historical on the authority of the Italian notary who was there; but it
may be doubted whether the plague began, as he says, among the nomade
hordes outside the fort. In sieges it has been not unusual for both sides
to suffer from infective disease; and although it is not always easy to
say where the disease may have begun, the presumption is that it arose
among those who were most crowded, most pressed by want, and most
desponding in spirit. It is, of course, not altogether inconceivable that
the Tartar besiegers of Caffa had bred a pestilential disease in their
camp; the nomades of the Cyrenaic plateau have bred bubo-plague itself
more than once in recent years in their wretched summer tents, and plague
has appeared from time to time in isolated or remote Bedouin villages on
the basaltic plateaus of Arabia. There is nothing in the nomade manner of
life adverse to pestilential products, least of all in the life of nomades
encamped for a season. But such outbreaks of bubo-plague or of typhus
fever have been local, sporadic, or non-diffusive. On the other hand the
plague which arose at the siege of Caffa was the Black Death, one of the
two greatest pestilences in the history of the world. Let us then see
whether there is any greater likelihood of finding inside the walls of
Caffa the lurking germs of so great a pestilence. Within the walls of the
Genoese trading fort were the Italian merchants driven in from all around
that region, with their merchandise--as De Mussis says, _fugientes pro
suarum tutione personarum et rerum_. Previous to their three years’ siege
in Caffa they, or some of them, had stood a siege in Tana, and had
retreated to the next post on the homeward route. Tana was at the
eastward bend of the Don, whence the road across the steppe is shortest to
the westward bend of the Volga; a little above the bend of the Volga was
the great city of Sarai--whence the caravans started on their overland
journey along northern parallels, across mountain ranges and the desert of
Gobi, to enter China at its north-western angle, just within the end of
the Great Wall[289]. The merchandise of Sarai and Tana was the return
merchandise of China--the bales of silks and fine cloths, spices and
drugs, which had become the articles of a great commerce between China and
Europe since Marco Polo first showed the way, and which continued to reach
Europe by the caravan routes until about 1360: then the route was closed
owing to the final overthrow of the authority of the Great Khan, which had
once secured a peaceful transit from the Yellow Sea to the Black Sea--so
completely closed that men forgot, two hundred years after, that it had
ever existed.
Did these bales of Chinese stuffs, carried into Caffa for protection,
contain the seeds of the Black Death? There is, at least, nothing
improbable in the seeds of plague lurking in bales of goods; that mode of
transmission was afterwards recognized as highly characteristic of the
plague during its Levantine days. Nor is there anything improbable in the
seeds of an infection being carried thousands of miles across the deserts
of Central Asia; cholera came in that way from India in 1827-8 by the
caravan-route to Cabul, Balkh, Bokhara, Khiva and the Kirghiz Steppe to
Orenburg, and again in 1847 to Astrakhan; and the slow land-borne viruses
of those two great epidemics exceeded in virulence the later importations
of cholera by the sea route from the East. Still farther, there is nothing
improbable in the germs of plague lying latent for a long time, or in the
disease existing as a potency although not manifested in a succession of
cases. The next stage of its progress, from Caffa to Genoa, illustrates
that very point; for we know that there were no cases of plague on board
ship, although the very atmosphere or smell of the new arrival seemed
sufficient to taint the whole air of Genoa, and to carry death to every
part of the city within a couple of days. And lastly the long imprisonment
of a virus in bales of goods, the crowding of merchants and merchandise
into the narrow space of a walled seaport, amidst the almost inevitable
squalor and fœtor of a three years’ siege, were the very circumstances
needed to raise the potency of the assumed virus to an unusual height, to
give it a degree of virulence that would make it effective, and a power of
diffusion that would spread and continue the liberated infection after the
manner of the greatest of pestilences.
Thus, if we have to choose between the origin of the plague-virus among
the Tartar hordes besieging the China merchants within the walls of Caffa,
and the pre-existence of that virus, for a long time latent, among the
goods or effects of the besieged, the latter hypothesis must be accorded
the advantage in probability. Accepting it, we follow the virus back to
Tana on the Don, from Tana to Sarai on the Volga, from Sarai by a
well-trodden route which need not be particularized[290], for many weeks’
journey until we come to the soil of China. According to a dominant school
of epidemiologists it is always enough to have traced a virus to a remote
source, to the “roof of the world” or to the back of the east wind, and
there to leave it, in the full assurance that there must have been
circumstances to account for its engendering there, perhaps in an equally
remote past, if only we knew them. If, however, we follow the trail back
definitely to China, it is our duty to connect it there with an actual
history or tradition, immemorial if need be, of Chinese plague. But there
is no such history or tradition to be found. We know something of the
China of Kublai Khan, fifty years before, from the book of Marco Polo; and
the only possible reference to plague there is an ambiguous statement
about “carbuncles” in a remote province, which was probably Yun-nan. Not
only so, but if we scrutinize the Chinese Annals closely, we shall find
that the thirty years preceding the Black Death were indeed marked by many
great calamities and loss of life on a vast scale, by floods, droughts,
earthquakes, famines and famine-fevers, but not by pestilence unconnected
with these; on the other hand, the thirty or forty years after the Black
Death had overrun Europe, beginning with the year 1352, are marked in the
Chinese Annals (as summarized in the _Imperial Encyclopædia_ of Peking,
1726) by a succession of “great plagues” in various provinces of the
Empire, which are not associated with calamitous seasons, but stand alone
as disease-calamities pure and simple[291]. If the Black Death connects at
all with events in China, these events were natural calamities and their
attendant loss of life, and not outbreaks of plague itself; for the
latter, assuming them to have been bubo-plague, were subsequent in China
to the devastation of Europe by the plague.
We are left, then, to make what we can of the antecedent calamities of
China; and we may now revert to the curious rumour of the time that the
relevant thing in China was the corruption of many corpses left unburied
after inundation, war and conflagration. So far as war and conflagration
are concerned they are quite subordinate; there was no war except an
occasional ineffective revolt in some remote western province, and the
conflagrations were minor affairs, noticed, indeed, in the Annals, but
lost among the greater calamities. The floods, droughts and famines were
events of almost annual recurrence for many years before, so that no
period in the Annals of China presents such a continuous picture of
national calamity, full as Chinese history has at all times been of
disasters of the same kind. It was the decadence of the great Mongol
empire, founded by Genghiz and carried by Kublai to that marvellous height
of splendour and prosperity which we read of in the book of Marco Polo.
The warlike virtues of the earlier Mongol rulers had degenerated in their
successors into sensual vices during the times of peace; and the history
of the country, priest-ridden, tax-burdened, and ruled by women and
eunuchs, neglected in its thousand water-ways and in all the safeguards
against floods and famine which wiser rulers had set up, became from year
to year an illustration of the ancient Chinese maxim, that misgovernment
in the palace is visited by the anger of the sky.
The following epitome of the calamities in China is taken from De
Mailla’s _Histoire générale de la Chine_. Paris, 1777, 9 vols. 4to., a
translation of the abridged official annals.
The year 1308 marks the beginning of the series of bad seasons.
Droughts in some places, floods in others, locusts and failure of the
crops, brought famine and pestilence. The people in Kiang-Hoaï were
reduced to live on wild roots and the bark of trees. In Ho-nan and
Chan-tong the fathers ate the flesh of the children. The imperial
granaries were still able to supply grain, but not nearly enough for
the people’s wants. The provinces of Kiang-si and Che-kiang were
depopulated by the plague or malignant fever which followed the
famine. The ministers sent in their resignations, which were not
accepted.
In 1313 the same events recur, including the resignations of
ministers. An epidemic carried off many in the capital, and the whole
empire was desolated by drought. At a council of ministers to devise
remedies and avert further calamities it was proposed by some to copy
the institutions of ancient empires celebrated for their virtue, and
by others to abolish the Bhuddist priesthood of Foh as the cause of
all misfortunes. The throne is now occupied by Gin-tsong, an emperor
of a serious and ascetic disposition. In 1314 he revived the old
Chinese system of competitive examinations and the distinctive dress
among the grades of mandarins, which the earlier Mongol rulers had
been able to dispense with. Next year there is a public distribution
of grain, and a check to the exactions of tax-gatherers in the
distressed districts. In 1317, it appears that the provincial
mandarins, in defiance of express orders, had neglected the laws of
Kublai with reference to the distribution of grain, although it was
dangerous to defer such public aid longer; they had failed also to
relax their rigour in collecting the taxes. One day the emperor found
at Peking a soldier in rags from a distant garrison, and discovered
that a system of embezzlement in the army clothing department had been
going on for five years. Gin-tsong is reported to have said to his
ministers, “My august predecessors have left wise laws, which I have
always had at heart to follow closely; but I see with pain that they
are neglected, and that my people are unhappy.”
In 1318 we read of a great flood in one province, of multitudes
drowned, and of a public distribution of grain. In 1320, forty of the
Censors of the Empire remonstrated against the cruel exactions of
“public leeches,” and against a practice of calumniating honest men so
as to get them out of the way. The emperor Gin-tsong died in that
year, aged thirty-three, and with his death the last serious attempt
to check the flood of corruption came to an end. In 1321 there is
drought in Ho-nan, followed by famine. In 1324 we read of droughts,
locusts, inundations and earthquakes. The emperor demanded advice of
the nobles, ministers and wise men, and received the following answer:
“While the palace of the prince is full of eunuchs, astrologers,
physicians, women, and other idle people, whose maintenance costs the
State an enormous sum, the people are plunged in extreme misery. The
empire is a family, and the emperor its father: let him listen to the
cries of the miserable.” In 1325 famine follows the disasters of the
year before; and we learn that the people were supplied from the full
granaries of the rich, who were paid, not out of the State treasury,
but by places in the mandarinate! In 1326 the tyranny and
licentiousness of the Bhuddist lamas reaches a climax, and an edict is
issued against them. The year 1327 is marked by a series of calamities
and portents--drought, locusts, ruined crops, earthquakes,
inundations. In 1330, again floods and the harvest destroyed, a cruel
famine in Hou-Kouang, millions of acres of land ruined, and 400,000
families reduced to beggary. In 1331 the harvest is worse than in the
year before--in Che-kiang there were more than 800,000 families who
did not gather a single grain of corn or rice,--and all the while
enormous taxes were ground out of universal poverty.
In 1333 begins the long and calamitous reign of Shun-ti, who came to
the throne a weak youth of thirteen. Next year the misfortunes of
China touch their highest point. Inundations ruined the crops in
Chan-tong; a drought in Che-kiang brought famine and pestilence; in
the southern provinces generally, famine and floods caused the deaths
of 2,270,000 families, or of 13,000,000 individuals. In 1336
inundations in Chan-tong ruined the harvest; in Kiang-nan and
Che-kiang the first harvest was a failure from drought, multitudes
perished of hunger, and a plague broke out. The emperor, insensible to
the misfortunes of his people, abandons himself to his pleasures. Next
year sees the first of those provincial revolts, led by obscure
Chinese peasants, which eventually overthrew the dynasty in 1368.
Floods occurred in more than one river basin, by which multitudes of
men and beasts were drowned; in the valley of the Kiang (a tributary
of the Hoang-ho) four millions perished. For several years we read of
numerous and repeated shocks of earthquakes, in 1341 of a great
famine, in 1342 of a famine so severe that human flesh was eaten, in
1343 of seven towns submerged, in 1344 of a great tract of country
inundated by the sea in consequence of an earthquake, in 1345 of
earthquakes in Pe-chili, in 1346 of earthquakes for seven days in
Chan-tong, and of a great famine in Chan-si. In 1347 earthquakes in
various provinces, and drought in Ho-tong, followed by many deaths.
The record of disasters in De Mailla’s abridged annals, and in Des
Guignes, who had clearly access to fuller narrations, comes to an end
for a time at the year 1347.
It will be observed that in these records there is comparatively little
said of epidemic sickness. The references to pestilence would in no case
suggest more than the typhus fever which has been the usual attendant upon
Chinese famines, and has never shown the independent vitality and
diffusive properties of plague. But the minor place occupied by actual
pestilence in China, in the years before the Black Death in Europe, is
brought out even more clearly on comparing that period with the section of
the Chinese annals for the generation following. In the chronology of
Chinese epidemics drawn up by Gordon (London, 1884) from the Peking
_Encyclopædia_ of 1726, there are, from 1308-1347, just the same entries
of pestilence as are given above from De Mailla’s and Des Guignes’ French
adaptation of the Annals. (Gordon makes the obvious mistake of attributing
to pestilence the enormous loss of life which the Annals clearly assigned
to floods and famines, with their attendant sickness.) But with the year
1352 we enter upon a great pestilential period, as clearly marked in the
history of China by the annual recurrence of vast epidemics as the decades
before it were marked by the unusual frequency of floods, famines and
earthquakes. Every year from 1352 to 1363, except 1355, has an entry of
“great pestilence” or “great plague” (yi-li), in one province or another,
although the old tale of floods and famines has come to an end in the
Annals. The last of the nearly continuous series of great pestilences is
in 1369, when there was a great pest in Fukien, and “the dead lay in heaps
on the ground.” There is then a break until 1380, and after that a longer
break until 1403. It would thus appear as if the great pestilential period
of China in the fourteenth century had not coincided with the succession
of disastrous seasons, but had followed the latter at a distinct interval.
Conversely the years of plague from 1352 to 1369 do not appear to have
been years of inundations and bad harvests; they stand out in the
chronology, by comparison, as years of plague-sickness pure and simple;
and although nothing is said to indicate the type of bubo-plague, yet the
disease can hardly be assumed to have been the old famine fevers or other
sickness directly due to floods and scarcity, so long as not a word is
said of floods and famines in that context or in the Annals generally. The
suggestion is that the soil of China may not have felt the full effects of
the plague virus, originally engendered thereon, until some few years
after the same had been carried to Europe, having produced there within a
short space of time the stupendous phenomenon of the Black Death. If
there be something of a paradox in that view, it is the facts themselves
that refuse to fall into what might be thought the natural sequence.
The historian Gaubil thinks that the national Annals make the most of
these recurring calamities, having been written by the official scribes of
the next dynasty, who sought to discredit the Mongol rule as much as
possible[292]; but it is not suggested that the compilers had invented the
series of disasters,--now in one province or river basin, now in another,
at one time with thirteen millions of lives lost, at another with four
hundred thousand families reduced to beggary, this time a drought, and
next time a flood, and in another series of years a succession of
destructive earthquakes.
We are here concerned with discovering any possible relation that these
disasters, coming one upon another almost without time for recovery, can
have had to the engendering of the plague-virus. According to the rumours
of the time, it was the corruption of unburied corpses in China which
caused the Black Death; and certainly the unburied corpses were there, a
_vera causa_, if that were all. Recent experiences in China make it easy
for us to construct in imagination the state of the shores of rivers after
those fatal inundations of the fourteenth century, or of the roadsides
after the recurring famines. Thus, of the famine of 1878 it is said[293]:
“Coffins are not to be got for the corpses, nor can graves be prepared for
them. Their blood is a dispersed mass on the ground, their bones lie all
about.... Pestilence [it is otherwise known to have been typhus fever]
comes with the famine, and who can think of medicine for the plague or
coffins for the multitude of the dead?” Or, again, according to a memorial
in the official Peking Gazette of 16 January, 1878, “the roads are lined
with corpses in such numbers as to distance all efforts for their
interment[294].”
There is much of sameness in the history of China from century to century;
what happened in 1878, and again on a lesser scale two or three years
ago, must have happened on an unparalleled scale year after year during
the ill-starred period which ended about 1342; there must have been no
ordinary break-down in the decencies and sanitary safeguards of interment
in such years as 1334, when thirteen millions (two million, two hundred
and seventy thousand families) were swept away by the floods of the
Yang-tsi, or destroyed by hunger and disease. But we are not left
altogether to the exercise of the imagination. A strangely vivid picture
remains to us of a scene in China in those years, which a returning
missionary saw as in a vision. The friar Odoric, of Pordenone, had spent
six years in Northern China previous to 1327 or 1328, when he returned to
Italy by one of the overland routes. The story of his travels[295] was
afterwards taken down from his lips, and it is made to end with one
gruesome scene, which is brought in without naming the time or the place.
It is a vision of a valley of death, invested with the same air of
generality as in Bunyan’s allegory of the common lot.
“Another great and terrible thing I saw. For, as I went through a
certain valley which lieth by the River of Delights (_flumen
deliciarum_) I saw therein many dead corpses lying. And I heard also
therein sundry kinds of music, but chiefly nakers, which were
marvellously played upon. And so great was the noise thereof that very
great fear came upon me. Now, this valley is seven or eight miles
long; and if any unbeliever enter therein, he quitteth it never again,
but perisheth incontinently. Yet I hesitated not to go in that I might
see once for all what the matter was. And when I had gone in I saw
there, as I have said, such numbers of corpses as no one without
seeing it could deem credible. And at one side of the valley, in the
very rock, I beheld as it were the face of a man very great and
terrible, so very terrible indeed that for my exceeding great fear my
spirit seemed to die in me. Wherefore I made the sign of the Cross,
and began continually to repeat _Verbum caro factum_, but I dared not
at all come nigh that face, but kept at seven or eight paces from it.
And so I came at length to the other end of the valley, and there I
ascended a hill of sand and looked around me.”
Narrated as it is of no specified place and of no one year of his journey,
it may stand, and perhaps it was meant to stand, for a common experience
of China in the period of Mongol decadence. Whether he left the country by
the gorges of the Yang-tsi and the Yun-nan route, or along the upper
basin of the Hoang-ho by the more usual northern route to the desert of
Gobi, his vision of a Valley of Corpses is equally significant.
The Theory of the Plague-Virus.
The question that remains is the connexion, in pathological theory,
between the bubo-plague and the corruption of the unburied dead or of the
imperfectly buried dead. Some such connexion was the rumour of the time,
before any scientific theory can well have existed. Also the factor in
question was undoubtedly there among the antecedents, if it were not even
the most conspicuous of the antecedents. But we might still be following a
wandering light if we were to trust the theory of the Black Death to those
empirical suggestions, striking and plausible though they be. It is not
for the Black Death only, but for the great plagues of the Mohammedan
conquests, which preceded the Black Death by many centuries and also
followed that great intercurrent wave until long after in their own strict
succession, for the circumscribed spots of plague in various parts of Asia
and Africa in our own day, and above all for the great plague of
Justinian’s reign,--it is for them all that a theory of bubo-plague is
needed. A survey of the circumstances of all these plagues will either
weaken or strengthen, destroy or establish, the theory that the virus of
the Black Death had arisen on the soil of China from the cadaveric poison
present in some peculiar potency, and had been carried to Europe in the
course of that overland trade at whose terminus we first hear of its
virulence being manifested.
The theory of the origin of the plague-virus from the corruption of the
dead was a common one in the sixteenth century. It was held by Ambroise
Paré among others, and it was elaborately worked out for the Egypt of his
day by Prosper Alpinus, physician to the Venetian Consulate at Cairo
towards the end of the same century. But the most brilliant exposition of
it, one of the finest exercises of diction and of reasoning that has ever
issued from the profession of medicine, was that given for the origin in
Egypt of the great plague of Justinian’s reign by Etienne Pariset,
secretary to the Académie de Médecine and commissioner from France to
study the plague in Syria and Egypt in 1829[296].
In the plague-stricken Egypt of that time, overburdened with population
and still awaiting the beneficent rule of Mehemet Ali, Dr Pariset had his
attention forcibly directed to the same contrast between the modern and
ancient manner of disposing of the dead, and to the insuitability of the
former to the Delta, which had been remarked by Prosper Alpinus in 1591,
and by De Maillet, French consul at Cairo, in 1735, and had been specially
dwelt upon by _philosophes_ of the eighteenth century, such as
Montesquieu, Volney and De Pauw. On the one hand he saw under his eyes
various revolting things in the Delta,--brick tombs invaded by water, an
occasional corpse floating at large, canals choked with the putrefying
bodies of bullocks dead of a murrain, the courtyards of Coptic and Jewish
houses, and the floors of mosques, churches and monasteries filled with
generations of the dead in their flooded vaults and catacombs. On the
other hand he saw, on the slopes of the Libyan range and on the edge of
the desert beyond the reach of the inundation, the occasional openings of
a vast and uncounted series of rock-grottoes in which the Egyptians of the
pre-Christian era had carefully put away every dead body, whether of bird,
or of beast, or of human kind. He was persuaded of the truth of Volney’s
remark, “In a crowded population, under a hot sun, and in a soil filled
deep with water during several months of every year, the _rapid_
putrefaction of bodies becomes a leaven of plague and of other
disease[297].” The remark of De Pauw, although it is not adduced, was
equally to the point: “Neither men nor beasts are any longer embalmed in
Egypt; but the ancient Egyptians seem to have done well in following that
mode, and in keeping the mummies in the deepest recesses of excavated
rocks.... Were we to note here all that those two nations [Arabs and
Turks] have left undone, and everything that they ought not to have done,
it would be easy to understand how a country formerly not altogether
unhealthy, is now become a hotbed of the plague[298].” These
eighteenth-century reflections, casual and discursive after the manner of
the time, were amplified by Pariset to scientific fulness and order, and
set in permanent classical form. Like De Pauw and Volney, he extolled the
ancient sanitary wisdom of Egypt, and excused the priestly mask of
superstition for the implicit obedience that it secured. De Pauw had
pointed out that the towns most remarkable for the worship of
crocodiles,--Coptos, Arsinöe (Crocodilopolis), and Athribis,--were all
situated on canals at some distance from the Nile; the crocodiles could
never have got to them unless the canals were kept clear; according to
Aelian and Eusebius the crocodile was the symbol of water fit to drink; so
that the superstitious worship of the animal was in effect the motive for
keeping the canals of the Nile in repair. The priests of Egypt, says
Pariset, with their apparatus of fictions and emblems, sought to veil from
the profane eyes of the vulgar and of strangers the secrets of a sublime
philosophy[299]. They made things sacred so as to make them binding, so as
to constrain by the force of religion, as Moses did, their disciple. They
had to reckon with the annual overflow of the Nile, with a hot sun, and a
crowded population. Suppose that all the dead animal matter, human or
other, were to be incorporated with the soil under these rapid changes of
saturation and drying, of diffusion and emanation, what a mass of poison,
what danger to the living! What foresight they showed in avoiding it, what
labour and effort, but what results! Can anyone pretend that a system so
vast, so beautiful, so coherent in all its parts, had been engendered and
conserved merely by an ignorant fanaticism, or that a people who had so
much of wisdom in their actions had none in their thoughts? Looking around
him at the Egypt of the Christian and Mohammedan eras, he asks, What has
become of that hygiene, attentive, scrupulous and enlightened, of that
marvellous police of sepulture, of that prodigious care to preserve the
soil from all admixture of putrescible matters? The ancient learning of
Egypt, the wisdom taught by hard experience in remote ages and perfected
in prosperous times, had gradually been overthrown, first by the Persian
and Greek conquests which weakened the national spirit, then by the Roman
conquest which broke it, then by the prevalence of the Christian
doctrines, and lastly by the Mohammedan domination, more hostile than all
the others to sanitary precaution.
Pariset’s remaining argument was that ancient Egypt, by its systematic
care in providing for a slow mouldering of human and animal bodies beyond
the reach of the inundation, had been saved from the plague; in the
historic period there had been epidemics, but these had been of typhus or
other sickness of prisons, slavery, and famines. According to Herodotus,
Egypt and Libya were the two healthiest countries under the sun. But when
St Paul’s vehement argument as to the natural and the spiritual body began
to make way, when men began to ask the question, “How are the dead raised
up, and with what body do they come?” the ancient practice of Egypt was
judged to be out of harmony with Christian doctrine. Embalming was
denounced as sinful by St Anthony, the founder of Egyptian monachism, in
the third century; and by the time that the church of North Africa had
reached its point of highest influence under St Augustine, bishop of
Hippo, the ancient religious rites of Egypt had everywhere given place to
Christian burial[300]. Bubo-plague had already been prevalent in at least
one disastrous epidemic in Lower Egypt at the time of the great massacres
of Christians in the episcopate of Cyprian; and in the year 542 it broke
out at Pelusium, one of the uncleannest spots in the Delta, spread thence
on the one hand along the North African coast, and on the other hand by
the corn ships to Byzantium, and grew into the disastrous world-wide
pestilence which has ever since been associated with the reign of
Justinian.
After the Mohammedan conquest things went from bad to worse; and from the
tenth century until the year 1846, plague had been domesticated on the
soil of Egypt.
The theory of Pariset was communicated by him to the Académie de Médecine
on 12 July, 1831, and finally published in a carefully designed and highly
finished essay in 1837. It was received with much disfavour; according to
his colleague Daremberg, the learned librarian of the Academy, nothing but
its brilliant style could have saved it from being forgotten in a week. It
was vigorously opposed by Clot Bey, on behalf of Egyptian officialdom,
because it fixed upon Egypt the stigma of holding in the soil an inherent
and abiding cause of the plague[301]. Besides the general objection that
it was the theorizing of a _philosophe_, exception was taken to particular
parts of the argument. Thus Labat demonstrated by arithmetic that the
mummied carcases of all the generations of men and animals in Egypt for
three thousand years would have required a space as large as the whole of
Egypt, which should thus have become one vast ossuary. And as to the fact,
he added, embalming was the privilege of the rich, and of some sacred
species of animals. Clot Bey asserted that the whole class of slaves were
not thought worthy of embalming. He found also, in the language used by
Herodotus, evidence that the people of Egypt felt themselves to be under
“the continual menace” of some great epidemic scourge and took precautions
accordingly--the very ground on which Pariset based his theory. The
objection which weighed most with Daremberg was the fact that, just about
the time when Pariset had asserted the immunity of Egypt from plague in
her prosperous days, evidence had been found, in the newly-discovered
collections of Oribasius, that a bubonic disease was recorded for Egypt
and Libya by a Greek physician two centuries before the Christian era, and
by another Greek medical writer about the beginning of our era.
It does not appear to have occurred to the opponents of Pariset’s theory
that the two chief objections, first that embalming was far from general,
and second that cases of plague did occur in ancient Egypt, answered each
other. But, as matter of fact, it can be shown that there were cheaper
forms of embalming practised for the great mass of the people. Again, it
was found by De Maillet that bodies not embalmed at all, but laid in
coarse cloths upon beds of charcoal under six or eight feet of sand at an
elevation on the edge of the great plain of mummies at Memphis, and beyond
the reach of the water, were as perfectly preserved from putrid decay as
if they had been embalmed, the dry air and the nitrous soil contributing
to their slow and inoffensive decomposition[302]. These facts tended to
support the notion that it was not ceremony which really determined the
national practice, but utility, into which neither art nor religion
necessarily entered. The existence also of bubonic disease in the period
of the Ptolemies proved that the risk assumed in Pariset’s theory was a
real risk, the precautions having been not always sufficient to meet it.
The plague which overran the known world in Justinian’s reign (542) was,
according to this theory, the effect on a grand scale of an equally grand
cause, namely, the final overthrow of a most ancient religion and national
life, which had not been built up for nothing and had a true principle
concealed beneath its superstitions. The parallelism between China and
ancient Egypt has been a favourite subject. In China whatever of religion
there is runs upon the Egyptian lines--reverence for the dead or worship
of ancestors. The Chinese do not indeed embalm their dead, but they
practise an equivalent art of preservation which may be read in almost
identical terms in the book of Marco Polo and in modern works on the
social life of China[303]. To prevent the products of cadaveric decay from
passing into the soil may be said to be the object of their practices. The
pains taken to secure dry burial-places are especially obvious in those
parts of the country, such as the “reed lands” of the Yang-tsi, which are
subject to inundations, annual or occasional[304]. Much of the national
art of Feng-shui is concerned, under the mask of divination, with these
common-sense aims.
Both Egypt and China are liable to have their river-basins flooded at one
time and parched to dust at another. These extreme fluctuations of the
ground water are now known to scientific research to be the cause of
peculiar and unwholesome products of putrefaction in the soil: given a
soil charged with animal matters, the risk to those living upon it is in
proportion to the range of fluctuation of the ground water. If it happen
as an annual thing that the pores of the ground are now full of water, now
full of air, or if these extreme alternations be a common liability, then
a soil with the products of animal decomposition dispersed through it will
be always unwholesome, and unwholesome on a national scale. It is often
held that even vegetables rotting on the ground are pestiferous; Ambroise
Paré believed that the rotting carcase of a stranded whale caused an
outbreak of bubo-plague at Genoa; but human decomposition is something
special--at least for the living of the same species[305]. Most special of
all is it when its gross and crude matters pass rapidly into the ground,
getting carried hither and thither by the movements of the ground water,
and giving off those half-products of oxidation which the extreme
alternations from air to water, or from water to air, in the pores of the
ground are known to favour. There may be nothing offensive to the sense,
but the emanations from such a soil will in all probability be poisonous
or pestilent. In particular circumstances of locality the permeation or
leavening of the soil with the products of organic decomposition produces
Asiatic cholera; in still more special circumstances the result is yellow
fever; in circumstances familiar enough to ourselves the result is typhoid
fever, and probably also summer diarrhœa or British cholera. These are all
soil poisons. Bubo-plague also is a soil poison; and it is claimed as
specially related to the products of _cadaveric_ decomposition, diffused
at large in such a soil as soil-poisons are ordinarily engendered in.
It is possible to subject that theory of the plague to the test of facts
still further. Thus bubo-plague dogged the steps of Mohammedan conquest
from the first century after the Hegira, now in Syria when Damascus was
the capital, now in Irak when Bagdad was the centre of Mohammedan rule,
now in Egypt when the seat of empire shifted to Grand Cairo; and, over a
great part of the period, simultaneously in all the regions of Islam. That
long series of plague-epidemics has been recorded in Arabic annals, and
has lately been published in an abstract accessible to all, with a summary
of conclusions[306].
What are the conclusions of the learned commentator on the Arabic annals,
as to the general causes of the thousand years of Mohammedan
plague?--“War, with the wasting of whole nations, in disregard of all
established rights, with plundering of towns and concentration of great
masses of men ill provided for and unregulated, who developed the seeds of
communicable and malignant diseases. Add to these things the negligent or
wholly neglected burial of those who had fallen in battle, the straits and
privations of the wounded, and the effects of a hot climate, especially in
flooded and swampy tracts of country.... The kind of burial, in very
shallow and often badly covered graves, which used to be practised in most
Eastern towns, and in part is still practised, may also have had
disastrous consequences not unfrequently.”
The Theory tested by Modern Instances.
With that general statement for the long succession of plague-epidemics in
Islam during nine centuries from the Hegira, beginning with a Syrian
epidemic in A.D. 628 and ending with a close succession of twelve
epidemics in Egypt from 1410 to 1492, we may pass to the more detailed
accounts of the conditions under which bubo-plague has been found in
various localities, often circumscribed spots far apart and out of the
way, during recent years. These spots are so varied, have so little
apparently in common, and are so capriciously chosen in the midst of
their several regions of the globe, that they do not readily fall into
any order or classification. What are we to make of a few spots of plague
among nomade Arabs of the Cyrenaic plateau; of plague in some stricken
villages high up in the highlands of Kurdistan, or in low-lying towns such
as Resht, near the shore of the Caspian, or amidst the black ooze of
amphibious habitations in the lower valley of Tigris and Euphrates; of
true bubonic disease in some few Bedouin villages or small towns on the
summits of the basaltic plateaus that rise like gigantic warts from the
Arabian desert; of bubo-plague in Yun-nan, at or near the capital Talifoo,
where the Mohammedan and Chinese influences have been struggling for
mastery, as well as among the cabins in the rocky valleys of the Salwen;
of some forty or fifty Himalayan hamlets picked out as plague-spots among
the six thousand villages of Kumaon; and of the now extinct but
comparatively recent centres of the same disease in the walled towns and
walled villages of Kutch, Kattiwar, and Marwar? And lastly what are we to
make of those cases of typhus fever with buboes which have been observed
in villages of the Yusufzai valley, near Peshawur, in 1852; in the Chinese
town of Pakhoi, on the gulf of Tonking, in 1886; occasionally among the
fever-cases in Burdwan since the health of that province underwent so
disastrous a change about the year 1870; and, on credible report, among
the troops in the Russo-Turkish war of 1879? It is surely unnecessary, at
least, to refute the sterile dogmatism that these are all the effects of
one pre-existing virus, carried, we know not how, from point to point of
the globe in an unbroken succession. It is a far cry even on a small-scale
map from Kumaon to Kutch, from Yun-nan to the Gulf of Tonking, from Resht
to the Armenian highlands, from the centre of Arabia to Tripoli, and from
Mesopotamia to North Yemen. And what is the use of assuming that there has
always been bubo-plague in the “cradle of the human race,” and concluding
that the Black Death was one of its excursions westwards, so long as the
plagues of Islam were going on from decade to decade, all through the
Middle Ages, at no great distance from Byzantium and from Western Europe?
Are not Damascus, Bagdad and Grand Cairo of more account as plague-foci
than a few villages in the Himalaya or in Kattiwar, even granting that the
plague may have been in the latter at an earlier date than we know? It is
not communication that connects the several seats of plague, scattered
widely in time and place; but it is community of conditions, or of the
causes and associated circumstances which breed the plague in each
separately. Let us take them in some sort of order.
Among the most remarkable habitats of modern bubo-plague are the villages
on the basalt plateaus of the Arabian desert. We have information of these
plague-spots from Doughty[307], who did not indeed visit Assir, the most
notorious of them, but several others more to the north and east. He
describes the ruined villages of Mogug, Gofar, Hâyil and others, where the
people had died of plague some years before. A year of dearth preceded the
plague in some, if not in all of them. The author is struck by the
carelessness of burial, or the difficulties of it in the baked soil,
although he does not directly connect that with the epidemics. Thus, in
passing the graveyard of Hâyil, one of the plague-towns, he remarks:
“Aheyd was a man of much might and glory in his day; he lies a yard under
the squalid gravel in his shirt.” Of Kheybar, with vague traditions of
plague, he says: “We passed through a burial-ground of black volcanic
mould and salt-warp; the squalid grave heaps are marked with headstones of
wild basalt. That funeral earth is chapped and ghastly, bulging over her
enwombed corses, like a garden soil in spring-time which is pushed by the
new spring plants. All is horror at Kheybar!” He is led to the following
general remarks: “The care of sepulture was beyond measure in the
religions of antiquity, which were without humility. Under the new
religion [of Arabia] the deceased is wound in a shirt-cloth of calico, and
his corse is laid in the shallow pit of droughty earth.” Again, of Bedouin
burials in general: “The deceased is buried the same day or on the morrow.
They scrape out painfully with a stick and their hands in the hard-burned
soil a shallow grave. I have seen their graves in the desert ruined by
foul hyenas, and their winding-sheets lay half above ground.”
Of the best known of these Arabian plague-spots the plateau of Assir, to
the south-east of Mecca, we have the following information relating to the
years 1874-79[308]; the chief plague-locality is Namasse, the principal
town of Beny Sheir, with five other villages.
The site is on a mountain ridge too high for camels, the climate is
cold and moist, the soil fruitful, springs abundant, and no standing
water. The houses are built of stone, and stand close together. The
ground-floor of each house is used as the stable; and as the winter in
these mountains is very severe, so that water freezes, the inhabitants
live with their cattle in a horrible state of filth. According to
information from the district superintendent, there had been plague in
a few villages every two or three years for the previous thirty-five
or forty years. It has seldom extended further than five or six
leagues. The region is a mountain canton, with no trade; it is cut off
from the rest of the world. The disease is mostly attended with buboes
in the groins, armpits, and neck, but not always; sometimes petechial
spots were spoken of; in the sheikh Faïk’s own household the disease
began with rigors, and developed buboes, petechiæ, headache and
burning thirst. Dr Nury counted up in six villages, with a population
of eight hundred, cases of plague to the number of 184 (68 men, 45
women, 50 boys and 21 girls), with 155 deaths and 29 recoveries.
Let us now place beside this the accounts of the plague in the mountains
village of Kumaon[309].
Of the plague-villages of Danpore and Munsharee, near the snow, we read:
“Their houses are generally built of stone, one storey high. On the
ground-floor herd the cattle; in this compartment the dung is allowed
to accumulate till such time as there is no room left for the cattle
to stand erect; it is then removed and carefully packed close around
all sides, so that the house literally stands in the centre of a
hot-bed.... In many instances we have seen it accumulated above the
level of the floor of the upper story in which the family lives.” In
that compartment, four feet high, with no window and a door of some
three feet by eighteen inches, ten or fifteen people live, lying
huddled together with the door shut. Their food is as poor as their
lodging. When plague breaks out, the family ties are rudely loosened:
those who can, flee to the jungle, leaving the stricken to their fate.
The following is by Renny: “Fourteen died at a place in the forest
half a mile or more from Duddoli, respecting which I had the best
description yet given to me of the career of the sickness. Here were
only two houses, or long low huts, occupied by two separate families,
the heads being two brothers, sixteen souls in all. These two huts had
to contain also thirty head of cattle, large and small, at the worst
season of the year. In these two huts the Mahamurree [bubo-plague]
commenced about ten or eleven months ago, corresponding to the time it
appeared in Duddoli. At this place the sixteen residents kept together
till fourteen died, and one adult only, a man of about thirty years of
age, with his female child of six years old, survived. There was no
particular disorder among the cattle, but the outbreak of the plague
was preceded and accompanied by a great mortality among the rats in
their houses.”
Let us now take the accounts, twenty-five years later, of the plague in
the same district in 1876-77[310].
Confirming the earlier statements as to the extraordinary filth of the
houses--the cattle under the same roof and the baskets of damp and
unripe grain--he directs attention specially to the disposal of the
dead. The custom of the country is to burn the body beside the most
convenient mountain stream terminating in the Ganges. But from that
good practice the people have deviated in regard to bodies dead of any
pestilence (smallpox, cholera, plague), which are buried. Of all
countries the Himalaya is least suited to the burial of the dead. For,
by reason of the rocky subsoil, it is seldom possible to dig a grave
more than two feet deep; and, as a rule, the pestilent dead are laid
in shallow trenches in the surface soil of the field nearest to the
place of death, or of the terrace facing the house, or even of the
floor of the house itself. This bad practice is begotten of fear to
handle the body, and has been long established. Such mismanagement of
the dead is sufficient to account for the continuous existence of the
active principle of plague-disease, sometimes dormant for want of
opportunity, but ever ready to affect persons suitably prepared by any
cause producing a low or bad state of health. In the houses of
families about to suffer from an outbreak of plague, rats are
sometimes found dead on the floor. Planck had seen them himself; all
that he had seen appeared to have died suddenly, as by suffocation,
their bodies being in good condition, a piece of rag sometimes
clenched in the teeth. He mentions nine villages, all of them endemic
seats of plague, in which the premonitory death of rats in the
infected houses was testified. The affected villages were not one in a
hundred of all the villages of Kumaon, and were widely scattered
throughout the northern half of the province. Even in each of those
few villages, the plague is confined to one house, or one terrace, or
one portion of the village.
Let us turn next to the small spots of bubo-plague in the remote province
of Yun-nan. Our information comes from members of the British and French
Consular services[311].
The plague occurs in towns and villages and is the cause of much
mortality. After ravaging villages scattered about the plains, it
frequently ascends the mountains, and takes off many of the aborigines
inhabiting the high lands. What, in M. Rocher’s opinion, aggravates
the evil is the practice of not burying the bodies of those who die of
this disease. Instead of being buried, the body is placed on a bier
and exposed to the sun. As a consequence of this practice the
traveller passing the outskirts of a village where the plague is
raging is nearly choked with the nauseous smell emanating from the
exposed and rotting corpses. Burial is the usual mode of disposal,
although many of the villages are on rocky mountain sides, as in
Kumaon. The rats are first affected; as soon as they sicken, they
leave their holes in troops, and after staggering about and falling
over each other, drop down dead. Mr Baber had the same information
from a French missionary in the upper valley of the Salwen, a long,
low valley about two miles broad, walled in by immense precipices, so
hot in summer that the inhabitants go up the hill sides to live. The
approach of bubo-plague (the buboes may be as large as a hen’s or
goose’s egg) may often be known from the extraordinary behaviour of
the rats, who leave their holes and crevices and issue on to the
floors without a trace of their accustomed timidity, springing
continually upwards from their hind legs as if they were trying to
jump out of something. The rats fall dead, and then comes the turn of
the poultry, pigs, goats, etc. The good father had a theory of his own
that the plague is really a pestilential emanation slowly rising in an
equable stratum from the ground, the smallest creatures being first
engulfed. The larger plague-centre at or near the capital, Talifoo,
appears to be related to Mohammedan warfare, and possibly to the
neglect to bury the dead, which is an admitted fact, although not
connected by the narrator with the prevalence of plague.
The other Chinese plague-spot is hundreds of miles away, on the shores of
the Gulf of Tonking. The best known centre of plague is the port of
Pakhoi, the native quarter of which is described as peculiarly filthy. The
houses are little cleaner than the streets, the floors being saturated
with excrement, and the drains being either close to the surface or open
altogether. An outbreak of plague there in 1882 is minutely described by
Dr Lowry[312].
It occurred in the hot weather of June (85° Fahr. day, 76° Fahr.
night); for fear of thieves the houses are carefully shut up even on
the hottest night. The epidemic caused about 400 to 500 deaths in a
population of 25,000. The disease does not spread. In nearly every
house where the disease broke out, the rats had been coming out of
their holes and dying on the floors: Dr Lowry dissected several of
them, and found the lungs congested. In the human subject, except for
the buboes, the disease resembled typhus: “anyone going to the bedside
of a patient would certainly at first think it was that disease he had
to deal with.” The same disease occurred at Lien-chow, a city twelve
miles off. Another English physician in the service of the China
Maritime Customs heard of a malady with the symptoms of plague in
certain districts of Southern Kiangsi in the autumn of 1886; but no
particulars were to be had. Typhus was prevalent, and very fatal,
every year in the towns, villages and hamlets of Northern Kiangsi.
One curious piece of evidence as to the death of rats, not associated
with plague in men, comes from a more northern province of China. In
the autumn of 1881, on the opposite side of the Yang-tsi from Nanking
and in the western suburbs of the ancient capital, the rats emerged
from holes in dwellings, jumped up, turned round, and fell dead.
Baskets and boxes filled with their bodies were cast into the canal.
“Here,” says Dr Macgowan, “was evidently a subsoil poison which
affected the animals precisely in the same way as the malaria of the
Yun-nan pest. Happily the subterranean miasm at Nanking did not affect
animals that live above ground[313].”
The evidence from Kutch, Kattiwar, and Marwar relates to the years
1815-20, and 1838. In circumstances peculiar in some respects, namely, of
walled towns and stockaded villages, but the same as those already given
in the matter of filth from cattle crowded into the human dwellings, we
find bubo-plague breaking out so long as the unwholesome state of things
lasted under Mahratta rule and until British rule had been fairly at work.
The causes of the bubo-plague, says Whyte, were the same as of
typhus--walled and crowded towns, cattle housed with human beings, slow
wasting diseases among the cattle, which were not killed for food but
kept for milk and ghee. He questions whether, in shutting out their
enemies, they had not shut in one far more powerful[314]. Here also we
have various independent witnesses[315] testifying to the premonitory
death of the rats; they lay dead in all places and directions--in the
streets, houses, and hiding-places of the walls. This happened in every
town that was affected in Marwar, so that the inhabitants of any house
instantly quitted it on seeing a dead rat.
Relation of Typhus to Bubo-plague.
The smallest and the most easily surveyed of all the recent foci of
bubo-plague, is that among the Bedouin of the Cyrenaic plateau in North
Africa (port of Benghazi), a desert region corresponding to one of the
most famous corn-lands of antiquity.
There was no difference of opinion that the small outbreak of plague
in 1874 began simultaneously in the tents of Orphas and the tents of
Ferig-el-Hanan, containing together about a hundred souls[316]. These
Arabs keep cows, sheep and goats; some of them also cultivate small
patches of corn. They are subject to periodic famines, and there had
been much want among them in 1869, 1870, 1871, 1872 and 1873, attended
by epidemics of typhus, cholera and smallpox. In the winter they found
employment among the traders of Merdjé, and at the end of March, 1873,
had quitted that village to place their animals in the neighbouring
hill-pastures. The ground had been saturated, after long drought, by
the rains of the winter. Their tents are pitched in hollows which may
be filled by water in a few minutes. The encampments, like those of
the Bedouin in Arabia, are excessively filthy and are often the scene
of typhus fever. In April, 1874, the plague began, the first case
being in a child; the buboes were in the groin, armpit or neck. The
other symptoms were bilious vomiting, black vomit, haematemesis,
petechiae, anthraceous boils, pains in the head, collapse, and
delirium. A few cases were mild, but the majority grave and fatal; in
several cases there was a relapse with new buboes. The disease was
brought from the tents to the village of Merdjé, in which 270 were
attacked in a population of 310, with 100 deaths. The total known
attacks from 5 April to 24 July were 533 in a population of 734, with
208 deaths and 325 recoveries, 201 resisting the infection. The
sanitary state of the village was as bad as that of the tents: the
houses, entered by a low door, had windows not to the sun, but to the
courtyard, which is a stable choked with filth; the floors of the
houses are covered with filth. The graveyard is in the centre of the
village, beside a pool of standing water: the graves are shallow, and
the corpses are sometimes unearthed by jackals. Both in the village
and in the encampments a fall of rain was followed by a new series of
attacks. The advice of the sanitary commisioner was to make graves at
least six feet deep, and to cover them with lime.
These events in 1874 were an exact repetition of those of 1858. In both
years heavy rains followed long drought, giving promise of an abundant
harvest after a period of famine. The dry years, in both instances, were
attended with sickness, typhus and other; the first wet season turned the
sickness to plague, that is to say, it added the complication of buboes
and haemorrhagic symptoms to the characters of typhus. The meaning of that
seems to be that the saturation of the ground generated a soil-poison
where there had previously been the milder aerial poison of typhus. This
view of plague, as a typhus of the soil, or a disease made so much more
malignant than typhus just because of underground fermentation of the
putrescible animal matters, is borne out by the facts already given for
China and for India. The latter country furnishes other illustrations of
typhus fever becoming complicated with buboes, and so becoming something
like plague. Perhaps the best instance is the fever observed in the
Yusufzai valley, near Peshawur, in 1852[317].
It arose mostly in the filthy Mohammedan houses, shared by cattle and
human beings; but it invaded some of the cleaner Hindoo houses also.
The disease began in low, marshy situations, which were covered with
water after rain and heavy night dews. It was of the type of typhus,
or relapsing fever, with yellowness of the skin, bleeding from the
gums, and from the bowels, and often from the nose. One of the
observers says: “The only other concomitant affection worthy of note
is swelling of the lymphatic glands over various parts of the body;
this, however, is only met with in a very few instances.” The other
authority says: “Inflammation and suppuration of the glands in the
groin, axilla, and neck occurred in some that survived the first or
second relapse.” To this outbreak, which is removed only in degree
from the Benghazi plague, the Pakhoi plague, and the Pali plague
(Gujerat), may be added some others, about which the information is
more general. Thus, the fevers which have become notorious in Burdwan
since the health of that province changed so disastrously owing to the
damming of the ground-water, are said to have been attended now and
then with buboes. The typhus fever at Saugor in 1859 was occasionally
complicated with suppuration of the lymphatic glands: “In the Doab, as
in the subsequent gaol attack, the glands in the groin were very
rarely affected; those in the neck were more frequently affected, but
this was not a prominent feature in the disease[318].” Again, General
Loris Melikoff told the correspondent of the _Golos_ that twenty men
died in a day in the Russo-Turkish war in the winter of 1878, with
glandular swellings; everywhere there was Schmutz, Schmutz! And
lastly, in the epidemic of 1878 at Vetlianka, on the Volga, which is
reckoned among the historic occurrences of bubo-plague in Europe, the
first ten cases in November, 1878, had suppurating glands in the
axilla, did not take to bed, and recovered; there had been ordinary
typhus in the filthy fisher cottages in 1877, and there was typhus
concurrent with the disease which at length became, and was at length
recognized as, true bubo-plague in the winter of 1878-79[319].
One thing which distinguishes these recent outbreaks of plague from the
great plague of Justinian’s reign, in part from the series of Mohammedan
plagues, and from the Black Death, is that they have for the most part
shown no independent vitality and no diffusive power. As in typhus fever
itself (except on great occasions), they have been almost confined to
those who lived in the filthy houses, and to those who came within the
influence of the pestilential emanations. The great plagues of the 6th and
14th centuries had, on the other hand, a diffusive power which carried
them over the whole known world. The buboes of Egypt and of China became
familiar as far as Norway and Greenland.
But, apart from diffusiveness, the conditions of recent local plagues are
not unlike those of the great historical epidemics. The very same
observation of the rats leaving their holes, which is so abundantly
confirmed from the recent plague-spots of Southern China, of Yun-nan, of
Kumaon, and of Gujerat, was familiar in the plague-books of London and of
Edinburgh in the Elizabethan period. Of the great outbreak in 1603, Thomas
Lodge writes: “And when as rats, moules, and other creatures (accustomed
to live underground) forsake their holes and habitations, it is a token of
corruption in the same, by reason that such sorts of creatures forsake
their wonted places of aboade[320].” That is only one of many proofs that
the virus of plague has its habitat in the soil, although it may be
carried long distances clinging to other things. In its most diffusive
potency it is a soil-poison generated, we may now say with some
confidence, out of the products of cadaveric decay[321]; in its less
diffusive but hardly less malignant potency, it is a soil-poison generated
out of the filth of cattle housed with human beings, or out of domestic
filth generally, and in nearly all the known instances of such generation,
associated with, but perhaps not absolutely dependent upon, carelessness
in the disposal of the dead after famine or fever; in the least malignant
form, when plague is only a small part of an epidemic of typhus and with
the buboes inclined to suppurate, it appears to be still a soil-poison,
and to differ from typhus itself, just because the pestilential product of
decomposing filth has been engendered in the pores of the ground, rather
than in the atmosphere of living-rooms.
* * * * *
The Black Death, which here concerns us immediately, is one of the two
great instances of a plague-virus with vast diffusive power, enormous
momentum, and centuries of endurance. So great effects may be said to
postulate adequate causes; and one must assume that the virus had been
bred from cadaveric decomposition in circumstances of peculiar
aggravation and on some vast or national scale. The sequence of events
carries us to China; and the annals of China do furnish evidence that the
assumed cause was there on a vast scale through a long period of national
disaster, while the national customs of China for the disposal of the
dead, like those of ancient Egypt, point to the existence of a real risk
from allowing the soil to be permeated at large by the crude or hasty
products of cadaveric decomposition.
It is our duty to construct the best hypothesis we can, sparing no labour.
No one really dispenses with theory, whatever his protestations to the
contrary; those who are the loudest professors of suspended judgment are
the most likely to fall victims to some empty verbalism which hangs loose
at both ends, some ill-considered piece of argument which ignores the
historical antecedents and stops short of the concrete conclusions. It has
been so in the case of infective diseases, and of bubo-plague in
particular. The virus of the plague, we are told, is specific; it has
existed from an unknown antiquity, and has come down in an unbroken
succession; we can no more discover how it arose, than we can tell how the
first man arose, or the first mollusc, or the first moss or lichen; its
species is, indeed, of the nature of the lowest vegetable organisms.
The objection to that hypothesis of plague is that it involves a total
disregard of facts. It is a mere formula, which saves all trouble,
dispenses with all historical inquiry, and appears to be adapted equally
to popular apprehension and to academic ease. The bubo-plagues of history
have not, in fact, been all of the same descent; notably the Black Death
was a wave of pestilence which Mohammedan countries, accustomed as they
had been to native bubo-plagues for centuries before, recognized as an
invasion from a foreign source, as an interruption of the sequence of
their own plagues. Again, the attempt to link in one series the various
scattered and circumscribed spots of plague now or lately existing must
fail disastrously the moment it is seriously attempted. The hypothesis of
one single source of the plague, of a species of disease arising we know
not how, beginning we know not when or where, but at all events reproduced
by ordinary generation in an unbroken series of cases, _ab aevo, ab ovo_,
is the merest verbalism, wanting in reality or concreteness, and dictated
by the curious illusion that a species of disease, because it reproduces
itself after its kind, must resemble in other respects a species of living
things.
The diffusive power of the virus of the Black Death, which has been
equalled only by that of the plague in Justinian’s reign, may seem to have
depended upon the favouring conditions that it met with. But although
favouring conditions count for much, they are not all. The Black Death
raged as furiously as anywhere among the nomade Tartars who were its first
victims; the virus, as soon as it was let loose, put forth a degree of
virulence which must have been native to it, or brought with it from its
place of engendering. None the less the incidence of the Black Death in
Europe had depended in part upon the preparedness of the soil. It came to
Europe in the age of feudalism and of walled towns, with a cramped and
unwholesome manner of life, and inhabited spots of ground choked with the
waste matters of generations. But even amidst these generally fostering
conditions, there would have been more special things that determined its
election. It is a principle exemplified in all importations of disease
from remote sources, in smallpox among the aerial contagions and in
Asiatic cholera among the soil-poisons, that the conditions which favour
diffusion abroad are approximately the same amidst which the infection had
been originally engendered. A soil-poison of foreign origin makes straight
for the most likely spots in the line of its travels; it may not, and
often does not confine itself to these, but it gives them a preference.
Thus, if we conclude on the evidence that the bubo-plague is a soil-poison
having a special affinity to the products of cadaveric decomposition, we
shall understand why the Black Death, when it came to England, found so
congenial a soil in the monasteries, and in the homes of the clergy.
Within the monastery walls, under the floor of the chapel or cloisters,
were buried not only generations of monks, but often the bodies of
princes, of notables of the surrounding country, and of great
ecclesiastics. In every parish the house of the priest would have stood
close to the church and the churchyard. One has to figure the virus of the
Black Death not so much as carried by individuals from place to place in
their persons, or in their clothes and effects, but rather as a leaven
which had passed into the ground, spreading hither and thither therein as
if by polarizing the adjacent particles of the soil, and that not
instantaneously like a physical force, but so gradually as to occupy a
whole twelvemonth between Dorset and Yorkshire. Sooner or later it reached
to every corner of the land, manifesting its presence wherever there were
people resident. Such universality in the soil of England, we have reason
to think, it had. But it appears to have put forth its greatest power in
the walled town, in the monastery, and in the neighbourhood of the village
churchyard.