What pandemics faced the ancients and how they explained their occurrence

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Global pandemics are a problem that humanity has inexorably faced throughout its existence. However, despite how obvious the answer to the question of how and why they arose, many scientists (and not only) minds preferred to think quite differently. How have people in the past explained to themselves and others the causes of pandemics? Are the stars really to blame for them, or is it all about inadequate living conditions?

But for millennia, people have come up with rather irrational ideas about how infectious diseases such as plague and cholera spread. For example, the idea that the ancient Cyprian plague can be caught just by looking at a sick person's face seems ludicrous today. But the people who lived at that time were clearly not laughing. They strongly believed in such things and tried to explain the overwhelming number of deaths that they saw in different ways. Some used simple observations, while others turned to fervent convictions. Others viewed the cataclysm through the prism of their long-standing prejudices, while others explained what was happening with the help of superstitions and bizarre theories.

1. Angry God

When masses of people began to die inexplicably, many early cultures first looked at an angry and unforgiving God, or gods. In ancient Greek mythology, which often served as an allegory for real events, Homer wrote in the Iliad about God Apollo, who unleashed a plague on the Greek army with his arrows during the Trojan War, killing first animals and then soldiers. As a result, the arrows of Apollo became a symbol of illness and death: - Homer's Iliad.

However, the Bible, for its part, also contains numerous references to the plague as the wrath of the Almighty, who sent diseases to people.

2. Astrology and fetid air

Over the centuries, plague has swept wave after wave, taking on many forms - from bubonic (affecting the lymphatic system) to pulmonary (affecting the lungs) and septic (penetrating the bloodstream). Perhaps the most dangerous phenomenon occurred in the mid-1300s with the Black Death, which knocked over twenty million people across Europe alone. Although it is generally believed that flea-carrying bacteria were the main culprit, the "experts" at the time found other explanations - especially in astrology and the widespread notion of "poisonous fumes" as a breeding ground for plague.

For example, in 1348, King Philip VI of France asked the greatest medical scientists from the University of Paris to report to him about the causes of the bubonic plague. In a detailed document presented to the monarch, they blamed the "configuration of the heavens." In particular, they wrote that in 1345 “at one o'clock in the afternoon on March 20, there was a large conjunction of three planets (Saturn, Mars and Jupiter) in Aquarius. In addition, they noted that a lunar eclipse occurred around the same time.”Referring to ancient philosophers such as Albert Magnus and Aristotle, Parisian medical scientists continued to link points between the planets and the sea:.

And yet, those same medical scientists, said in a letter that the earthly winds widely spread poisonous air, destroying the vitality of everyone who swallows it into their lungs. Their theory was that it was the very tainted air that was the direct cause of the sudden outbreak of the epidemic. Several centuries later, these toxic fumes received another name - "miasma". … This explains why during the plague of 1665, doctors wore beak-shaped masks filled with sweet-smelling flowers to protect themselves from infection and the stench surrounding them.

Never mind that the playwright and poet William Shakespeare, like other Londoners in the early 1600s, did not bathe often and lived among rats, dirt, fleas and sewage-filled street drains. He also believed that the plague is an atmospheric phenomenon. And delving deeper into the heavenly explanation, he wrote in his play The Tempest that malaria, a separate epidemic caused by swamp mosquitoes along the Thames, was caused by the sun, which evaporated the swamps, as a result of which swamp vapor formed, which created favorable conditions for the reproduction of vectors disease.

3. Conspiracy theories and straw grabbing

Pandemics have long fostered prejudice and mistrust, and fueled long-standing prejudices, as some communities have often accused others of being unclean or malicious spreading disease. Throughout medieval Europe, the plague was the occasion to become the scapegoat and exterminate the Jewish people. Medieval Christian mobs attacked Jewish ghettos with virtually every wave of disease, claiming that Jewish citizens poisoned wells and conspired with demons to spread disease. During one of the pogroms on February 14, 1349, two thousand Jews were burned alive in Strasbourg.

Meanwhile, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cholera swept across Europe became the subject of wild class conspiracy theories, as poor and marginalized people accused the ruling elite of ruthless work to cull their ranks, spreading the disease and deliberately poisoning them. Dozens of riots followed from Russia to Italy and the UK, killing police, government and medical personnel, and destroying hospitals and town halls.

The lack of scientific validity of a pandemic often inspires people to seek answers based on what they directly observe around them. With the Russian flu of 1889, bizarre theories quickly turned into widespread rumors. One newspaper, the New York Herald, suggested that the flu could be transmitted over telegraph wires after a large number of telegraph operators appeared to have contracted the disease. Others have suggested that the flu may have arrived with letters from Europe as postal carriers began to fall ill. In Detroit, when bank tellers began to get sick, some were quick to conclude that they had picked it up from handling paper money. Other contagious sources were rumored to include dust, postage stamps, and library books.

Eventually science began to see the invisible and explain why people in the thousands fell dead. Of course, there were some plague-related problems that always required more highly skilled skills. In the Middle Ages, it was believed that sneezing not only spreads the Black Death, but also causes a person to expel their soul. And such prejudices were dark and dark.

And in continuation of the topic, read also about long before the pandemic of the XXI century.