The Common Cold

One often hears some version of, "If they can send a man to the moon, why can't they cure the common cold?"  Well, for starters there are probably 200 or so different versions of "the" common cold, so you'd need 200 cures.  They are all viruses, which scientists put into several groups, including the Rhinoviruses (the most common), and Coronaviruses, also known as Covid.

Symptoms vary but all include sniffling and aching and maybe running a fever.  One's body does build up immunity, so by the time a person has been around for a while they don't catch nearly as many colds, as they've already had and recovered from a large proportion of them.  Children, as every daycare knows, catch lots of colds, because their immune system is still developing and is meeting colds for the first time.  Influenza is another viral disease, again with a number of different strains, potentially more deadly than a cold and usually not involving sniffles, though it can make a person feel terrible otherwise.

In spite of the name, you won't "catch cold" by going outdoors without a sweater.  But the  cells in your nose that fight off foreign invaders (like viruses) may be less effective when they're chilly, making colds spread more readily, especially when people are mostly indoors during the winter months, breathing each others' air.

(Don't try to treat viral diseases with antibiotics.  Antibiotics are effective against living creatures like bacteria, which viruses are not, and overuse of antibiotics helps antibiotic-resistant bacteria to develop.  This health tip brought to you courtesy of this blog.)

Wait, you say, didn't you just mention Covid a couple paragraphs back?  What's with that?  Yes indeed, I did, because Covid-19 is a Coronovirus, related to though a lot more serious than the "common cold" versions.  It's called "19" because it was first identified in 2019.  (The number has nothing to do with the number of pounds you gained in 2020, staying home, getting no exercise, but filling your time baking sourdough bread and cinnamon rolls.)

But what, you say, does this have to do with the Middle Ages?  You're about to find out.

Some version of "the common cold" has been around for a long time, the sniffles being described by physicians in ancient Egypt.  But there is emerging evidence that one of the Coronovirus versions of the cold first appeared in humans in the thirteenth century.  Like many viruses (including Covid-19), it probably developed first in animals and then made the jump to humans.

It was a killer.  A lot of people got very sick and died.  It was not nearly as bad as the Black Death in the fourteenth century, but it was bad.  Without modern vaccines, people had to rely on their own immune systems and on friends and family keeping them warm and fed.  This is when it became a great act of charity to endow a hospital, to care for the sick and the indigent.

This disease was probably comparable in effect to modern Covid-19, and like Covid-19 it mutated readily, each iteration being somewhat less deadly but somewhat more infectious.  It seems most likely that this medieval form of Covid, now just starting to be studied seriously by historians of medicine, is still with us.  We know we still have a version of Covid that killed a lot of people in Russia in the 1890s, before becoming less deadly.  So it seems Covid-19 is going to be with us permanently, in some form.

By the way, there are a number of "just so stories" about medieval people, some of which involve colds and are clearly untrue.  No medieval priest taught that your soul would escape as you sneezed or coughed, or that the devil would zip into the vacancy your soul left behind.  So stories that people said "Bless you" to encourage your soul to stay put, or that they coughed into a handkerchief to keep the soul from escaping, are just untrue.  People have doubtless said some version of "Bless you" or "Gesundheit" (meaning Good Health) as long as people have sneezed, because sniffles are an illness you hope the person recovers from.  And they coughed into handkerchiefs because, even without knowing about viruses, no one likes a sick person spraying on them.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on medieval health and disease and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Leprosy

 Before the Covid pandemic, people would often try to understand the horrors of the fourteenth-century Black Death by saying it must have been like AIDS.  Actually, no.  Even though AIDS has, over the last 35 years or so, killed a lot more people than have been killed (so far) by Covid, it's not particularly like the Black Death (on which see more here).

The actual Black Death (first outbreak in medieval Europe in 1347) was very infectious and transformed society abruptly, with people going from infection to death in a very short time, whereas AIDS is not very infectious, requiring contact of bodily fluids, and, now that the medical profession has worked out treatments, not a death sentence.  (Well, life is a death sentence, but we're not going into that right now.)

Actually the Black Death was more like Covid-19, in its abrupt appearance, rapid spread, and impact on all of society.  But we're not going to have a third of our population dead in a few years, as in the fourteenth century, and there actually are treatments and vaccines, which they did not have then.  (Note:  there were no "Black Death Deniers" in 1347.)

AIDS is more like leprosy, in that it infected a fairly small proportion of the population, and those infected were avoided both as (potential) spreaders of infection and as people considered morally as well as physically compromised.

But let's talk about leprosy itself.  The disease appears in the Bible, called "unclean" in the Old Testament.  In the New Testament Jesus cleansed lepers.  Now it's not entirely clear if all these people in ancient times actually had what we now call leprosy, or if some might have had some other skin disease, but DNA tests have shown the bacterial disease we now call leprosy has been around for thousands of years.  It is also now called Hansen's disease, after the Norwegian doctor Hansen, who in the late nineteenth century first identified the bacterium that causes it.

As a bacterial disease, it can be cured with modern antibiotics, but there was no cure before the mid-twentieth century, and it is still fairly prevalent in some parts of the world, especially India.  The disease attacks the skin and the nerves, so that the infected person may not notice they have wounds, leading to loss of digits especially.  Someone with discolored skin, missing fingers, and maybe shuffling along half blind was frightening.  (Leprosy often infects the eyes.)

Medieval people both feared and pitied lepers.  Although leprosy was (and is) hard to catch, medieval people didn't want to take chances.  Thus lepers were isolated and were supposed to avoid the general population, ringing a bell if they had to go somewhere, to warn people to get out of their way.  The "unclean" of the Bible gave lepers a moral and social stigma, so they were not just frightening but despicable.  The disease has always spread more easily among those living very close together, especially the poor, and encampments of outcasts were "unclean" in the full sense of the word.

But medieval people also pitied lepers and wanted to be Christ-like and, if not actually cleanse them (heal them completely), at least help them.  Just as many hospitals were established in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, hundreds of leper-houses were set up, essentially sanitariums where lepers would live isolated but properly taken care of.  These were called Lazarus houses, due to the belief that Lazarus, who Jesus brings back from the dead in the Bible, had died of leprosy.  (The Bible doesn't actually say he was a leper, but it's a good story.)

Fun fact:  The abbey of Fontevraud had a leper-house associated with it in the twelfth century, called appropriately St.-Lazare.  It has been remodeled into a luxury hotel.  I bet the Americans who stay there have no idea.  The Paris train station St.-Lazare is located on the site of a medieval leper house.

Leprosy reached the Pacific islands in the nineteenth century.  A leper colony was established on the island of Molokai in the Hawaiian islands, on a lava beach at the bottom of steep cliffs.  Lepers were rowed to nearby, pushed overboard and told to swim to shore.  A Catholic priest, Damien De Veuster, took care of them until he finally caught leprosy himself and died.  He has now been canonized as Saint Damien.  The lepers were there until the later twentieth century, when they were finally cured, though some stayed on at the colony, which had been their home for so long.  The Molokai tourist bureau offered tourists a chance to ride a donkey down the very steep cliff to visit the lepers.  (And they wonder why their island has no high-rise hotels.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2021
For more on medieval hygiene and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

After the plague

As I have posted before, the Middle Ages certainly had epidemics, most notably the Black Death, usually known now as the bubonic plague (it also had a variant, the pneumonic plague, even more virulent).  I used to have trouble explaining to my students how serious the plague was in the fourteenth century and how much it disrupted what one might think of as normal.  Some would say, Is it like AIDS?  No, because AIDS is not particularly contagious, and people can live with it for years.  In the future it may be easier to explain the plague:  it's more like COVID-19.

Now the plague was far more deadly than our current epidemic.   Estimates are that maybe a third of Europe's population was wiped out within a year or two.  We are nowhere near that figure yet, but there's still time.

Part of Europe's problem in the fourteenth century was that it was impossible to practice "social distancing."  Houses were small and close together, so for most people "self-quarantining" away from everyone else was just not possible.  The same problem, that one cannot put distance between oneself and other people, is why the current disease has spread so rapidly in places like cruise ships, prisons, and Mediterranean countries where houses are still small and close together.  In the case of the plague, the disease could be spread by fleas, so staying 6 (or 12) feet apart was not going to be enough anyway.

Without modern medical treatments and sanitizers, medieval people could try to flee (often taking the disease with them), but the overall response was by necessity something close to what is now described as "ride it out," keep on trying to act normal, and figure that after a while everyone who was going to die is dead, and the rest either are immune or have recovered.

Well, the problem with that approach then (as it would be now) is that an awful lot of people die, and whatever health care facilities you have are overwhelmed, so a lot of those who die might have had a chance to recover in better circumstances.

And what happens then?  Well, in spite of happy hopes one sometimes hears expressed, you can't just restart an economy devastated by a pandemic.  In fourteenth-century Europe, trade routes had been completely disrupted, cities (the centers of economic exchange) decimated, churches and law courts emptied, and any sense of optimism for the future dealt a pretty significant blow.  You can't just put an economy back together when a lot of the people on whom the economy depends are dead.

Europe's cities shrank and did not return to their pre-plague size for at least another century.  Italian merchants who survived stopped putting their money into commerce, which looked decidedly iffy, and started patronizing art instead, kick-starting the Italian Renaissance.  Religious expression became far more morbid, with "dance of death" a common artistic scene:  Death is portrayed dancing across the countryside, bringing everyone with him, rich and poor, young and old, men and women.

Many started creating what might be considered double-decker tombstones, two depictions of the deceased carved in stone, one above the other like bunk beds.  In one the deceased would be seen dressed and peacefully sleeping, as seen in elite tombs for generations.  In the other, the deceased would be depicted as partially decayed, complete with worms carved in stone.

The only ones to come out of the plague better off (besides the Italian artists) were the peasants, if one can put "better off" and "many friends and family members dead" in the same sentence.  Europe had been overpopulated, without enough land (using fourteenth-century techniques and crops) to adequately feed the population.  Losing a third to a half of the population certainly solved that pesky problem!  Peasant families could start farming more land, because a lot of their neighbors were gone.  Landlords who relied on peasant rents and labor had to lower rents or pay more for labor if they didn't want to have to grow their own food themselves, because there was competition for the surviving peasant workers.

In some places landlords fought back.  England for example passed laws trying to keep peasants from demanding higher wages or lower rents.  These were not nearly as successful as hoped.  The peasants in turn fought back, becoming aware, really for the first time, that they had common cause with peasants around the country, resulting in the great Peasants Revolt of 1381.  But that's a story for another time.

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

For more on medieval disease and other aspects of medieval history, see my book Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook  and on-line platforms.