Michael McNamara
Dr. Hinks
BI 245x
7/26/2017
Final Reflective Essay
Epidemics and society provided VMI education was and still is a very interesting course, I have learned a lot and continue to do so as I am still writing a final paper on Babesiosis disease which has no symptoms but can kill those it infects. This class gave me a new perspective on diseases which have at times have decimated various populations and changed various society’s and affected cultures. Over the course of this class I have written multiple artifacts, six to be exact. Through these I was able to further reinforce my learnings from the class lectures and various worksheets and films. There are three artifacts I wish to talk about specifically which really provide evidence of this where I believed that I could reinforce my learnings and go a little bit deeper into these diseases.
The first Artifact which I believe exemplifies what I stated above is artifact two which focuses on the plague and like all the artifacts the various societal impacts the disease had and vice versa. The plague was often considered the perfect organism, it strikes at the perfect times and when It struck on a global scale it killed hundreds of thousands, in Europe alone it killed 30-60% of the world population. Which totals to about 150 million people. This disease is believed to have originated in south east central Asia, and spread due to the expanding trade of that time. The societal factors in the 14th century of Mongol conquest and pursuit of a massive empire and the use of both land and sea for trade made the spread of the disease easier than ever before. The disease also affected the culture and society as a hole just as much as the current culture and connectiveness of the people of that time allowed for an easier spread of the disease. The plague had many effects on the culture of Europe one of which was the weakening of the catholic church. The church was weakened mainly due to the rapid growth of the flayment movement which was a group of radical Christians who believed that through self-harm they could stop the plague. They became so radical that they convinced themselves that they were justified to kill any non-believers. They would also hold their own prayer sessions after murdering priests who did not support or join the movement. Another cultural affect was the use of a scapegoat, the people in Europe needed someone to blame, they couldn’t just sit back and believe that this was a naturally occurring disease that just happened strike at the perfect time. So, the people in Europe blamed the Jews, they claimed that the Jews were poisoning the water and that’s what was causing the plague. As seen here the plague was dependent on the interconnectedness of that people in that time and had a very deep effect on the culture and attitudes towards others in Europe.
The next Artifact I want to reference here is Artifact 3, in this artifact I analyzed the cultural aspects of syphilis. Syphilis is easily most known for its various controversial studies which were conducted around it. To name a few the Tuskegee study and the intentional contaminating of various “patients” in Guatemala. Syphilis was so contagious and common that scientist either out of curiosity or desperation to gather further knowledge on these diseases decided and in some cases (Tuskegee) could conduct what today would be considered extremely unethical studies which led to huge backlash on the U.S. health department. Although these studies were very controversial there were some positives, although no number of findings could justify these studies, penicillin was found to be extremely effective at combating this disease and they also confirmed the subtle belief that African Americans experienced Syphilis the same way that white people do in the U.S.
The Third and final artifact in which I will be referencing will be Artifact 4 which discuss Small Pox. During the 18th century small pox on average killed an estimated 400,000 Europeans a year, the mortality rate of this disease is somewhere between 20-80% although this is a big gap it was still killing hundreds of thousands, and if it didn’t kill it had horrible symptoms. This disease in the past never received and successful treatments, only speculations some people believed that the color red could stop the symptoms but this was only speculation. This treatment involved placing the infected individual in a red colored room. Small pox is also one of the earliest diseases to be used in early experimental biological warfare, once Europeans were able to have an immune defense against the disease they proceeded to contaminate blankets and clothes and give them to native Americans when they explored the new world to kill off natives. This is an example of one of the cultural practices developed by the Europeans after they could be somewhat immune to the disease. In today’s society vaccinations are available for small pox thus making it much less prevalent and dangerous to us.
Although there are many emerging infectious diseases today, we have a much better understanding of how diseases function multiply and spread than we have in the past. I recognize that is a very ignorant thing to say today and that in the future people will most likely look back and wonder how we could approve of some of our treatments used today. But on the other hand, we are dedicating many more resources to the study of diseases and treatments and use various vaccines to try to limit as much as possible the spread of some of these diseases. This may be in part due to our globalized world were people travel across the world every day and make spreading diseases easier than ever before. Societies over use of antibiotics also allows for the reemergence of diseases such as new drug resistant forms of TB which make treating TB much harder than it already is.