Santer - Confronting contagion: our evolving understanding of disease

Confronting Contagion

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Santer, Melvin, author.

Confronting contagion : our evolving understanding of disease / Melvin Santer.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 9780199356379 (ebook)

I. Title.

[DNLM: 1. Communicable Diseaseshistory. 2. Communicable Diseasesetiology.

3. Disease Outbreakshistory. WC 11.1]

RA643

616.9dc23

2014010298

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

This book is dedicated to Ursula Victor Santer

(19322003) and Emily Miriam Santer,

Ruth Irene Santer, and Lewis Aaron Santer.

The god Apollo,

. unleashes his arrows on animals and soldiers for nine days

black bolts of plague fly on the Argives

HOMER, The Iliad

The human body contains blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. These are the things that make up its constitution and cause its pains and health.

THE HIPPOCRATIC TREATISE, The Nature of Man

Now what is the cause of plagues, and whence on a sudden the force of disease can arise and gather deadly destruction for the race of men and herds of cattle, I will unfold. First I have shown before that there are seeds (semina, atoms) of many things which are helpful to our life, and on the other hand it must needs be that many fly about which cause disease and death.

LUCRETIUS, De rerum natura

An inland lake there were very many little animalcules.

Letter from Leeuwenhoek to Henry Oldenburg, First Secretary of the Royal Society

..... for the smallest sort of animalcules, which come daily to my view, I conceive to be more than 25 times smaller than one of those blood-globules which make the blood red.

Leeuwenhoek to Oldenburg

From hence it appears that the Art of Physic (Medicine) was anciently established (1) by a faithful Collection of Facts Observed, whose Effects were (2) afterwards explained, and their Causes assigned by the Assistance of Reason; the first carries Conviction along with it, and is indisputable; nothing more certain than Demonstration from Experience, but the latter is more dubious and uncertain; since every Sect May explain the Causes of particular Effects upon different Hypotheses.

HERMAN BOERHAAVE, Academical Lectures on the Theory of Physics, 1751, 2nd edn, vol. 1; Eighteenth Century Collections Online, http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/ECCO

That man has long and persistently been concerned to achieve some understanding of the enormously diverse, often perplexing, and sometimes threatening occurrences in the world around him is shown by the manifold myths and metaphors he has devised in an effort to account for the very existence of the world and of himself, for life and death, for the motion of the heavenly bodies, for the regular sequence of day and night, for the changing seasons, for thunder and lightning, sunshine and rain. Some of these explanatory ideas are based on anthropomorphic conceptions of the forces of nature, others invoke hidden powers or agents, still others refer to Gods inscrutable plans or to fate

CARL HEMPEL, Philosophy of Natural Science, 1966, Prentice-Hall

This book had its beginnings when my wife, Ursula Victor Santer, and I taught a course for non-scientists at Haverford College designated History of Microbiology. Such Histories generally concentrated on the role of microorganisms in disease, and therefore their narratives began in the nineteenth century. Disease theory, however, begins millennia before the nineteenth century; the written materials provide a rich source of speculation about the cause of infectious/contagious diseases. That theorizing is an integral part of the speculations about the content and operation of the physical and biological world. I encourage the reader to read Notes to the Reader and the prologue to gain an introduction to the form and content of the book.

I want to thank a number of people who read portions of the book and encouraged me to continue. They are Jim Joyce, Sidney Axinn, Ruth Rothman, Lewis Santer, Karl Johnson, Madelyn Gutwirth, Marcel Gutwirth, Jim Dahlberg, and Tracy Kosman. I want to thank Lewis Santer, who has contributed to the book during the final stages of its preparation. I love you.

My thanks go to Dora Wong, science librarian at Haverford College. I am indebted to Sasha Santer Hill for work on Permissions to quote copyrighted material. I want to thank Professor K. Codell Carter for providing me with the original J. Henle reference used in .

Walter Pagel opens his book on Paracelsus, An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance, with the following paragraph:

Much of modern medicine developed in the xvith and xviith centuries against a background of trends of thought that were not purely or mainly scientific. The main purpose of the present writers historical enquiries since 1926 has been to place scientific and medical discoveries in the to us less comprehensible philosophical and religious setting in which they first appeared

PAGEL, p. 1, 1958, Karger

Pagel is stating the essential fact that to understand the origins of disease theories during any historical period, one must understand the contemporary philosophical and religious ideas about the composition and the operation of the world. It is my intention to adopt and extend this approach to understand the cause of infectious/contagious disease starting in antiquity and going forward to the twentieth century.

I want to request of you, dear reader, to temporarily suspend judgment about the causes of contagious disease that you know to be the initiated by the invasion of a host by various microscopic agents. I request the suspension of this knowledge so that you can place yourself in the particular period, prior to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, that will be described and can find yourself, like the writers of the time, struggling to understand a phenomenon that is visible but incomprehensible because its underlying causes are invisible and impossible to know. Despite this difficulty, it was essential for humans to try to explain the causes of these diseases in order to treat them. This crucial philosophical assumption is in the Hippocratic treatise