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Contagion
Contagion
Perspectives from Pre-Modern Societies
Edited by
Lawrence I. Conrad
and Dominik Wujastyk
First published 2000 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2017 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
,
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group an informa business
Copyright © The editors and authors, 2000
The authors have asserted their moral right under the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Contagion: Perspectives from Pre-Modern Societies.
1. Communicable diseases-History. 2. Communicable
diseases-Social aspects-History. 3. Medicine, Ancient.
I. Conrad, Lawrence I., 1949- II. Wujastyk, Dominik.
306. 4’ 61’ 0901
US Library of Congress Control Number: 00-104025
Designed and typset with Tj3C at the Wellcome Institute for this History
of Medicine.
ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-0258-3 (hbk)
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction ix
I CHINA 1
1 Epidemics, Weather, and Contagion in Traditional Chinese Medicine
Shigehisa Kuriyama 3
2 Dispersing the Foetal Toxin of the Body: Conceptions of Smallpox
Aetiology in Pre-modern China
Chia-Feng Chang 23
3 The Threatening Stranger: Kewu in Pre-Modern Chinese Paediatrics
Christopher Cullen 39
II INDIA 53
4 Notions of “Contagion” in Classical Indian Medical Texts
Rahul Peter Das 35
5 Does Ancient Indian Medicine Have a Theory of Contagion?
Kenneth G. Zysk 79
v
VI
III MIDDLE EAST and EUROPE 97
6 Old Testament “Leprosy”, Contagion and Sin
Elinor Lieber 99
7 Did the Greeks Have a Word for It?
Vivian Nutton 137
8 A Ninth-Century Muslim Scholars Discussion of Contagion
Lawrence I. Conrad 163
9 Contagion and Leprosy: Myth, Ideas and Evolution in Medieval
Minds and Societies
Fran^ois-Olivier Touati 179
Contributors 203
Index 205
Prefa ce
The papers in this volume were originally presented at a conference on con
tagion in pre-modern societies held at the Wellcome Institute for the History
of Medicine in 1993. Since then, the papers have been substantially revised
for publication. A goal of that conference was to explore a key concept in
medical history across the boundaries not only of time, but also of culture
and language. This goal remains central to the present volume. Historians
are, by definition, professionally concerned with negotiating the pathways of
past time, to which medical historians must add a specifically medical insight.
But all too often the apparent otherness of cultural and linguistic difference
presents a barrier which is not negotiated, and many histories claiming gen
erality in reality focus on small, bounded parts of the “western” world, and
exclude relevant data which happens to be recorded in non-European lan
guages. It is therefore a source of special satisfaction to be able to present this
volume, in which the history of an important medical concept is genuinely
chased down in all parts of the globe, and through sources produced in many
classical and modern languages from both East and West. This effort has in
volved the collaboration of historians with exceptionally wide-ranging skills
in languages and in cultural studies, and has been an enriching experience for
all concerned with the preparation of this book.
It is the pleasant duty of the editors to acknowledge the assistance of
Mohsina Somji in preparing the typescript of this volume. We would also
like to thank Barbara Hird, registered indexer of the Society of Indexers, for
preparing the index with such care and precision.
Vll
Introduction
‘Contagion’ - even today the word conjures fears of serious disease, of un
controllable outbreaks of drug-resistant bacteria, of viruses like Ebola and
HIV. Older terrors such as malaria, cholera, and even tuberculosis, are still
extremely dangerous and continue to kill people in large numbers. The pro
gress of the biomedical sciences is shadowed by the parallel process of adapta
tion and mutation amongst pathogens, so that the threat of new outbreaks of
contagious disease remains a very present one. Popular treatments of conta
gion in fiction, printed and film, today attract mass audiences, as they have at
least since the fourteenth century, when Boccaccio framed his Decameron as
tales told while in refuge from a devastating plague, which he did not hesitate
to describe in gory detail. The idea of contagion clearly retains the power to
fascinate and terrify.
Contagious disease was an even greater threat to past generations of man
kind all over the world. Diseases like bubonic plague, smallpox, syphilis,
tuberculosis, cholera, and influenza, which are today preventable or treatable
in varying degrees, killed adults and children in vast numbers. Although the
biomedical sciences provide the dominant contemporary explanatory model
for contagious disease, broadly speaking in terms of germ theory, there re
mains a certain cognitive dissonance in the minds of many people outside
the medical establishment. When AIDS first emerged as a global health prob
lem, there was no shortage of irrational voices claiming that the disease was
a punishment for an immoral lifestyle. In some ways this echoed the theolo
gical debates which surrounded the discovery of smallpox vaccination at the
end of the eighteenth century. At that time many opposed vaccination on
the grounds that disease was a just punishment for sin. Today, popular beliefs
about disease causation are by no means always closely aligned with the cur
rent medical orthodoxy. In early 1999, Glen Hoddle, coach of the England
football team, was widely vilified in the press, and subsequently obliged to
resign, for publicly stating his belief that disease and disability were attribut-
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