Whether its the Plague of Athens during the Peloponnesian War, the Black Death, or the Spanish Flu, the spread of infectious disease has helped define the course of the history of human civilization. ‘Cholera,’ ‘bubonic plague,’ ‘small pox,’ and ‘influenza’ are but a tiny sample of a legion of biological dangers that man has learned to live with and to mitigate over the course of his learning to live in civilization. In his Second Discourse, Rousseau argued this point, that the history of civilization is a history of disease:
When one considers the good constitution of Savages, at least of those we have not ruined with our strong liquors, when one realizes that they know almost no other illnesses than wounds and old age, one is strongly inclined to believe that the history of human diseases could easily be written by following that of civil Societies…
With so few sources of illnesses, man in the state of Nature has, then, little need for remedies, and even less for Doctors; in this respect, too, the human species is no worse off than all the others, and one can easily find out from Hunters whether they come across many unhealthy animals in their treks. (Rousseau 1997, 138)
Infectious disease is a cost of the great benefits of human beings living socially together. Although human beings have grown wealthy due to the productive possibilities of such social living across history, so too have they been made miserable by disease. Just like any other complex system, a complex society is only possible because of the interactions of many, many component parts. Such interactions require people to live in close proximity together, which welcomes the easy communication of disease, especially when people also live in close proximity with domestic animals. The very same cities that have been nexuses of trade have been the nexuses of communicable diseases. Wealth and disease have followed hand-in hand.
As society has evolved to become ever more complex, so has disease become an ever more potent danger. No civilization has been immune to the danger. Even the Roman Empire, which brought aqueducts and bathing along with its legions, was not exempt. In a recent paper in Parasitology, Piers Mitchel has argued that Rome’s public-sanitation infrastructure was insufficient to prevent the spread of parasites and so the Roman Empire became an instrument for spreading such agents of misery across Europe. Maev Kennedy of The Guardian reports on the story, writing:
What did the Romans ever do for us? Despite all the hot baths and smart multi-seat public lavatories, the surprising answer turns out to be lice, fleas, bed bugs, bacterial infections from contamination with human faeces, and 25ft-long tapeworms, a misery spread across the empire by the Roman passion for fermented fish sauce.
“It seems likely that while Roman sanitation may not have made people any healthier, they would probably have smelled better,” said Piers Mitchell, an expert on ancient diseases at Cambridge University’s Department of Archaeology and Anthropology.
Mitchell found evidence for the tapeworms, previously associated with the taste for raw or pickled fish in Scandinavia, in countries where they had not been recorded before the Roman period. He believes the culprit was garum, the Romans’ ubiquitous fish sauce seasoning, which was made from fermented but uncooked fish.
Wrapped around the Romans’ intestines, he said, the parasites could remove nutrients from food before it could be digested, which could cause severe or even fatal anaemia. Evidence from some Roman sites in Italy revealed that up to 80% of the child skeletons had evidence of severe anaemia.
His research, published this week in the journal Parasitology, has gathered archaeological evidence – and faecal samples – from sites across the Roman world. His conclusion is that the civilised Romans may not have been any freer from disease than the barbarians they despised. The evidence is in their bones, in objects found at Roman sites, and in their cesspits. They were prey to bedbugs, pubic lice, fleas that may have spread the first recorded outbreak of bubonic plague, bacterial infections and intestinal parasites including whipworms, roundworms, and fish tapeworms, which their culinary fashions spread to countries where the infestations were previously unknown.
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