Épidémies, épizooties

This book, edited by François Clément, forms the second volume of edited essays on natural disasters organised at the universities of Nantes and Poitiers. The first focused on physical disasters (aléas physiques)—climate change, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods—while the present one investigates biological disasters. The twelve chapters by seventeen authors concentrate on antiquity and the Middle Ages, although several (most prominently, François Vallat’s ‘Épizooties anciennes et plus récentes: données d’ensemble et méthodes d’approche’) examine better-documented cases in contemporary history to build models for the analysis of earlier periods. Many of these chapters are widely interdisciplinary, combining philological analysis of ancient and medieval texts—principally histories, chronicles, annals and, for antiquity, also works of literature—with up-to-date scientific knowledge of endemic and epidemic diseases, such as malaria, plague, cattle plague, typhus, smallpox and dysentery. The two chapters on animal plagues extend further, combining archaeology, physical anthropology, philology and veterinary medicine. In this crossing between humanistic disciplines and scientific analysis, the chapters by Éric Faure on malaria and Vallat on cattle diseases are the most impressive. Both illustrate the advantages of combining close textual analysis and sophisticated biological information to question historical sources and extend our knowledge of biological disasters in antiquity and the Middle Ages. Faure, for instance, argues that malaria is the only infectious disease of antiquity that can reliably be diagnosed from the analysis of ancient texts (p. 137). Yet, because of malaria’s tendency to weaken populations’ resistance to other diseases, it can, paradoxically, be difficult to diagnose, even in modern times, because of its high degree of co-infection with other diseases. Moreover, malaria’s rates of mortality can vary dramatically depending on (1) the type of Plasmodium (P. vivax and P. malariae, being more benign, versus the more deadly P. falciparum) and (2) whether a locale possesses a long history of the disease as opposed to regions where malaria invades a ‘naïve’ population, as occurred at the village of Sermoneta on the fringes of the Pontine marshes, south-east of Rome, in 1925, when the rate of mortality reached 41 per cent

Ancient history · Annals · Biology · Geography · Humanism · Humanities · Malaria · Middle Ages · Philology · Plague (disease · Smallpox · Sociology · Typhus · Classics · History · Philosophy · Yersinia bacterium, plague, ectoparasites research