A History of Epidemics in Britain, Volume 1 (of 2): From A.D. 664 to the Extinction of PlagueCreighton, Charles
History
A History of Epidemics in Britain, Volume 1 (of 2): From A.D. 664 to the Extinction of Plague
Creighton, Charles
Epidemics -- Great Britain -- History
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
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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