While the white man was spreading west across North America during the 19th century it’s well documented that the Indians living on the plains were exposed to, and succumbed to, a variety of diseases passed to them from the settlers and soldiers. But were there also diseases that were passed from the Indians to the settlers?
Wow! Did the Indians have any effective treatment for the disease at the time?
Given how easily Syphilis is transmitted from one person to another it must have been a real scourge for them…
The syphilis story is controversial. There is some evidence that syphilis may have been present in Europe before contact with North America.
And I suppose it’s my turn to mention “Guns, Germs, and Steel” by Jared Diamond, in which he posits geographically based explanations for why Europe conquered America, and not the other way around. The “germs” part basically boiled down to the fact that in the Old World, humans lived in much closer contact with animals than they did in the New World, and did so for much longer, leading to a whole zoo of various diseases that the New World people had no resistance to.
In addition, aboriginal Americans had passed through a population bottleneck, dramatically reducing the variety of immune system genes in the population. So, not only were they exposed to fewer diseases, they had a poorer toolkit for dealing with new diseases.
The evidence against syphilis coming from the Americas is pretty thin, but it’s not established orthodoxy that that’s what happened.
I believe I got both these tidbits from 1491 by Charles Mann.
It is a main thesis of both Guns, Germs, & Steel and 1491 that the Native Americans did not have significant exposure to epidemic diseases on anything like the scale the Europeans did. They lacked not just the germs to pass to the Europeans, they essentially lacked the entire category of what we call “epidemic” (meaning you get infected and then recover or die) diseases. The reasons this is the case are detailed in those books, but basically boil down to massively longer European exposure to living with domesticated herd animals, and perhaps some element of luck.
I’ve never heard of anything going the other way that might be plausible except the controversial supposition about syphilis. Certainly the exchange of germs was either entirely or almost entirely one-sided.
Thanks everyone. I was familiar with how Europeans decimated Indian populations with disease, especially the earliest settlers, but I hadn’t read about disease flowing in the other direction. Had there been more of that it might have slowed down the inevitable somewhat…
Montezuma’s Revenge?
There is a chart about halfway down the Wikipedia article on the Columbian Exchange that illustrates how one-sided the disease trading was.
This looks like the best thread for this news:
Not showing in a OneBox. It’s a shared article from WaPo titled “Ancient DNA suggests syphilis originated in Americas before ravaging Europe”
Some details for those of us who neither have nor want a WaPo subscription?
When I said “shared”, I meant you could read without a subscription. But I think it may require a login, so:
The quote includes a link to the paper in Nature. You should be able to read the abstract without payment.
Guardian version of the story may be easier to access for some people.
You might want to look at a book called Pox Americana by Elizabeth Fenn. See pox americana - Google Search
Another factor would likely be population density. While the Aztecs/Mayan region, and the Incas, might have the population density to support an epidemic or a pandemic, much of the Americas were not that dense, nor did they have that much travel going on compared to the “old world”. I guess it comes down to - how promiscuous were the natives to be able to keep syphilis as a going concern in remote areas like the West Indies islands?
Also, as mentioned above, a lot of our diseases originate as cross-overs from domesticated animals. We have chickens, cows, goats, horses, etc. Pigs are the worst, their body chemistry is very similar to ours; but pigs root around in dirt that may be contaminated from birds or bats. (Can humans suffer from bat diseases, one wonders? /s) Other than llamas and dogs, Americans did not keep a lot of domestic animals.
The Pacific Northwest tribes, for example, succumbed to smallpox in epidemics in the late 1880’s, centuries after it infected the east coast, when Europeans first began settling there in larger numbers.
I will repeat what I saw in a Scientific American book review about that epidemic and the next few in Alaska - the author studied assorted statistics, came to the conclusion that smallpox was no more lethal as a disease for indigenous people than for Europeans - about 1 in 10 died from it. What they did die from was the speed of the disease and lack of immunity.
There were stories in the Victoria museum describing groups that fell ill, for example, on the way home and the entire group died in the forest a few hours after leaving Victoria. The author studied old records and jounrnals from the time. When there was nobody healthy to tend to the sick, since they were all suffering at once, most people died of exposure, starvation, or dehydration. Often entire villages were wiped out. Where one or more people in the village had been exposed before, or there was a missionary present, the sick coul be tended to, the survival rate was much better, often as high as that European 9 out of 10.
This was quite important. Many groups were living on the edge. Certain activities had to be done on schedule or else. E.g., harvesting pine nuts, moving to a fishing spot to catch a salmon run and hundreds of other such activities. When most of a group is sick, that doesn’t happen, food runs out and the death rate soars.
Even more basic than that, if everyone is feverish and unable to walk, nobody is fetching water which could be a decent walk to fetch. Similarly, nobody is preparing meals, and I’m not sure there’s a lot of easy ready-to-eat food lying around. Even putting another log on the fire requires some energy and mobility, as does digging out some blankets. We’re talking about everyone being laid up at the same time. I don’t think too many people in modern society have experienced communicable diseases so serious that you are delerious and/or incapable of performing simple tasks.
There was a large “mound builder” soceity in the central Mississippi valley, that essentially is believed to have collapsed a century or so before the arrival of Europeans - so not a disease from Europe. There have been various explanations, some suggest the shifting climate, war, and multiple other causes. I don’t know if anyone ruled out disease. But none of the European settlers arriving in that area later reported unusua diseases.