More Noted Things

by Cliopatria

Tomorrow, Cliopatria will feature our sixth symposium. It will treat Bernard Porter's"British and American Imperialisms Compared." Cliopatricians should send their responses to the article to manan*at*uchicago*dot*edu by this evening for posting. Other history bloggers joining us in the symposium should post your responses to Porter's article at your blog and send a link to it to the same address.

Bruce Stutz,"Megadeath in Mexico," Discover, February, reports the findings of a Mexican epidemiologist about the epidemics that destroyed 90% of the country's indigenous population in the 80 years after the invasion by Spanish conquistadors. According to his findings, the later and more destructive epidemics were not of diseases brought into Mexico by the Europeans. Thanks to Miami University's David Fahey for the tip.

Edmund Conway,"US ‘could be going bankrupt'," Telegraph, 14 July, reports on a study by Laurence Kotlikoff of Boston University for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. It says that

Experts have calculated that the country's long-term"fiscal gap" between all future government spending and all future receipts will widen immensely as the Baby Boomer generation retires, and as the amount the state will have to spend on healthcare and pensions soars. The total fiscal gap could be an almost incomprehensible $65.9 trillion ....
The figure is massive because President George W Bush has made major tax cuts in recent years, and because the bill for Medicare, which provides health insurance for the elderly, and Medicaid, which does likewise for the poor, will increase greatly due to demographics.
Prof Kotlikoff said:"This figure is more than five times US GDP and almost twice the size of national wealth. One way to wrap one's head around $65.9 trillion is to ask what fiscal adjustments are needed to eliminate this red hole. The answers are terrifying. One solution is an immediate and permanent doubling of personal and corporate income taxes. Another is an immediate and permanent two-thirds cut in Social Security and Medicare benefits. A third alternative, were it feasible, would be to immediately and permanently cut all federal discretionary spending by 143 [percent]."

There's nothing" conservative" about leaving an impossible burden of debt to our children.

Timothy Garton Ash,"Mugged by the Blogosphere – or, How to Find Nuggets in a Cyberswamp," Guardian, 13 July, reflects on his experience working through 353 comments on his column of 6 July,"Between Cheese-Easting Surrender Monkeys and Fire-Eating War Junkies." His recommendations to the Guardian's [and HNN's] site: 1) a system that allows subsequent commentators to rate previous comments on a scale of one to five (as Amazon allows rating of on-line book reviews); and 2) a system that allows commentators voluntarily to establish a clickable on-line profile of themselves, so that their readers have some sense of who the person is who is commenting.

Finally, congratulations to Oxblog's Patrick Porter who received his doctorate in history from Oxford yesterday.

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Andrew D. Todd - 7/17/2006

I take it you have considered the possible effects of the Popham Colony up in Maine. Also, don't forget that fishermen might well have set up temporary camps on any convenient beach to dry, smoke, or salt their fish.

However, I would be inclined to be cautious in postulating hemorrhagic fever. The thing you have to remember is that a disease which is super-deadly to an individual is not necessarily super-deadly to a population. The individual dies before he has time to spread it around. The documented outbreaks of Ebola have relied heavily on motorized transportation. Case in point: a Frenchman, resident on a plantation in East Africa, drove his land rover to a remote forest preserve. Based on what is known about him, he was probably the kind of man who could make friends with a wild monkey, or a parrot, or maybe one of those East African fruit bats. If it was a monkey, they very probably "intergroomed," because that is how you make friends with a monkey, the monkey equivalent of shaking hands. Come to that, based on an admittedly limited observation of one parrot, I would say that parrots "interpreen." When the Frenchman got home, he started feeling sick, and hopped an airplane to Nairobi, and he was more or less unconscious by the time the airplane landed, but people got him to the hospital. By this time, he was starting to bleed out, and the Duty Resident got himself more or less bloodsoaked, trying to help the Frenchman. The Resident then got Ebola. Given the speed with which the Frenchman collapsed while doing essentially nothing, I very much doubt he could have walked a mile. In an earlier time, he would most probably have fallen into a ditch somewhere, and and have been devoured by vultures and hyenas.

Similarly, one of the worst Ebola outbreaks involved a missionary hospital which had five hypodermic needles, and used them over and over for hundred of patients, without sterilization. What drove the Ebola epidemics was a peculiar type of interaction between the jungle and modern technology. On reflection, I'm surprised something similar didn't happen in Vietnam, what with all the medevac helicopters.

The best evidence is that the hemorrhagic fevers and some native species, most likely monkeys, have co-evolved, to the point that the monkey can stay in reasonable health while infected. The known outbreaks among monkeys in captivity have involved monkeys kept in concentration camp conditions. "On the day that the monkeys and the lab rats start holding war-crimes tribunals..."

Epidemics tend to be associated with overcrowding and starvation, a byproduct of being displaced. For example, the Yanomamo in Brazil are all dying of epidemic, or perhaps endemic, tuberculosis. The gold-seekers invaded their territory, and they have been pushed aside onto reservations. Plus ca change...

One of the obvious things the Spaniards did was to turn loose large numbers of hogs and cattle. Particularly if you are talking about populations of natives who were cultivating marginal land by shifting cultivation, it is easy to see how hog-foraging on the temporarily unoccupied land might have pushed them over the edge.

See: Richard Preston, _The Hot Zone_

Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs - 7/16/2006

The New England epidemic among Natives is "time-proximate to the first European settlement" there by being two or three years before the settlement. And the epidemic is several years (about ten) after the first known brief contacts by non-settling Europeans. That's not counting possible contact during decades of visits by European fishermen, who may not have had personal contact with Natives. Disease could have been spread through contact with just one European, obviously, but that would narrow it down to contact with John Smith's crews. I don't have a copy of his reports at hand, so can't check whether their contact included any on land. They (Dermer, to be specific) seem to have taken the Natives who reached their ships away as slaves.
Unfortunately not all possible contact is documented. Some Natives who went out to the ships may have escaped back to shore having already been infected. Smith reports only that he exchanged shots in the harbor at Scituate-Cohasset, but he may have met Natives earlier and traded when Dermer took captives. It's uncertain when the European whose body was found in 1620 buried on Cape Cod got there, lived with the Natives, then died and was buried. It is assumed, however, that he was from the French visits a decade before the epidemic. Probably there's no way to be sure.

Ralph E. Luker - 7/16/2006

A major argument piece of circumstantial evidence that the New England epidemic was caused by a European import is that is so time-proximate to the first significant European settlement. There's little doubt that the early epidemics in Mexico after the European incursion were a function of European disease. But the later epidemics in Mexico were generations later, which should have allowed time for indigenous people to develop some immunities.

Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs - 7/16/2006

Thanks for posting the reference to the article on Aztec epidemics. Perhaps the epidemic of 1617-1618 in coastal New England should be investigated as well. Maybe the symptoms described for Massassoit Osamequen are characteristic of hemorragic fever rather than typhus (although evidently the similarities are so great that distinction is difficult, even with Winslow's detailed description). Dendrochronological results for the years 1614-1620 would be interesting.
That Europeans were responsible for having imported disease that destroyed an idyllic Native civilization is a fairly standard assumption. Might it be inaccurate in New England as well as Mexico?
Jeremy Bangs