Was the Black Death in India and China?

Bulletin of the History of Medicine

Volumn 85, Issue 3, 2011, Pages 319-355

  Sussman, George D ^a  

^a University of New York   (United States)

Author keywords

Black Death; China; India; Plague

Indexed keywords

EID: 80855129498     PISSN: 00075140     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/bhm.2011.0054     Document Type: Article

References (171)

1. Throughout this paper I use the term "Black Death" to refer to the devastating plague epidemic that swept through Europe and the Middle East between 1347 and 1352. After this initial invasion, the plague returned to Europe and the Middle East repeatedly for three to five hundred years (until 1711 in northwestern Europe, until 1743 in southern Europe, until 1770 in eastern Europe, and until 1842 in the Middle East). Plague historians refer to this long wave of epidemic outbreaks-from 1347 to 1842-as the second plague pandemic, to distinguish it from an earlier and a later wave of epidemic plague outbreaks. The first plague pandemic traveled from the Egyptian seaport of Pelusium in 541 CE to Constantinople, where it was known as the Plague of Justinian, in 542 and spread sporadically throughout the Middle East and Mediterranean Europe until 767. The third pandemic first received worldwide notice in Hong Kong and Canton in 1894, spread from there by steamship to seaports in India, Africa, Australia, and South and North America, and has continued at least until an outbreak in 1994 in Surat, India.
2. Gabriele de' Mussis, "The Arrival of the Plague [Historia de Morbo]" in The Black Death, ed. Rosemary Horrox (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1994), 14-26, quotation on 18. For an interesting discussion of the perception of the Black Death as universal
3. see Ann G. Carmichael, "Universal and Particular: The Language of Plague, 1348-1500, " in Pestilential Complexities: Understanding Medieval Plague, ed. Vivian Nutton, Supplement 27 to Med. Hist. (London: Wellcome Trust for the History of Medicine at UCL, 2008), 17-52.
4. Gabriele de' Mussis, "The Arrival of the Plague [Historia de Morbo]" in The Black Death, ed. Rosemary Horrox (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1994), 25.
5. Michael Dols, "Ibn al-Wardi's Risalah al-Naba' 'An al-Waba': A Translation of a Major Source for the History of the Black Death in the Middle East, " in Near Eastern Numismatics, Iconography, Epigraphy and History: Studies in Honor of George C. Miles, ed. Dickran K. Kouymjian (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1974), 443-55, quotations on 444, 448.
6. J. F. C. Hecker, M.D., "The Black Death, " in The Epidemics of the Middle Ages, 3rd ed., trans. B. G. Babington, M.D. (London: Trübner & Co., 1859), xx-62, quotation on xxiii. Hecker's essay was initially published and immediately translated into English in 1832, when another "universal pestilence, " cholera, had spread from Asia to Europe.
7. J. F. C. Hecker, M.D., "The Black Death, " in The Epidemics of the Middle Ages, 3rd ed., trans. B. G. Babington, M.D. (London: Trübner & Co., 1859), 11-17, quotation on 17.
8. William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (1976; repr., New York: Anchor, 1998), 196.
9. Michael W. Dols, The Black Death in the Middle East (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977).
10. Myron Echenberg, "Pestis Redux: The Initial Years of the Third Bubonic Plague Pandemic, 1894-1901, " J. World Hist. 13, no. 2 (2002): 429-49;
11. Myron Echenberg, Plague Ports: The Global Urban Impact of Bubonic Plague, 1894-1901 (New York: New York University Press, 2007).
12. For an excellent recent collection on the first pandemic see Lester K. Little, ed., Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541-750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Procopius's account of the outbreak of 542-43 in Constantinople is found in Procopius, History of the Wars, II:xxii-xxiii, in Procopius, trans. H. B. Dewing (New York: Macmillan, 1914), 1:451-73.
13. The Church lawyer and historian Evagrius Scholasticus, from Antioch, Syria, wrote fifty years after the initial invasion that the plague had come from Ethiopia, also abutting the Red Sea. Evagrius Scholasticus, The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius Scholasticus, trans. Michael Whitby (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2000), "Introduction" and 229.
14. See the argument on this point in Michael McCormick, "Toward a Molecular History of the Justinianic Pandemic, " in Lester K. Little, ed., Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541-750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 290-312, esp. 303-4.
15. William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (1976; repr., New York: Anchor, 1998), 137.
16. William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (1976; repr., New York: Anchor, 1998), 139.
17. Myron Echenberg, "Pestis Redux: The Initial Years of the Third Bubonic Plague Pandemic, 1894-1901, " J. World Hist. 13, no. 2 (2002): 33-35.
18. Myron Echenberg, "Pestis Redux: The Initial Years of the Third Bubonic Plague Pandemic, 1894-1901, " J. World Hist. 13, no. 2 (2002): 69-70.
19. Dr. August Hirsch, Handbook of Geographical and Historical Pathology, vol. 1, Acute Infective Disease, trans. Charles Creighton, M.D. (2nd German ed. 1881; repr., London: New Sydenham Society, 1883), 508.
20. Dr. August Hirsch, Handbook of Geographical and Historical Pathology, vol. 1, Acute Infective Disease, trans. Charles Creighton, M.D. (2nd German ed. 1881; repr., London: New Sydenham Society, 1883), 1:509-10, emphasis original.
21. Dr. August Hirsch, Handbook of Geographical and Historical Pathology, vol. 1, Acute Infective Disease, trans. Charles Creighton, M.D. (2nd German ed. 1881; repr., London: New Sydenham Society, 1883), 1:510-11. I will discuss the plague in nineteenth-century Yunnan, the origin of the third plague pandemic, later in this article.
22. Dr. August Hirsch, Handbook of Geographical and Historical Pathology, vol. 1, Acute Infective Disease, trans. Charles Creighton, M.D. (2nd German ed. 1881; repr., London: New Sydenham Society, 1883), 1:514.
23. Georg Sticker, Abhandlungen aus der Seuchengeschichte und Sechenlehre. I. Band. Die Pest. Erster Teil: Die Geschichte der Pest (Giessen, Germany: Verlag von Alfred Töpelmann, 1908-10), 294, 326, for example.
24. Wu Lien-Teh, "The Original Home of Plague, " in Far Eastern Association of Tropical Medicine, Transactions of the Fifth Biennial Congress Held at Singapore, 1923, ed. A. L. Hoops and J. W. Scharff (London: John Bale, Sons & Danielsson, 1924), 286-304.
25. For information on Wu Lien-Teh and his leading role in the Manchurian pneumonic plague pandemic of 1910-11, see Wu Lien-Teh, Plague Fighter: The Autobiography of a Modern Chinese Physician (Cambridge, UK: W. Heffer, 1959);
26. Carsten Flohr, "The Plague Fighter: Wu Lien-Teh and the Beginning of the Chinese Public Health System, " Ann. Sci. 53 (1996): 361-80;
27. Carl F. Nathan, Plague Prevention and Politics in Manchuria, 1910-1931 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Harvard East Asian Monographs, 1967);
28. Mark Gamsa, "The Epidemic of Pneumonic Plague in Manchuria, 1910-1911, " Past Pres. 190 (February 2006): 147-83.
29. Wu Lien-Teh, "The Original Home of Plague, " in Far Eastern Association of Tropical Medicine, Transactions of the Fifth Biennial Congress Held at Singapore, 1923, ed. A. L. Hoops and J. W. Scharff (London: John Bale, Sons & Danielsson, 1924), 289.
30. On Koch and the central African focus of plague, see Myron Echenberg, "'Scientific Gold': Robert Koch and Africa, 1883-1906, " in Agency and Action in Colonial Africa: Essays for John E. Flint, ed. Chris Youé and Tim Stapleton (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 34-49, esp. 42-43.
31. Wu Lien-Teh, "The Original Home of Plague, " in Far Eastern Association of Tropical Medicine, Transactions of the Fifth Biennial Congress Held at Singapore, 1923, ed. A. L. Hoops and J. W. Scharff (London: John Bale, Sons & Danielsson, 1924), 292.
32. Wu Lien-Teh, "The Original Home of Plague, " in Far Eastern Association of Tropical Medicine, Transactions of the Fifth Biennial Congress Held at Singapore, 1923, ed. A. L. Hoops and J. W. Scharff (London: John Bale, Sons & Danielsson, 1924), 293, 294, 300.
33. Georg Sticker traces the Benghazi plague focus via caravan route back to Nubia and ultimately to the central African focus. 21. Georg Sticker, Abhandlungen aus der Seuchengeschichte und Sechenlehre. I. Band. Die Pest. Erster Teil: Die Geschichte der Pest (Giessen, Germany: Verlag von Alfred Töpelmann, 1908-10), I:326
34. William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (1976; repr., New York: Anchor, 1998), 172.
35. William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (1976; repr., New York: Anchor, 1998), 171-73.
36. John Norris, "East or West? The Geographic Origin of the Black Death, " Bull. Hist. Med. 51, no. 1 (Spring 1977): 1-24, 10;
37. R. Pollitzer, M.D., Plague (Geneva: World Health Organization, 1954), 1-24, esp. 14. Robert Pollitzer was initiated into plague research as a young assistant to Wu Lien-Teh in the Manchurian pneumonic plague epidemic of 1910-11.
38. See Wendy Orent, Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World's Most Dangerous Disease (New York: Free Press, 2004), 201-2.
39. John Norris, "East or West? The Geographic Origin of the Black Death, " Bull. Hist. Med. 51, no. 1 (Spring 1977): 1, 3-7.
40. John Norris, "East or West? The Geographic Origin of the Black Death, " Bull. Hist. Med. 51, no. 1 (Spring 1977): 7.
41. John Norris, "East or West? The Geographic Origin of the Black Death, " Bull. Hist. Med. 51, no. 1 (Spring 1977): 13. In addition, as Ole Benedictow observes, the term pestilence on the tombs near Lake Issyk Kul could refer to any epidemic disease.
42. Ole J. Benedictow, The Black Death, 1346-1353: The Complete History (Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell, 2004), 44.
43. Peter Jackson suggests a different chronology of the Silk Road trade. He claims that the years from about 1320 to about 1345 were the heyday of direct European overland trade with India and the Far East, "the era in which Western merchants, relatively few in number, travelled beyond Tana [near the mouth of the Don River] and Tabriz [in northwestern Iran], to participate personally in commercial ventures in the Indian subcontinent, in Central Asia, or in China. " Peter Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 1221-1410 (New York: Pearson Longman, 2005), 301.
44. John Norris, "East or West? The Geographic Origin of the Black Death, " Bull. Hist. Med. 51, no. 1 (Spring 1977): 13-15.
45. Dr. R. Devignat, "Variétés de l'espèce Pasteurella pestis: Nouvelle hypothèse, " Bull. World Health Organization 4 (1951): 247-63. Recent genetic research analyzing the DNA of Y. pestis found in the remains of European plague victims in the first and second pandemics does not support Devignat. Two studies conducted by the team of Michel Drancourt in Marseille found only the Orientalis biovar among victims of the first two pandemics in southern France, while another by a team led by Stephanie Haensch of Mainz found Yersinia pestis of neither the Medievalis nor Orientalis biovar in remains of victims of the second pandemic in various northern European sites. Michel Drancourt, Véronique Roux, La Vu Dang, Lam Tran-Hung, Dominique Castex, Viviane Chenal-Francisque, Hiroyuki Ogata, Pierre-Edouard Fournier, Eric Crubézy, and Didier Raoult, "Genotyping, Orientalis-like Yersinia pestis, and Plague Pandemics, " Emerg. Infect. Dis. 10, no. 9 (September 2004): 1585-92;
46. Michel Drancourt, Michel Signoli, La Vu Dang, Bruno Bizot, Véronique Roux, Stéfan Tzortzis, and Didier Raoult, "Yersinia pestis Orientalis in Remains of Ancient Plague Patients, " Emerg. Infect. Dis. 13, no. 2 (February 2007): 332-33;
47. Stephanie Haensch, Raffaella Bianucci, Michel Signoli, Minoarisoa Rajerison, Michael Schultz, et al., "Distinct Clones of Yersinia pestis Caused the Black Death, " PLoS Pathog. 6, no. 10 (2010): 1-8, doi:10.1371/journal.ppat.1001134.
48. Dr. R. Devignat, "Variétés de l'espèce Pasteurella pestis: Nouvelle hypothèse, " Bull. World Health Organization 4 (1951): 254-55.
49. Robert Sallares, "Ecology, Evolution, and Epidemiology of Plague, " in Lester K. Little, ed., Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541-750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 231-89, esp. 281;
50. John Theilmann and Frances Cate, "A Plague of Plagues: The Problem of Plague Diagnosis in Medieval England. " J. Interdiscip. Hist. 37, no. 3 (Winter 2007): 371-93, esp. 381-83;
51. Susan Scott and Christopher J. Duncan, Biology of Plagues: Evidence from Historical Populations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 51-53;
52. Wendy Orent, Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World's Most Dangerous Disease (New York: Free Press, 2004), 58-60.
53. John Norris, "East or West? The Geographic Origin of the Black Death, " Bull. Hist. Med. 51, no. 1 (Spring 1977): 22.
54. John Norris, "East or West? The Geographic Origin of the Black Death, " Bull. Hist. Med. 51, no. 1 (Spring 1977): 22-24.
55. On the third plague pandemic in India, see Myron Echenberg, "Pestis Redux: The Initial Years of the Third Bubonic Plague Pandemic, 1894-1901, " J. World Hist. 13, no. 2 (2002): chap. 2 (p. 51 for fatalities);
56. Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, "Plague Panic and Epidemic Politics in India, 1896-1914, " in Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence, ed. Terence Ranger and Paul Slack (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 203-40;
57. David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), chap. 5;
58. I. J. Catanach, "The 'Globalization' of Disease? India and the Plague, " J. World Hist. 12, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 131-53;
59. Ira Klein, "Plague, Policy and Popular Unrest in British India, " Mod. Asian Stud. 22, no. 4 (1988): 723-55.
60. Peter Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. chap. 10.
61. Sir H. M. Elliot, Tarikh-I-Firoz Shahi of Zia ud-Din Barni, ed. Prof John Dowson (1871; repr., Lahore, Pakistan: Chowk Minar Anarkali, 1974), 166-67;
62. Peter Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 3-4, 37, 162, 296.
63. Michael W. Dols, The Black Death in the Middle East (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977). 47, 154-55.
64. Kanhaiya Lall Srivastava, The Position of Hindus under the Delhi Sultanate, 1206-1526 (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1980), 182-83, 186;
65. Peter Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 193, 197, 232-33, 252-53, 266, 315.
66. Peter Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 4, 61-66, 41-43, 184-85, 233-34, 311-12.
67. Peter Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 49-51, 164. I follow Jackson's spelling of Barani's name rather than that of Sir H. M. Elliot's nineteenth-century translation.
68. Sir H. M. Elliot, Tarikh-I-Firoz Shahi of Zia ud-Din Barni, ed. Prof John Dowson (1871; repr., Lahore, Pakistan: Chowk Minar Anarkali, 1974), 159.
69. Michael W. Dols, The Black Death in the Middle East (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977). 34;
70. John MacPherson, M.D., Annals of Cholera: From the Earliest Periods to the Year 1817 (London: Ranken and Co., 1872), 6.
71. R. C. Jauhri, ed., Medieval India in Transition-Tarikh-i-Firoz Shahi: A First Hand Account (New Delhi: Sundeep Prakashan, 2001), vii-viii, 170-71.
72. Gabriele de' Mussis, "The Arrival of the Plague [Historia de Morbo]" in The Black Death, ed. Rosemary Horrox (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1994), 75-80.
73. Jahangir, The Tuzuk-I-Jahangiri; or, Memoirs of Jahangir, trans. Alexander Rogers, ed. Henry Beveridge (1909-14; repr., Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1968), II:65.
74. Christine M. Boeckl, Images of Plague and Pestilence: Iconography and Iconology (Kirksville, Mo.: Truman State University Press, 2000), 19-21.
75. Graham Twigg, The Black Death: A Biological Reappraisal (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), 114.
76. The Weather Channel, 1995-2011, http://www.weather.com.
77. Ira Klein, "Plague, Policy and Popular Unrest in British India, " Mod. Asian Stud. 22, no. 4 (1988): 733.
78. Jahangir, The Tuzuk-I-Jahangiri; or, Memoirs of Jahangir, trans. Alexander Rogers, ed. Henry Beveridge (1909-14; repr., Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1968), I:330.
79. Sir Thomas Roe, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India, 1615-1619, as Narrated in His Journal and Correspondence, ed. Sir William Foster (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), 268, 312, 336.
80. Mu'tamad Khan, Ikbal-Nama-i Jahangiri, in The History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians;
81. The Muhammadan Period. The Posthumous Papers of the Late Sir H.M. Elliot, K.C.B., Edited & Continued by Professor John Dowson, M.R.A.S. (London: Trübner and Co., 1875; repr., New York: AMS Press, 1966), VI:406.
82. Jahangir, The Tuzuk-I-Jahangiri; or, Memoirs of Jahangir, trans. Alexander Rogers, ed. Henry Beveridge (1909-14; repr., Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1968), II:66-67.
83. For example, Albert Camus's novel La Peste (1947), which depicts a contemporary plague outbreak in Oran, Algeria.
84. Graham Twigg, The Black Death: A Biological Reappraisal (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), 83;
85. Susan Scott and Christopher J. Duncan, Biology of Plagues: Evidence from Historical Populations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 78;
86. Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe (London: Arnold, 2002), 1. The plague skeptics have identified other important discrepancies between outbreaks of the "second plague pandemic" and those recorded by modern medical observers in the third pandemic, particularly the reports of the Indian Plague Commission from the early twentieth century. These discrepancies include, in addition to the premonitory dying off of rats, the exclusively warm-weather seasonality of the modern plague, a slower spread, lower population mortality, evidence of household case clustering rather than person-to-person transmission, the absence of acquired immunity, and, in the judgment of the plague skeptics, different symptoms (prominence of buboes in the modern epidemic and of more generally distributed pustules in the medieval and early modern epidemics).
87. John Theilmann and Frances Cate, "A Plague of Plagues: The Problem of Plague Diagnosis in Medieval England. " J. Interdiscip. Hist. 37, no. 3 (Winter 2007): 371-91;
88. Ann G. Carmichael, "Universal and Particular: The Language of Plague, 1348-1500, " in Pestilential Complexities: Understanding Medieval Plague, ed. Vivian Nutton, Supplement 27 to Med. Hist. (London: Wellcome Trust for the History of Medicine at UCL, 2008), 59-73, esp. 69-73;
89. Wendy Orent, Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World's Most Dangerous Disease (New York: Free Press, 2004), 3, 43-44, 121, 158, 167, 170. A primary pneumonic infection is acquired by inhaling plague bacteria adhering to droplets coughed out by someone with a pneumonic infection; a secondary pneumonic infection occurs when an infection acquired through a flea bite passes from the lymph system into the bloodstream and reaches the lungs. The symptoms are the same, but the mode of transmission is different. Bolstering the traditional, symptomatic evidence of medieval plague have been various molecular studies reported in the past dozen years on the remains of plague victims from the first and second pandemics. Some of these studies claim to have identified fragments of Yersinia pestis DNA in the dental pulp of skeletons from mass graves identified by archaeologists with the first pandemic, the Black Death, and subsequent outbreaks of the second pandemic.
90. See Michel Drancourt, Gerard Aboudharam, Michel Signoli, Olivier Dutour, and Didier Raoult, "Detection of 400-Year-Old Yersinia pestis DNA in Human Dental Pulp: An Approach to the Diagnosis of Ancient Septicemia, " Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 95, no. 21 (October 13, 1998): 12637-40;
91. Didier Raoult, Gérard Aboudharam, Eric Crubézy, Georges Larrouy, Bertrand Ludes, and Michel Drancourt, "Molecular Identification by 'Suicide PCR' of Yersinia pestis as the Agent of Medieval Black Death, " Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 97, no. 23 (November 7, 2000): 12800-803;
92. M. Thomas P. Gilbert, Jon Cuccui, William White, Niels Lynnerup, Richard W. Titball, Alan Cooper, and Michael B. Prentice, "Absence of Yersinia pestis-Specific DNA in Human Teeth from Five European Excavations of Putative Plague Victims, " Microbiology 150, no. 2 (February 2004): 341-54;
93. Michel Drancourt and Didier Raoult, "Molecular Detection of Yersinia pestis in Dental Pulp, " Microbiology 150, no. 2 (February 2004): 263-64;
94. I. Weichman and G. Grupe, "Detection of Yersinia pestis DNA in Two Early Medieval Skeletal Finds from Aschheim (Upper Bavaria, 6th Century A.D.), " Amer. J. Phys. Anthrop. 126 (January 2005): 48-55.
95. Another group of studies has used different techniques to detect Yersinia pestis antigens in the remains from plague pits from the Black Death: Carsten M. Pusch, Lila Rahalison, Nikolaus Blin, Graeme J Nicholson, and Alfred Czarnetzki, "Yersinial F1 Antigen and the Cause of Black Death, " Lancet Infect. Dis. 4 (August 2004): 484-85;
96. Raffaella Bianucci, Lila Rahalison, Emma Rabino Massa, Alberto Peluso, Ezio Ferroglio, and Michel Signoli, "Technical Note: A Rapid Diagnostic Test Detects Plague in Ancient Human Remains: An Example of the Interaction between Archeological and Biological Approaches (Southeastern France, 16th-18th Centuries), " Amer. J. Phys. Anthrop. 136 (July 2008): 361-67;
97. Stephanie Haensch, Raffaella Bianucci, Michel Signoli, Minoarisoa Rajerison, Michael Schultz, et al., "Distinct Clones of Yersinia pestis Caused the Black Death, " PLoS Pathog. 6, no. 10 (2010): As will become apparent in the rest of this article, I side with the majority view that Yersinia pestis was the causal agent of the Black Death, but with the important caveat that the mode of transmission of the medieval plague differed from the rat-to-rat flea-to-human sequence identified in the third pandemic in India in the first decade of the twentieth century.
98. William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (1976; repr., New York: Anchor, 1998), 206. Pasteurella pestis is the former name for Yersinia pestis. The "habits and customs" referred to include avoidance of the meat of diseased rodents, isolation of patients, and abandonment of houses or villages overrun by diseased rodents.
99. Albert Lawrence Borroughs, "Sylvatic Plague Studies: The Vector Efficiency of Nine Species of Fleas Compared with Xenopsylla cheopis, " J. Hygiene 45, no. 3 (August 1947): 371-96.
100. Myron Echenberg, "Pestis Redux: The Initial Years of the Third Bubonic Plague Pandemic, 1894-1901, " J. World Hist. 13, no. 2 (2002): 7, 70;
101. I. J. Catanach, "The 'Globalization' of Disease? India and the Plague, " J. World Hist. 12, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 138-43;
102. Graham Twigg, The Black Death: A Biological Reappraisal (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), 127-28.
103. Wendy Orent, Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World's Most Dangerous Disease (New York: Free Press, 2004), 43-47, 121;
104. Wendy Orent, Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World's Most Dangerous Disease (New York: Free Press, 2004), 71-72;
105. Ann G. Carmichael, "Universal and Particular: The Language of Plague, 1348-1500, " in Pestilential Complexities: Understanding Medieval Plague, ed. Vivian Nutton, Supplement 27 to Med. Hist. (London: Wellcome Trust for the History of Medicine at UCL, 2008), 115-22, esp. 117.
106. Wu Lien-Teh, J. W. H. Chun, R. Pollitzer, and C. Y. Wu, Plague: A Manual for Medical and Public Health Workers (Shanghai Station, China: Weishengshu National Quarantine Service, 1936), 42-43.
107. Wu Lien-Teh, "The Original Home of Plague, " in Far Eastern Association of Tropical Medicine, Transactions of the Fifth Biennial Congress Held at Singapore, 1923, ed. A. L. Hoops and J. W. Scharff (London: John Bale, Sons & Danielsson, 1924), 294-95.
108. Wu Lien-Teh, Plague Fighter: The Autobiography of a Modern Chinese Physician (Cambridge, UK: W. Heffer, 1959), 33.
109. Carol Benedict, Bubonic Plague in Nineteenth-Century China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 28-29;
110. Wu Lien-Teh, "The Original Home of Plague, " in Far Eastern Association of Tropical Medicine, Transactions of the Fifth Biennial Congress Held at Singapore, 1923, ed. A. L. Hoops and J. W. Scharff (London: John Bale, Sons & Danielsson, 1924), 296.
111. Quoted in Wong K. Chimin and Wu Lien-Teh, History of Chinese Medicine: Being a Chronicle of Medical Happenings in China from Ancient Times to the Present Period (2nd ed. 1936; repr., Taipei: Southern Materials Center, 1985), 507. I omitted from this quotation the Chinese characters parenthetically inserted after several names.
112. Carol Benedict, Bubonic Plague in Nineteenth-Century China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), chaps. 1-2;
113. Wu Lien-Teh, "The Original Home of Plague, " in Far Eastern Association of Tropical Medicine, Transactions of the Fifth Biennial Congress Held at Singapore, 1923, ed. A. L. Hoops and J. W. Scharff (London: John Bale, Sons & Danielsson, 1924), 293;
114. Myron Echenberg, "Pestis Redux: The Initial Years of the Third Bubonic Plague Pandemic, 1894-1901, " J. World Hist. 13, no. 2 (2002): chap. 1.
115. Denis Twitchett, "Population and Pestilence in T'ang China, " in Studia Sino-Mongolica: Festscrift für Herbert Franke, ed. Wolfgang Bauer (Wiesbaden, Germany: Franz Steiner, 1979), 35-68, quotation on 40.
116. Denis Twitchett, "Population and Pestilence in T'ang China, " in Studia Sino-Mongolica: Festscrift für Herbert Franke, ed. Wolfgang Bauer (Wiesbaden, Germany: Franz Steiner, 1979), 40-42.
117. Shigehisa Kuriyama, "Epidemics, Weather, and Contagion in Traditional Chinese Medicine, " in Contagion: Perspectives from Pre-Modern Societies, ed. Lawrence I. Conrad and Dominik Wujastyk (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2000), 3-22, quotation on 4.
118. Denis Twitchett, "Population and Pestilence in T'ang China, " in Studia Sino-Mongolica: Festscrift für Herbert Franke, ed. Wolfgang Bauer (Wiesbaden, Germany: Franz Steiner, 1979), 41;
119. Asaf Goldschmidt, The Evolution of Chinese Medicine: Song Dynasty, 960-1200 (New York: Routledge, 2009), 83-84.
120. Asaf Goldschmidt, The Evolution of Chinese Medicine: Song Dynasty, 960-1200 (New York: Routledge, 2009), 82.
121. Denis Twitchett, "Population and Pestilence in T'ang China, " in Studia Sino-Mongolica: Festscrift für Herbert Franke, ed. Wolfgang Bauer (Wiesbaden, Germany: Franz Steiner, 1979), 35-68;
122. Helen Dunstan, "The Late Ming Epidemics: A Preliminary Survey, " Ch'ing-Shih wen-t'i 3, no. 3 (November 1975): 1-59. Dunstan draws on local gazetteers, which began to become available in the Ming Dynasty.
123. Carol Benedict, Bubonic Plague in Nineteenth-Century China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 11.
124. Dong Lu, Xi Ma, and François Thann, Les maux épidémiques dans l'empire chinois (Paris: Éditions L'Harmattan, 1995), 55-59. The authors argue that a disease outbreak identified in the northern Jin Dynasty (1115-1234) as the "epidemic of the large head" must refer to the inflamed lymphatic ganglia of the neck in plague.
125. Carol Benedict, Bubonic Plague in Nineteenth-Century China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 101.
126. Denis Twitchett, "Population and Pestilence in T'ang China, " in Studia Sino-Mongolica: Festscrift für Herbert Franke, ed. Wolfgang Bauer (Wiesbaden, Germany: Franz Steiner, 1979), 37-39;
127. Michel Cartier and Pierre-Étienne Will, "Démographie et institutions en Chine: contribution à l'analyse des recensements de l'époque impériale (2 ap. J.-C.-1750), " in Annales de démographie historique (1971): 161-245, esp. 162-64 and 194.
128. Frederick W. Mote, "Chinese Society under Mongol Rule, 1215-1368, " in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 6, Alien Regimes and Border States, 907-1368, ed. Herbert Franke and Denis Twitchett (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 616-64, esp. 618.
129. This summary is based on John W. Dardess, Conquerors and Confucians: Aspects of Political Change in Late Yuan China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973).
130. William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (1976; repr., New York: Anchor, 1998), 297-306.
131. "Appendix. XXXIV. Epidemics, " in An Epitome of the Reports of the Medical Officers to the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Service, from 1871 to 1882, ed. Surgeon-General C. A. Gordon, M.D., C.B. (London: Baillière, Tindall, & Cox, 1884), 325-59.
132. The same list, without interpolated references to Western epidemics, appears in Wu Lien-Teh, J. W. H. Chun, R. Pollitzer, and C. Y. Wu, Plague: A Manual for Medical and Public Health Workers (Shanghai Station, China: Weishengshu National Quarantine Service, 1936), 43-51.
133. I am grateful to an anonymous reader of this article for these cautions as well as other insights.
134. William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (1976; repr., New York: Anchor, 1998), 173.
135. I have substituted the pinyin transliteration for the Wade-Giles transliteration of modern provinces.
136. Timothy Brook also identifies three severe epidemics of the late Yuan period: in 1344-45, 1356-60, and 1362. In omitting reference to epidemics in 1331-34, Brook makes it less likely that the Black Death of Europe and the Middle East, beginning in 1346, could have originated in China. Timothy Brook, The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 64-65.
137. Traditional estimates of mortality for the Black Death in Europe run from one-quarter to one-third overall, with some cities and regions bypassed completely and some cities registering over 50 percent mortality. See the cautious discussion of this topic in Jean-Noël Biraben, Les hommes et la peste en France et dans les pays européens et méditerranéens, vol. 1, La peste dans l'histoire (Paris: Mouton, 1975), chap. 4. The extremes in the discussion of population mortality in the Black Death are represented by the biologist J. F. D. Shrewsbury, who insisted that plague was primarily an urban disease that could not have killed more than 5 percent of the population of the British Isles in the Black Death, and the historian Ole J. Benedictow, who claimed that the Black Death attacked every part of Europe with the exception of Iceland and Finland, caused even greater mortality in rural areas than in towns and cities, and killed approximately 60 percent of the population.
138. See J. F. D. Shrewsbury, A History of Bubonic Plague in the British Isles (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 36, 122-23;
139. Ole J. Benedictow, The Black Death, 1346-1353: The Complete History (Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell, 2004), chap. 24 and part IV. I think most historians today would reject Shrewsbury's estimate as far too low and Benedictow's as somewhat high.
140. Angela Ki Che Leung, "Diseases of the Premodern Period in China, " in The Cambridge World History of Human Disease, ed. Kenneth F. Kiple (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 354-62, esp. 357;
141. John D. Durand, "The Population Statistics of China, A.D. 2-1953, " Popul. Stud. 13, no. 3 (March 1960): 209-56, esp. 249.
142. Frederick W. Mote, "Chinese Society under Mongol Rule, 1215-1368, " in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 6, Alien Regimes and Border States, 907-1368, ed. Herbert Franke and Denis Twitchett (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 618-21.
143. Michel Cartier and Pierre-Étienne Will, "Démographie et institutions en Chine: contribution à l'analyse des recensements de l'époque impériale (2 ap. J.-C.-1750), " in Annales de démographie historique (1971): 161-245, 193-94.
144. John D. Durand, "The Population Statistics of China, A.D. 2-1953, " Popul. Stud. 13, no. 3 (March 1960): 229-33.
145. Frederick W. Mote, "Chinese Society under Mongol Rule, 1215-1368, " in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 6, Alien Regimes and Border States, 907-1368, ed. Herbert Franke and Denis Twitchett (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 622.
146. Frederick W. Mote, "Chinese Society under Mongol Rule, 1215-1368, " in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 6, Alien Regimes and Border States, 907-1368, ed. Herbert Franke and Denis Twitchett (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 621;
147. Michel Cartier and Pierre-Étienne Will, "Démographie et institutions en Chine: contribution à l'analyse des recensements de l'époque impériale (2 ap. J.-C.-1750), " in Annales de démographie historique (1971): 161-245, 198.
148. Li Bozhong, "Was There a 'Fourteenth-Century Turning Point'? Population, Land, Technology, and Farm Management, " in The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition in Chinese History, ed. Paul Jakov Smith and Richard von Glahn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 135-75, esp. 137-43.
149. The only references to southern provinces affected by the epidemics are one mention by Cha of an epidemic of 1354 in Guangdong and Guangxi and references by Cha and the Customs Service to an epidemic in 1359 in Guangdong. There are no mentions in either source of epidemics during this period in the southwestern and western provinces of Yunnan, Sichuan, Guizhou, Gansu, or Shaanxi.
150. Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past: A Social and Economic Interpretation (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1973), 310-11. Wu Lien-Teh quotes three clinical descriptions of deadly "bubonic diseases" from China in the seventh century CE, at the time of the first plague pandemic. None of the three refer to the specific site of the buboes or to pneumonic symptoms. Wu's historical sketch of the plague in China then skips to the late eighteenth century, omitting any reference to the second pandemic.
151. Wu Lien-Teh, J. W. H. Chun, R. Pollitzer, and C. Y. Wu, Plague: A Manual for Medical and Public Health Workers (Shanghai Station, China: Weishengshu National Quarantine Service, 1936), 11-12.
152. Helen Dunstan, "The Late Ming Epidemics: A Preliminary Survey, " Ch'ing-Shih wen-t'i 3, no. 3 (November 1975): 19.
153. William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (1976; repr., New York: Anchor, 1998), 297-306.
154. Angela Ki Che Leung, "Diseases of the Premodern Period in China, " in The Cambridge World History of Human Disease, ed. Kenneth F. Kiple (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 355.
155. For descriptions of the spread of the Black Death around Europe, Jean-Noël Biraben, Les hommes et la peste en France et dans les pays européens et méditerranéens, vol. 1, La peste dans l'histoire (Paris: Mouton, 1975), I:71-85;
156. Ole J. Benedictow, The Black Death, 1346-1353: The Complete History (Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell, 2004), part II.
157. Ann G. Carmichael, "Universal and Particular: The Language of Plague, 1348-1500, " in Pestilential Complexities: Understanding Medieval Plague, ed. Vivian Nutton, Supplement 27 to Med. Hist. (London: Wellcome Trust for the History of Medicine at UCL, 2008), 118-19, 121-22.
158. Ann G. Carmichael, "Universal and Particular: The Language of Plague, 1348-1500, " in Pestilential Complexities: Understanding Medieval Plague, ed. Vivian Nutton, Supplement 27 to Med. Hist. (London: Wellcome Trust for the History of Medicine at UCL, 2008), 118-19.
159. Graham Twigg, The Black Death: A Biological Reappraisal (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), 139.
160. Wendy Orent, Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World's Most Dangerous Disease (New York: Free Press, 2004), 118.
161. Ole J. Benedictow, The Black Death, 1346-1353: The Complete History (Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell, 2004), 229-31. After the appearance of infective rat fleas in an uninfected locale, a delay of two to three weeks ensued while the imported, infective rat fleas transmitted the pathogen to a hitherto uninfected rat colony, the rats of that colony died off, their fleas transferred to the human population, and the plague incubated in the first human patients.
162. See Ole J. Benedictow, The Black Death, 1346-1353: The Complete History (Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell, 2004), 18.
163. Ole J. Benedictow, The Black Death, 1346-1353: The Complete History (Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell, 2004), 50.
164. Timothy Brook, The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 64-66.
165. Ann Bowman Jannetta, Epidemics and Mortality in Early Modern Japan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), 14-15.
166. Angela Ki Che Leung, "Diseases of the Premodern Period in China, " in The Cambridge World History of Human Disease, ed. Kenneth F. Kiple (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 354-55.
167. Helen Dunstan, "The Late Ming Epidemics: A Preliminary Survey, " Ch'ing-Shih wen-t'i 3, no. 3 (November 1975): 8-18.
168. Wendy Orent, Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World's Most Dangerous Disease (New York: Free Press, 2004), 60.
169. See also Michel Drancourt, Linda Houhamdi, and Didier Raoult, "Yersinia pestis as a Telluric, Human Ectoparasite-Borne Organism, " Lancet Infect. Dis. 6, no. 4 (April 2006): 234-41, which suggests how the Yersinia pestis bacillus might produce seven different epidemic "scenarios, " depending upon a variety of hosts and vectors.
170. While this article was undergoing final revisions, an important paper on the genetic evolution of Yersinia pestis by a European team led by Giovanna Morelli appeared in Nature Genetics. Morelli's team compared the genetic sequences of seventeen Y. pestis samples from different sites around the world and constructed a phylogenetic tree of the bacterium. The authors argue that Y. pestis evolved through clonal mutation over 2,600 years ago from Yersinia pseudotuberculosis in China. The genotypes identified by Stephanie Haensch, Raffaella Bianucci, Michel Signoli, Minoarisoa Rajerison, Michael Schultz, et al., "Distinct Clones of Yersinia pestis Caused the Black Death, " PLoS Pathog. 6, no. 10 (2010): 1-8, doi:10.1371/journal.ppat.1001134., as responsible for the Black Death in Europe evolved more than 728 years ago (i.e., before 1282), according to Morelli's group. Although the authors clearly believe that the plague pathogen that ravaged western Eurasia in the fourteenth century reached the West from China via the Silk Road, they cannot confirm, based on the evidence of modern DNA, whether the evolution of the pathogen that caused the Black Death occurred in the West or China or whether the plague was also epidemic in China in the fourteenth century.
171. Giovanna Morelli, Yajun Song, Camila J. Mazzoni, Mark Eppinger, et al., "Yersinia pestis Genome Sequencing Identifies Patterns of Global Phylogenetic Diversity, " Nature Genet. 42, no. 12 (December 2010): 1140-43, doi:10.1038/ng.705.