Video feature: The whole elephant - a comparative world history of pandemics
13 September 2011. By Penny Bailey
Hotwired for hate?
In this short film, Professor Cohn discusses the principal reasons why certain diseases do - or do not - incite violence. Throughout history, the triggers for mass violence have been far from clear cut, and some outbreaks of disease have brought communities together as much as others have driven them apart.
Running time: 4 min 5 s
Read the transcript [PDF 85KB]
The whole elephant
Essayist and author Max Beerbohm contested a popular aphorism by arguing that 'History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.'
One historian at the University of Glasgow is unlikely to be doing much of that. In his research into the correlation between disease and violence, Professor Cohn keeps coming across the assumption that deadly disease pandemics always lead to outbreaks of mass hatred and the scapegoating of minorities or 'outsiders'.
There's no smoke without fire (to borrow another aphorism) and certainly there have been occasions where that was the case. The 'Black Death' outbreak that raged across Europe from 1348 to 1351, killing between one-third and one-half of the population, was one. Across German-speaking regions and into Spain, France and the Low Countries, Jews were accused of poisoning wells and streams, were rounded up, tortured into confessing, and burned en masse in their synagogues and other places. Jewish communities in more than 1000 settlements in German-speaking regions alone were annihilated.
"The Black Death pandemic of 1348 to 1351 in Europe is the worst case in world history of hate-inspired mass slaughter provoked by a pandemic," says Professor Cohn. "From 1348 historians have then jumped to cholera pandemics in the 1830s to 1850s, and from these two pandemics 500 years apart in time have concluded that hatred, social tension, scapegoating and mass murder are the accustomed bedfellows of pandemics. What surprises me is just how seldom hate and pandemic have come together in world history."
He believes that extrapolating this supposed universal truth from a few isolated cases leaves serious gaps in the picture. "You're just touching the elephant in two or three places. You're not examining pandemics systematically."
He has been awarded a Wellcome Trust Research Pilot grant to embrace the whole animal and construct the first comparative world history of pandemics. "I'm going to go through sources to collect epidemics from antiquity to the present, to see when and where this hatred came to fruition - and what levels of intensity it reached. There's a big difference between labelling a disease by its supposed origin or the people believed to have spread it and genocide. The historical literature, however, lumps the two together as equal expressions of hatred."
He plans to collect his findings in a website database as a resource that will enable researchers to examine pandemics and their social consequences more systematically. He believes this will provide a more objective, comparative view on when, where and whether disease led to mass persecution. He will also address the simplifying of cause and effect in the historical literature, which tends to point to single causes to explain pandemics' eruptions into waves of hatred.
Factors such as social and racial tensions already present in a society before an epidemic arrives, or the newness or mysteriousness of a disease, or the gruesomeness of a disease's signs and symptoms have all been cited as possible reasons for mass violence and hatred. All are perhaps reasonable assumptions, but on closer inspection Professor Cohn feels it unlikely that any one of them can explain why some pandemics triggered hatred whereas others (in different times and places) did not.
Social tension?
He contests the idea that pre-existing social, political and racial tensions are always behind eruptions of violence in response to disease outbreaks. "The flu pandemic of 1918-1919 and yellow fever in US history, especially New Orleans in 1853, fly in the face of seeing historical context as the sole determinant."
The flu pandemic of 1918-19 exploded when political and racial tensions were at their height in US history, with some of the bloodiest race riots in its history at East St Louis, Tulsa and other places. The 'red scare', jingoistic war frenzy and labour strife cut across wide swaths of the country. Yet in Philadelphia and elsewhere, people risked their lives during the Great Flu of 1918 to help others regardless of race, class and religion. Elite volunteers entered the ghettoes and opened kitchens to feed the poor, cab drivers mobilised 2000 cars to serve as hospital ambulances, and Catholic nuns worked in Jewish hospitals.
"For some reason, historians appear reluctant to point out that some diseases seem consistently to have healed over racial, class or religious divides at least temporarily, rather than provoked social tensions, religious and racial bigotry, and hate," says Professor Cohn.
Along with the Great Flu of 1918-19, yellow fever at various moments has performed similar healing feats. One of these took place in New Orleans in 1853, right on the eve of the Civil War when racial tensions were running high. Far from fuelling these pre-existing tensions, the disease healed over the racial divide; blacks, who possessed greater immunity to yellow fever thanks to millennia of exposure to it in West Africa, volunteered to help the sick and offer basic services. And the whites profited from and praised the blacks' altruism.
"Another presumption people make is that diseases that hit the poor and recent immigrants are the ones that provoke anger and blame. Clearly, this is not the case with yellow fever, which in 19th-century America disproportionately hit recent immigrants, who had no previous exposure to the disease and were also living in poverty. The disease was therefore labelled 'the strangers' disease'. Yet instead of stigmatizing the poor and the 'outsider' (as cholera did), it brought communities together."
He contrasts yellow fever's history with that of cholera, which in Europe and the Americas from 1831 onwards (to as late as 1912 in Italy and the 1960s in Peru and Venezuela) sparked waves of hate and social violence to both the poor and elite classes. Yet this toxic mix of pandemic and hate does not seem to have depended on previous political or social tensions. In Jacksonian America of the 1830s, for example, class tensions and distinctions were on the wane when cholera struck New York City. But the arrival of the disease provoked rioting, class hatred and attacks on doctors and hospital workers. It had a similar effect in Russia and Europe, under a wide spectrum of political regimes in cities as diverse as St Petersburg, Paris and Manchester.
"The yellow fever/flu-cholera comparison dispels other single solutions to discovering why some diseases provoke blame, bitterness and violence, while others could pull communities together."
Modern rationality?
Another 'popular' view in the historical literature is that mass scapegoating, hatred and social violence in response to pandemics declined in the 17th century, when scientists started to offer naturalistic explanations of disease. Yet, with the exception of the Black Death, mass hatred and violence sparked by pandemics were rare in the Middle Ages and rarer still in antiquity.
Instead, the spectre of hate and disease surfaced with plague in the late 16th and 17th centuries - despite the scientific revolution – and became even more intense in the 19th and early 20th centuries. With the exception of Nazi Germany and its fear and hatred of 'the other' (Jews from inside the Reich and impoverished peasants from the east, all supposedly covered with lice and carrying typhus) the connection between epidemic disease and hate seems to have declined after the First World War. However, the decline can't be pinned on the 20th century's espousal of naturalistic causation and rationality - as its violent history of genocide, religious hatred and ethnic cleansing all too sadly reveal.
English Sweats; French Disease
Another possible cause often suggested in the historical literature is the frightening mysteriousness of a disease. Professor Cohn argues that this is again belied by several cases in history. "Yellow fever was as mysterious as cholera in the 19th century, yet it never generated a violent response."
Four centuries previously, the English sweats appeared in England during the Wars of the Roses (when, again, tensions ran high), yet he can find no evidence of scapegoating or blaming. "It was called the English sweat; it was not blamed on outsiders. Even when it spreads to France with invading English armies, which you might expect to create resentment, no sources describe any such resentment or blame for the disease on the English."
This is similar to the 'Great Pox', or syphilis; doctors and commoners alike had realized by 1500 that it was usually transmitted sexually and was spread by armies and prostitutes. Yet even against the backdrop of the Counter-Reformation and its inquisitions, it failed to trigger mass violence. At most, it provoked name-calling, branding the disease as belonging to 'other' people. It was called the French disease in Italy, the Neopolitan disease in France, the German disease in Poland, and the Polish disease in Germany.
Moreover, labelling the disease with the name of another nation (or after its presumed origins) didn't necessarily mean that those using the name were actually blaming those other people. To illustrate that point, Professor Cohn cites Ulrich von Hütten's famous treatise on the 'French disease' of 1519: "I shall follow the usage which has prevailed generally and call it the French sickness; this is most definitely not because I bear any grudge against a most renowned nation, which is perhaps the most civilized and hospitable now in existence."
The arrival of a brand new modern disease, AIDS, 500 years later has - says Professor Cohn - been the launching pad for historians' recent search to connect disease and hate in the more distant past. "But when you start to look at AIDS in historical perspective, little evidence of mass violence appears, especially compared to that seen with cholera or Black Death." Expressions of hatred and fear have been largely limited to fiery, abusive speech, attempts to deny children entry to a school and individual cases of assault, rather than collective physical violence.
"In fact, AIDS can't hold a candle to the collective violence against abortion clinics - the torching of clinics, killing of doctors, in the US. It's baffling," he says. "It's just wrong to put AIDS on a par with the violence of the Black Death or of cholera."
The character of the disease
The physical characteristics of a disease have also been suggested as the factor that sparks hatred. To address this assumption, Professor Cohn will be looking at correlations of disease and violence with particular features of each disease - including how sudden its onset is, how gruesome its symptoms are, number of deaths, speed of death and degree of contagion - to see what patterns may emerge.
"With cholera it's hard to imagine a disease, particularly with middle class mores in 1830s, that grips you so quickly, that transforms the body, the victim dying in his or her own diarrhoea," he says. "But yellow fever is equally gruesome with the black vomit that gives it its name in Spanish, black blood oozing from the ears and nose, and fatality rates that can be as high as cholera's. Yet yellow fever has never incited mass violence. With flu in 1918, the rapid transformation of the human body was also shocking. It had a very rapid onset, it was highly contagious, and oxygen depletion turned victims' faces blue - as did cholera. But flu and yellow fever brought communities together."
Violent response to disease may even, he suggests, have something to do with the effect of a disease on the brain. "We know diseases affect the brain in different ways. With Yersinia pestis the patient is taken over by this sort of almost day-dreaming doziness. It's not hysterical. But with tuberculosis and syphilis you get the opposite - an intensification or intoxication." It was in part this intoxication that led the middle classes to romanticize both diseases in the 19th century, linking them to genius and inspiration.
Professor Cohn hopes ultimately to be able to draw out common themes and patterns that may shed light on what it is about disease pandemics that leads to hatred, although, as he has cautioned, he's not expecting any simple answers. "I think for newsworthiness it's always better to come up with one explanation you've discovered. This is it, this is the answer. That's what people want. And I want it too. I'm not against reductionism. But it just doesn't work when you're looking at diseases and their social consequences." One thing seems sure: in defiance of Max Beerbohm, he's unlikely to be repeating a lot of the existing literature.
Top image: Burning of a hut in a women’s camp and a ward; Belsen. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.
