The History of the World in 100 Pandemics, Plagues and Epidemics

Paul Chrystal

• Publisher: Pen and Sword History
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781399005432
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

This revelatory book charts and explains the impact and consequences of successive pandemics, plagues and epidemics on the course of world history – all through the lens of today’s ongoing global experience of COVID 19. Ranging from prehistory to the present day, it first defines what constitutes a pandemic or epidemic then looks at 20 guilty diseases: including cholera, influenza, bubonic plague, leprosy, measles, smallpox, malaria, AIDS, MERS, SARS, Zika, Ebola and, of course, Covid-19. Some less well-known, but equally significant and deadly contagions such as Legionnaires’ Disease, psittacosis, polio, the Sweat, and dancing plague, are also covered. The book is ordered chronologically. Each chapter features an explanation and description of epidemiology, sources and vectors, morbidity, mortality, governmental response and reaction, societal response and impact as well as psychological issues where known - and the political, legal and scientific consequences it had or has for each locus at a local and international level. In short – the book explains how each of the events both made and influenced subsequent history in its own way, particularly how each shaped future medical and scientific research and vaccine development programmes. It also examines myths about infectious diseases, the role of the media and social media. Perhaps most importantly, Paul Chrystal asks what lessons have been learnt. Will we be better prepared next time? Because, if one thing is sure, there is going to be a ‘next time’.

Appendix 1

The Antonine Plague reaches Hadrian’s Wall

…send away the noisy clatter of raging plague…

In 1807 evidence emerged which confirmed the existence of the plague at Housesteads on Hadrian’s Wall (RIB 1579). It comes in the form of a funerary slab with the inscription: ‘To the gods and goddesses according to the interpretation of the oracle of Clarian Apollo the First Cohort of Tungrians (set this up).’ While this is formulaic (we know of at least ten others) and would have been trotted out by all units, it seems likely that it was a reaction to a general order from Marcus Aurelius to invoke Apollo in a bid to safeguard their forts and cities from rampant smallpox. An identical inscription has been found at Ravenglass.

The Romans were no stranger to plagues but, just to be on the safe side, they turned to that age old precautionary measure, the oracle. Indeed, in total eleven dedications ‘To the gods and goddesses according to the interpretation of the oracle of Clarian Apollo’ have been found built into walls to ward off the plague. Our Tungrians had more to fear than the one in W.H. Auden’s delightful Roman Wall Blues:

Over the heather the wet wind blows,

I’ve lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose.

The rain comes pattering out of the sky,

I’m a Wall soldier, I don’t know why.

The mist creeps over the hard grey stone,

My girl’s in Tungria; I sleep alone.

Aulus goes hanging around her place,

I don’t like his manners, I don’t like his face.

Piso’s a Christian, he worships a fish;

There’d be no kissing if he had his wish.

She gave me a ring but I diced it away;

I want my girl and I want my pay.

When I’m a veteran with only one eye

I shall do nothing but look at the sky.

Another oracle from Claros, once preserved on a stone in Pergamum, told people to ‘beg from immortals a good remedy against the plague, so that it may travel far to the land of hostile men’.

In 2011 Roger Tomlin provided more evidence for the plague’s spread to Britannia when he published research on an amulet found in 1989 at Vintry in the City of London: it gives us 30 lines of Greek and was written for a man with the Greek name Demetri(o)s. It translates as ‘…send away the noisy clatter of raging plague, air-borne… penetrating pain, heavy-spiriting, flesh-wasting, melting, from the hollows of the veins. Great Iao, great Sabaoth, protect the bearer. Phoebus [Apollo] of the unshorn hair, archer, drive away the cloud of plague…! Lord God, watch over Demetrios.’

Life in the Limes (pp.197–205)

Appendix 2

Contracts for the boys and girls

The UK government, perhaps in panic, perhaps due to a lack of procurement skills, perhaps to inculcate a climate of ‘chumocratic’ government, has a reputation for inept and dubious practice in the appointment of senior staff and in PPE procurement. A case in point is the monumental debacle that is Randox Science, responsible for much of our testing. Their organisation is said to be ‘shabby’ with a frighteningly cavalier approach to cross-infection amongst its workforce and an alarming lack of concern for delivering results on time, or, sometimes, at all. On 7 August 2020, the United Kingdom Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency requested Randox to recall the Randox COVID-19 Home Testing Kit due to safety concerns in a measure it described as precautionary.

Randox has been awarded nearly £500 million by the UK government to provide private-sector testing without having to compete for a tender. In March 2019 former cabinet minister and Conservative MP Owen Paterson, a consultant to Randox, had lobbied the government to seek contracts for them thus violating rules stating that an MP may not lobby on behalf of a paying client. When asked if Paterson had lobbied on behalf of the company, a spokesman for DHSC said they were ‘unable to comment on the personnel matters of other organisations’.

The hapless Baroness Harding, Chair of NHS Improvement, has sat on the board of Cheltenham Racecourse. Her husband is Tory MP politician John Penrose who has served as the United Kingdom Anti-Corruption Champion since 2017; she is a jockey and racehorse owner, owning the 1998 Cheltenham Gold Cup winner, ‘Cool Dawn’. And then there was the astonishing, lethal, decision to allow the 2020 Cheltenham Gold Cup to go ahead, in a time of COVID…

She was appointed the first CEO of TalkTalk in 2010, when Carphone Warehouse split its telecoms business from its retail operation. In October 2015, TalkTalk was hit by a cyber-attack, during which personal and banking details of up to four million customers, not all of which were encrypted, were thought to have been accessed. City A.M. described her responses as ‘naïve’, noting that early on, when asked if the affected customer data was encrypted or not, she replied: ‘The awful truth is that I don’t know.’ Her inflexible line on termination fees was also criticised. Marketing ran a headline, ‘TalkTalk boss Dido Harding’s utter ignorance is a lesson to us all.’ The Evening Standard noted that ‘It has been a tough week for TalkTalk boss Dido Harding, facing complaints from customers and calls for her head.’ The company admitted the incident had cost it £60 million and lost it 95,000 customers. Fining the company £400,000, the Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham blamed a ‘failure to implement the most basic cyber security measures’.

Other multi-million-pound beneficiaries include Serco (£410m) who redacted part of the document explaining how the government would monitor their performance before publication. In July 2019, a fine of £19.2m was imposed on Serco for fraud and false accounting over its electronic tagging service for the Ministry of Justice. The company has also been accused of an extensive cover-up over sexual abuse of immigrants at Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre in Bedfordshire, and of failing to develop a strategy for managing Higher Active Radioactive Waste at the Atomic Weapons Establishment.

Serco’s failures include the deplorable handling of pathology labs and fatal errors in patient records. At St Thomas’ Hospital, the increase in the number of clinical incidents arising from Serco non-clinical management has resulted in patients receiving incorrect and infected blood, as well as patients suffering kidney damage due to Serco providing incorrect data used for medical calculations.

And there is Concentrix, who in 2016 was criticised by a cross-party parliamentary committee on welfare for incorrectly closing the claims of tens of thousands of claimants, leaving them without money for essentials. A government report disclosed that of 36,000 appeals against Concentrix, 87 per cent were upheld. In September 2016, HMRC announced that it would not renew the contract, due to expire in 2017, although the Treasury has resisted calls for a full inquiry so far. As a result of Concentrix’s failings, thousands of claimants are also due to receive back-payments for incorrectly stopped claims. Processing the resultant case reviews cost HMRC £43 million.

The government connives at reckless behaviour by its own, weakening national compliance; Dominic Cummings’s cavalier trip to Barnard Castle dented compliance badly and, ultimately, probably resulted in unnecessary deaths.

Space does not permit more in this astonishing litany; however, if we are to navigate our way through subsequent pandemics then this self-serving, squalidly unprofessional behaviour has got to be eradicated. The best companies, the best people, the demonstrably transparent and efficient need to be in place in times when we need the highest integrity and reliability.

Appendix 3

Eyam, plague village

The depredations of the 1965-1666 ‘Great Plague of London’ (see page 163) were not, of course, confined to the capital. The insidious plague infiltrated many other cities, towns and villages throughout the kingdom; one of them was Eyam, a hitherto unassuming Derbyshire Peak District village betwixt Chesterfield and Buxton.

It was on 1 November 1666 that farm labourer Abraham Morten passed away as the last of 260 Eyam villagers to die from bubonic plague. They had signed their death warrant in July of that year when the entire village astonishingly agreed to impose quarantine on itself in a valiant bid to stop the spread of the Great Plague in its tracks.

Abraham was one of 18 Mortens who succumbed and were listed as plague victims on the parish register. His death, and the deaths of all the others began 14 months earlier, with the arrival of a bale of cloth sent from London, where the rampant disease had already slain thousands of inhabitants. No one could know that the bale of damp cloth was home to deadly fleas, vectors of the plague.

A tailor’s assistant by the name of George Viccars opened the bale and draped the cloth in front of the hearth to dry, unwittingly activating the disease-ridden fleas incubating in the parcel’s contents. George Viccars became the first plague victim in Eyam: he was just visiting the village to help make clothes for Wakes Week and sadly never got to leave. From Viccars the contagion tore through the community. Between September and December 1665, 42 villagers succumbed and by the spring of 1666, many, quite naturally, were on the verge of fleeing their homes and abandoning their livelihoods in order to save themselves.

That was when the new rector, William Mompesson, stepped in. He was of the fervent belief that it was, as a man of the church, his duty to prevent the plague spreading to the nearby villages and the populous towns of Sheffield and Bakewell; he decided that the village should be quarantined.

Persuading his parishioners to sacrifice their lives in an act of unalloyed altruism was going to be hard enough, but Mompesson had another problem in that he was already deeply unpopular with the villagers. He had been posted to Eyam in April 1664 after the previous rector, Thomas Stanley, a Cromwell supporter, was removed. Stanley had refused to acknowledge the 1662 Act of Uniformity, which made the use of the Book of Common Prayer, introduced by Charles II, compulsory in religious services. Stanley reflected the pro-Puritan leanings of the people of Eyam and so remained influential with the villagers; his support, therefore, was crucial if Mompesson’s scheme was to succeed.

Stanley, now ostracised to the edge of the village, agreed to meet and the two men formulated their remarkable and groundbreaking plan which was revealed to the parishioners on 24 June 1666. Mompesson pronounced that the village must be enclosed, with no-one allowed in or out, adding that the Earl of Devonshire, who lived nearby at Chatsworth, had offered to send food and supplies if the villagers agreed to be quarantined.

In a bid to offer reassurance to his flock and touching on their Christian faith, Mompesson said that if they agreed to stay – effectively choosing to die – he would do everything he could to alleviate their suffering and remain with them, explaining that he was willing to sacrifice his own life rather than see neighbouring communities afflicted.

His wife, Catherine, noted in her diary that there were many misgivings over the wisdom of his plan, but she concluded that with help from Stanley – who had asserted that a cordon sanitaire was the most effective way of dealing with the plague – the doubters reluctantly agreed to the plan.

August 1666 saw the peak in the number of victims with five or six deaths a day. The weather was uncommonly hot that summer making the fleas particularly industrious, so the pestilence spread unchecked throughout the village; hardly anyone broke the cordon though.

The same month, Elizabeth Hancock buried six of her children and her husband close to the family farm. They had all perished in just eight terrible days and she was forced to drag the bodies of her children one by one to a field where they could be buried. Another survivor who also had to bury his family was Marshall Howe who assumed the role of village undertaker. He was infected during the early stages of the outbreak, but survived, believing that the immunity this conferred meant that he could not be infected twice. We can perhaps understand why he loved such a morbid job when we learn that he often helped himself to the victims’ possessions as his reward.

Cases fell in September and October and by 1 November the disease had gone. The cordon had worked. Eyam’s mortality rate was higher than that suffered by the plagued citizens of London. In little over a year, 260 Eyam inhabitants died from 76 different families; the total population of Eyam is estimated at somewhere between 350 and 800 before the plague struck.

Mompesson left Eyam in 1669 to work in Eakring, Nottinghamshire, but such was the stigma and reput...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Plates
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Prehistory, Plague in The Neolithic Age, The Classical Period, Byzantium, Ancient China and Japan
• The Middle Ages
• The 16th-19th Centuries
• The 20th Century
• The 21st Century
• Epilogue or Epitaph? It’s up to us.
• Postcript: India April–May 2021 – Watch Out World…
• Appendix 1 The Antonine Plague reaches Hadrian’s Wall
• Appendix 2 Contracts for the boys and girls
• Appendix 3 Eyam, Plague Village
• Further reading
• Plates