Final Reflective Essay
Throughout the year we have examined several different diseases and their pathologies.
Each disease is distinctly different and effects its victims in a different way at different times throughout human history. Possibly more importantly through the length of this course has been disease’s impact on human society and how it drives change in human societies. Disease has been an omnipresent aspect of human society for thousands of years. Indeed, since human beings first started to form permanent settlements before recorded history, they began to encounter the pathogens that were associated with living in close proximity to animals, trash, and other human beings (Artifact 1). Disease and humanity have had a mutual relationship throughout history with disease affecting the course of humanity, and humanity affecting the emergence of disease. Increasingly in recent years, reemerging and newly emerging infectious diseases have displayed a frightening potential to have devastating effects on an increasingly connected world. Far and away the most distinctive feature of the course has been how the more connected human societies become, the more likely and the greater effects diseases have on human society.
In the beginning, before permanent settlements, infectious diseases have had little impact on humanity. If one group of hunter gatherers contracted a disease, the weak would be left behind and the group would generally move on from endemic regions in search of greater food sources. With the agricultural revolution and a follow-on explosion in human populations, humans became sedentary in order to stay where viable farmland was. While this did allow for the formation of primitive societies, it also meant that human populations now started living near each other permanently, along with trash, waste, and domesticated animals (Artifact 1). This, combined with the fact that early societies were composed of individuals from the same gene pool and therefore did not have a diverse amount of resistance to disease led to the first instances of epidemics among humans (Artifact 1).
As time went o and human societies became more and more interconnected between initial settlements, disease became a larger and larger part of the human story. In the 14th century, the first truly global pandemic broke out, one both driven by humans and one that had an everlasting impact on humanity. Due to the Mongol conquests of the past two centuries, diverse trade routes that connected medieval Europe to Asia the exchange of diverse goods was enabled helping to enrich the respective societies (Artifact 2). However, these trade routes also facilitated easy interactions of diverse populations a, a recipe for the spread of disease. Beginning in the Far East and making its way across Eurasia inside of fleas on rats, the Bubonic plague began to take its toll on Europe (Artifact 2). With a population that was underfed and lacking political control from both the church and warring kingdoms, there was no organized public health response to the plague, resulting in mass death for Europe’s citizens (Artifact 2) In addition, society in Europe went through dramatic changes because of the disease, with the mass death creating a new niche for a middle class, something unheard of in Europe up until that point (Artifact 2). At the same time however, mass hysteria as a result of the plague led to pogroms against Jews who were seen to be the cause of the plague, resulting in a mass migration of Jews from Western to Eastern Europe (Artifact 2).
By the time humanity had emerged from the Middle Ages and the Black Plague other scourges were beginning to affect human societies. Smallpox in particular was a scourge on Western Europeans who slowly developed immunity or resistance to the disease. But, when the first European explorers began venturing out to undiscovered lands in North and South America, smallpox would devastate the native populations there (Artifact 4). Without developed immunity, these native populations were extremely susceptible to smallpox, and in places like Tenochtitlan it would help Europeans conquer what had formerly been the seats of massive empires that dwarfed those in Europe at the time (Artifact 4). For settlers to the New World, smallpox would kill many of the natives opening up new land and giving them a buffer zone to settle in before they came into conflict with the natives.
Cholera is another infectious disease that spread as a result of human interaction and had significant effects on human populations. Originating in the Ganges River Delta in India, British trade from their colony there would spread cholera across Europe, particularly impacting the poor and individuals who lived in slums (Poverty and The People’s Plague, Artifact 6). Spreading to America, cholera helped to drive the nativist movement in the United States, which viewed immigrants as dirty, poverty ridden individuals polluting America (Poverty and The People’s Plague, Artifact 6). This feeling would drive many Irish Catholics and other immigrants to the Democratic Party, where they remain entrenched to this day.
Throughout this course the interaction of society ad disease has constantly been referenced. Human societies in many ways enable disease by virtue of their increasing globalization, which makes transmission all the easier. At the same time, disease in many ways drives great changes within human societies. Without this understanding it is difficult to know how the world as we see it came to be, and how it will change for the future.