The Power of Plagues. Irwin W. Sherman

The Power of Plagues - Irwin W. Sherman


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      The Pharaohs’ Plague

       A look back

      The land of the pharaohs flourished for 27 centuries, and its accomplishments, even today, are truly impressive. When Herodotus, the Greek historian, made a tour of Egypt in 400 B.C., he wrote of “wonders more in number than those of any other land.” And he went on to say that “when the Nile inundates the land all of Egypt becomes a sea and only the towns remain above water. Anyone traveling from Naucratis to Memphis sails right alongside the pyramids, and when the waters recede they leave behind a layer of fertile silt—’black land’—the Egyptians call it, to distinguish it from the sterile ‘red land’ of the deserts. Egypt is the gift of the river.”

      In some ways Nature favored Egypt because, unlike Mesopotamia, which stood on an open plain and was unprotected from marauding tribes, the deserts that bordered the Nile discouraged invasion, and so the people lived in relative security. The villages shared the river and merged into cities. To tap the bounty of the Nile required the cooperation and organization of the people, with social and political structures developing therefrom. All power was invested in the pharaohs, who were both kings and gods. Below the pharaoh was a vast bureaucracy that rested on the shoulders of the workers and the peasantry. Egypt’s people, however, who built enduring stone monuments for their pharaohs, were racked with a debilitating disease, snail fever. And although medical science began in Egypt, the doctors and surgeons could not keep this disease at bay. There is a reason for this: the early civilizations of Egypt and those of the Fertile Crescent (Sumer, Assyria, and Babylon) were based on agriculture, and this agriculture required irrigation and/or natural flooding by the rivers. Irrigation farming, especially in the tropics, created conditions favorable for the transmission of snail fever caused by the blood fluke. Blood fluke disease—the plague of the pharaohs—is not a fatal disease, as is malaria or yellow fever; it is, however, a corrosive disease. And although there may have been a time when the natural flooding of the Nile River made snail fever a seasonal problem, once there was irrigation it became a year-round problem, since infections could be acquired from the standing water in the irrigation channels. Consequently, as William McNeill wrote in his book Plagues and Peoples,

      there was a listless and debilitated peasantry handicapped … for the … demanding task of resisting military attack or throwing off alien political domination and economic exploitation. Lassitude and chronic malaise … induced by parasitic infections was conducive to successful invasion by the only kind of large-bodied predators human beings have to fear: their own kind, armed and organized for war and political conquest.

      McNeill also suggested that the rule of the pharaohs may have been due to the power of the snail and the blood fluke and malaria—the classic plagues of Egypt—which debilitated the populace.

      And so it was that snail fever did its work. By 660 B.C., Egypt became subject to internal political dissension and to attack by their iron-armed neighbors (the Assyrians), and their civilization, based on agriculture and copper weapons, began to collapse. The Persians overran Egypt in 525 B.C. The cause of snail fever, the disease that set the Egyptian civilization on its inexorable downward spiral, was unknown to the ancient Egyptians because the transmission stages of the parasite (eggs, miracidia, and cercaria) are microscopic; in addition, the adult worms themselves are tiny and live within the small blood vessels, and so they were unnoticed for thousands of years.

       Search for the destroyer

      Blood fluke disease, also known as snail fever and endemic hematuria, involves feces or urine, water, snails, and a flatworm. The first Europeans to experience the disease on any scale appear to have been the soldiers of Napoleon’s army during the invasion of Egypt (1799-1801). The symptoms of the disease, bloody urine, were rife among the soldiers. Baron Jean Larey, a military surgeon, noted its high frequency in the men; he believed, however, that the excessive heat during the long marches was the cause. The connection between hematuria and a parasite did not occur until 1851. In that year Theodor Bilharz, a German physician working in Egypt, while carrying out an autopsy on a young man, made a startling discovery: worms were found in the blood vessels, a location never before encountered (Fig. 3.2E). He named the worm Distomum (meaning “two mouths”) haematobium (from the Greek words haema, meaning “blood,” and bios, meaning “to live in”). In 1858 the name was changed to Schistosoma (from the Greek words schisto, meaning “split,” and soma, meaning “body”). Today, blood fluke disease is called schistosomiasis or bilharzia, the latter in honor of Bilharz’s discovery. (During World War I, British soldiers found it easier to call the disease “Bill Harris.”)


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