightly settled
by uncivilized pastoralists, nothing could be further from the truth.
A book I love and I recommend highly 1491 by Charles C. Mann.
And he shows that the Americas were inhabited throughout North and South America
by highly civilized peoples.
For instance, the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had running water,
immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any European city of the time.
Mesoamerican civilizations came up with the concept of zero long before the Arabs did.
The estimates for the different civilizations in the Americas, North and South to together,
added up to about 60 million people in 1492.
Europe's population at that time was estimated to be about 70 to 88 million.
So what happened?
Well, Jared Diamond offers a good explanation in his widely read book, Guns, Germs and Steel.
A key factor is that the Europeans brought with them diseases,
for which the Native Americans had no resistance,
among them being measles, smallpox, influenza, and the bubonic plague.
As a result, 56 million Native Americans died,
which was over 90% of the population of the Americas,
and 10% of the global population of the time.
This is the largest death toll in percentage terms ever,
and second only to World War II in absolute numbers of dead.
This not only made it very easy for Europeans to come in and take over,
it had global effects.
As the population died off, cultivated lands returned to a wilder state,
and this regrowth removed enough CO2 to cool the planet.
This is called the beginning of the Anthropocene epic in global climate,
and it was a contributor to the little ice age.
Now in British North America, a similar story can be told.
Americans learn about the pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock
and setting up a settlement, but you rarely learn
that they moved into an abandoned native settlement that was empty
because of diseases primarily smallpox brought by European fishermen,
and that they were helped to survive by plundering native graves.
It's not the story we usually hear on Thanksgiving in this country.
And there's the Coco Litzley epidemic in the Americas.
There were a series of these. Coco Litzley is an Aztec term
that basically refers to infectious disease in general.
But the one from 1545 to 1548 was the biggest.
Now this, just in what is now Mexico, 15 million natives died,
and there were other epidemics in this series in 1520 and 1576.
So if you ever wonder, you know, how were the Spanish able to take over a giant civilization?
Well, you know, you wipe them all out with disease and suddenly it becomes pretty easy.
Now that's not the only impact.
A side effect of the native susceptibility to old rural diseases
was that the Spanish plans to enslave the natives and use them for labor
were frustrated by high death rates.
This led them to bringing African people over instead,
who had resistance to the diseases endemic in the eastern hemisphere.
So, disease is a proximate cause for the enslavement of Africans in the western hemisphere.
And of course, we have to talk about the Spanish flu.
Now the so-called Spanish flu is a misnomer.
The best evidence I have seen suggests that it first appeared in Kansas at an army base
and spread because of World War I.
There are a few other competing theories about this.
But there's no doubt that it has nothing to do with Spain.
How did that happen?
Well, World War I was going on and with World War I there was military censorship.
And so the competent countries, United States, France, England, Germany, Austria,
and so on, they had military censorship.
They were not going to allow any news reporting of this disease that was wiping out a lot of troops,
among other things.
Spain, however, was not a participant in the war.
And so they had no military censorship and news accounts were free to cover the outbreak of the disease there.
So because the first reports showed up in Spain came known as the Spanish flu.
Now this particular flu was an H1N1 virus and thus part of the same family as the swine flu epidemic of 2009 to 2010.
Back to the Spanish flu. This is estimated to have infected 500 million people worldwide or about one third of the global population.
A novel feature of this flu is that unlike most flu's, which kill primarily the very young and the very old,
this flu killed young adults by creating a cytokine storm.
I've got a link in the show notes if you want to know more about cytokine storms.
Basically, your body's reaction to the infection gets out of control and kills you itself.
And we might note here that cytokine storms are implicated in many COVID-19 deaths as well.
Now from the Spanish flu, estimates of the dead have been in the vicinity of 50 million or about one in ten of those infected.
For comparison, World War I dead totaled about 20 million with a further 21 million wounded.
So what's the point of all of this? Infectious disease is the single greatest influence on history.
It has caused more deaths than any other single cause. It has brought down empires and helped new ones arise.
It has aided the spread of religions and it's contributed to a racial problem we still suffer from.
And on the other side, the increase in human lifespan we have seen in last few generations is largely due to our ability to prevent, manage, and cure infectious disease.
Now we only think of cancer and heart disease as major killers because for the first time in human history, large numbers of people live long enough to get these illnesses of old age.
Sadly, we are also perilously close to throwing it all away.
We now hear people say, ah, it's only the flu, like influenza is no worse than a head cold.
Yet in the winter of 2017-2018, 80,000 Americans died of the flu. Now granted, that was worse than usual number.
The CDC has got some estimates of the average and they say that they believe the influenza resulted 9 million to 45 million illnesses,
140,000 to 810,000 hospitalizations in between 12,000 and 61,000 deaths on average every year since 2010.
Now another disease we now need to watch out for again is measles. We had nearly wiped it out in the United States and in fact it was declared eliminated from the US in 2000.
But in the last few years, as vaccination rates have fallen, it is making a comeback in the US.
Now the CDC says measles is a leading cause of vaccine preventable infant mortality, measles kills babies. It's as simple as that.
I hope the vaccine hysteria in the US will die out. I suspect it's going to take a lot more deaths before we get there.
So, this is a hookup for HECR Public Radio signing off and reminding you to wear a mask and stay isolated. Bye-bye.
You've been listening to HECR Public Radio at HECR Public Radio.org.
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