Plague

Reviewed by: Plague? Jesuit Accounts of Epidemic Disease in the Sixteenth Century Stephen Ell A. Lynn Martin. Plague? Jesuit Accounts of Epidemic Disease in the Sixteenth Century. Sixteenth-Century Studies, vol. 28. Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth-Century Journal Publishers, 1996. xiv + 268 pp. Ill. $35.00. This book has a somewhat schizophrenic quality. On the one hand, it is based on primary sources not much used in the past; as such, much of its content reflects what is in the sources. On the other hand, however, it is part of the seemingly endless series of efforts to apply medical knowledge to the disease called “pest” in sixteenth-century Europe and, by extension, in other centuries as well. Its first side is successful. The reader learns much of the day-to-day running of the Jesuit order during epidemics (and in calmer times as well). The ways in which the structure and ideology of the Jesuit order interacted with the epidemics that brutally and unpredictably disrupted life in the sixteenth century are well presented. The author knows her sources, uses quotations well to illustrate her points, and leaves the educated reader enriched by her knowledge of the Jesuits. On this level, which actually comprises more than half of the book, the work is to be recommended. The book’s other face represents partisan campaigning for the author’s views on medieval plague, summed up in the book’s title (Plague?). Martin sees a disease referred to as “pest” that had the symptoms and course of bubonic plague, but whose other behavior does not square with that diagnosis at all. Her main arguments against accepting the diagnosis of plague (without the attached query) are twofold. First, there are no dead rats cited in medieval documents: she states that plague cannot exist without at least some black rats and their fleas, and the fact that the medieval and early modern European sources simply do not mention rats in times of plague is simply too much to accept. I am not quite sure where she has gotten this notion (there are and have been countries in modern [End Page 321] times that managed to spread plague without rats), but she is tenacious in asserting the significance of the point. Even if she were correct, there is no particular reason that the rats need have been in Europe at all: they might have infected a ship’s company on another continent. She posits the presence of spread by the human-dwelling flea (an idea I have championed myself), but states that the Jesuit sources show that the disease could not have been transmitted in this way. Using the writings of people who had no idea how it was actually spread, Martin accepts her sources’ statements that even a few seconds in the presence of a plague victim was enough to transmit the disease. In other words, she accepts her sources’ primitive views of contagion over modern ones in order to fit her argument. If her source says someone spent only a few seconds near a plague victim and subsequently developed the disease, she assumes that all possible contagion occurred in those few seconds—disregarding the labyrinthine ways of plague. Indeed, Martin’s entire handling of medical material is suspect, when not simply amateurish. She states that the lack of a shift to pneumonic plague in the winter months argues against the disease’s being plague to start with: she does not distinguish between primary and secondary pneumonic plague, nor does she seem to have any notion of how uncommon pneumonic plague epidemics actually are. Further, she takes information from modern medical sources and uses it as a kind of ironclad truth; the fact that there are a lot of different ironclad views in different medical works on plague passes either unnoticed or without comment. In the book’s conclusion, Martin states that the most reliable diagnosis to be made from her primary sources is influenza. True influenza is not an easy diagnosis, given the host of upper respiratory infections that afflict mankind in the winter. Almost unbelievably, she states that typhus is characterized by “fever, delirium, and the spots or petechiae” (p. 67). True enough, but

Ancient history · Epidemic disease · Face (sociological concept) · Ideology · Order (exchange) · Plague (disease) · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Classics · History · Law · Medicine · Virology · Yersinia bacterium, plague, ectoparasites research