16th Century U.K. Epidemics and its Impact on the British - Essay Example

16th Century U.K. Epidemics and its Impact on the British This paper discusses the impact of epidemics upon the British people in the 16th century (1500-1600) with reference to three common diseases. The first part is a brief introduction on what an epidemic is and its causes. The second part is on England before and during the 16th century to show why it became prone to epidemics. The third part is on epidemics of malaria, influenza, and the plague in 16th century England and its effects on the English people and their history. Epidemics: Nature and Causes An epidemic is an outbreak of a contagious disease that affects an unusually large proportion of people or involves an extensive geographical area. Epidemics such as the recent SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) outbreak in Asia may last for a few months, but some last for years, such as the plague that ravaged Europe for six centuries (Encarta, 2007; Ranger & Slack, 1992). Epidemiology is the study of how diseases are transmitted and how people infected by diseases can be cured to control the extent of epidemics. Diseases are caused by organisms such as bacteria or parasites, some of which lie dormant until they reside in a living host. Others are caused by viruses, strands of DNA that enter cells of living creatures and cause mutations that affect the living body. Once these organisms enter the host through infection, they multiply and cause the host to get sick, turning the host into a carrier of disease-causing organisms in very large numbers. Disease-causing organisms are spread by contamination of food and water, physical contact, or the exchange of bodily fluids like saliva, semen, or blood, or through insects, rodents, and other disease-carrying animals known as vectors or agents that infect human populations. In the past, these diseases were believed to be caused by "germs" that spread their evil effects in the air. So lethal were these germs that they changed the fates of human societies in the last 13,000 years (Diamond, 2005). Germs went through a deadly cycle of mutation and adaptation, infecting animals and humans, each mutation giving rise to deadlier forms or diseases. Bacteria, parasites, and viruses need to eat in order to live and multiply. Germs (or microbes) do not exist to kill other living beings. Death is an unfortunate consequence, and if germs had their way, they would prefer their hosts to stay healthy, as millions of bacteria already do in the human body, helping in digestion and fighting deadlier diseases. Disease and death are unintended consequences of germs finding living bodies in which to live, encouraged by environmental conditions and the habits of the living hosts. Poor living conditions and poor sanitation, the concentration of populations into a smaller area that encouraged greater and frequent social contact, the thirst for discovery and travel to foreign lands, the search for greater wealth and prosperity, changes in weather conditions, and even a rise in promiscuity were the factors that increased the frequency of disease and epidemics (Wilkinson, 1992). Epidemics eventually die down once the conditions for their transmission disappear. In several parts of Europe in the Middle Ages, the plague disappeared from a town because half its population who were still healthy and uninfected were able to get away, while half including animals were infected and died. With no new living hosts, the bacteria could not survive. Weather changes also affected the rate of infection, whether they encouraged people to stay home or to go out. Either way, infection could spread at a faster rate through proximity and social contact. These conditions led to epidemics that would die down when these factors disappear. England in the 16th Century At the turn of the 16th century, Spain and Portugal was the European superpower, and having just discovered America through Columbus, it launched until the middle of the 16th century several sea voyages that led to the discovery of South America, Africa, the Pacific Ocean, and the eastern boundaries of Asia. Henry VIII was crowned King of England in 1509. English society at the beginning of the 16th century was chaotic, its economy driven by trade and commerce, and it was not until the defeat by the English Navy of the Spanish Armada in 1588 during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I that it started its rise to become the mighty global empire that lasted until America took its place in the 20th century. Sixteenth century England was marked by revolutions and civil wars, as political lines realigned among the nobility from the Reformation that Martin Luther launched in 1517. The English king's break with the Church in 1534 added to the wars the English fought against the Scots and the Welsh with whom they shared the British Isles and against France, Spain-Portugal, and the Netherlands. The Reformation led to civil and political strife that reshaped the map of England depending on which side of the religious divide the feudal leaders aligned themselves. These conflicts led to the movement of large human populations. As wars ravaged the countryside and work opportunities sprung up outside the farms, the English moved to larger cities like London, the capital, and the port towns. This migration of people had been going on for years from the inner towns of England to the sea, as displaced and unemployed farmers looked for employment as day laborers, seamen, or pirates, their families joining them to find whatever jobs were becoming plentiful and available. This mass movement, which continued throughout the 16th century and into the next, led to the recurring incidents of epidemics in England until the 19th century. Writing a century later, Boghurst (1665 in Campion, 1993) cited the following as the causes of the plague: "thicknes (sic) of inhabitants; those living as many families in a house; living in cellars; want of fitting accommodations, as good fires, good dyett (sic), washing, want of good conveyances of filth; standing and stinking waters; dung hills, excrements, dead bodies lying unburied and putrefying; churchyards too full crammed; unseasonable weather ..." Graunt (1662 in Campion, 1993) wrote of a "precise physico-mathematical relationship between the waxing and waning of diseases and the quality of the built environment." He argued that when people abandoned living in large houses in the wide open farms in favor of small tenements in crowded urban centers that promoted urban diseases, mortality increased. These poor lodgings with poor sanitation practices attracted poor inmates and lodgers, filling large communities with pests, dirt, poverty and disease as disease-carrying seafarers and animals infected the healthy humans and animals who unwittingly offered their relatively clean bodies as unconscious hosts. The crowded cities were breeding grounds for epidemics that spread within England and, with English sea voyages in the next centuries, spread all over the world. England's 16th Century Epidemics and their Impact Three notable epidemics broke out in England for which records are available. From 1485 to 1551, sweating sickness from an influenza virus struck England. Since the 15th century, malaria from a parasite was endemic in the marshes and seacoasts of England. And from 1348 to 1665, England was subjected to intermittent epidemics of the bacteria that caused the plague. Influenza (Sweating Sickness) In the summer of 1485, a rapidly fatal infectious fever struck England, "a new kind of sickness which was so sore, painful, and sharp that the like was never heard of to any man's remembrance before that time" (Grafton, 1569 in Thwaits et al., 1997). The disease was Sudor Anglicus, more commonly referred to as English Sweating Sickness: sudden headaches, myalgia, fever, profuse sweating, and hardness of breathing. In the summers of 1508, 1517, 1528, and 1551, epidemics of English sweating sickness reappeared and then suddenly disappeared. Slack (1985) and Creighton (1965) distinguished the disease from plague, malaria and typhoid fever. Given the symptoms and recurrence patterns, Roberts (1965) and Patrick (1965) argued that the sickness could be influenza or food poisoning, or caused by a virus (Wyle & Collier, 1981; Hunter, 1991). The disease swept through East Anglia and Hertfordshire in the late 15th century and had spread all over the land by 1551, recurring mostly during the summer months of July and August. Despite all accounts in parish registers since 1538 being seemingly exaggerated (Thwaits et al, 1997), the pattern of the epidemic was well documented. A rise in deaths occurred in the summer months, with some infected people dying within three hours. In some towns half the people died and, in some, a third of the population became fatalities as the fervent and infectious sweat transmitted the virus from one sick person to the next healthy one. The disease was infectious, rapid, and fatal with a marked pulmonary component, but without leaving any visible lesions or colored spots on the skin, leading Wylie & Collier (1981) to suggest that the infectious agent was likely to reside in a mammalian or avian host. They concluded that an arbovirus with a rodent reservoir and an arthropod vector is the most probable agent of the sickness. Rodent populations are largest in late summer or early autumn, coinciding with the peak incidence of the disease, and the scientific investigations showed that the sickness is a form of a pulmonary Hantavirus that attacks the lungs and leads to death in 72 hours. The sickness occurred in July, August, and early September and disappeared at the start of winter. The sickness had a distinct age and sex predisposition: most of those afflicted were men between the ages 30 and 40. Very few women, children, or old men died of the disease. And among the male victims, most were from the upper classes although it is possible that the accounts of fatalities are biased in the absence of precise records and the fact that the rich had a higher social profile than victims from the lower classes (Thwaits et al, 1997). The sweating sickness, by killing middle-aged males in the upper classes of English society, contributed to the political and economic chaos of the period. For example, there are accounts that the Duke of Suffolk and his brother died of the sweating sickness during the 1551 epidemic (Thwaits et al, 1997), leaving their wealth, farmlands, the people, and their loyalties hanging in the air. Such events that led to uncertainty had an influence on the way the surviving family members cast their political and religious loyalties. It is also possible that in some cases where fatalities among the nobility left no surviving heirs, the wealth were passed on to the steward, grabbed by the most powerful serf, or fell into the arms of the nearest powerful family. Malaria (Ague, Tertian or Quartan Fever) There is evidence that indigenous malaria ("the ague") occurred in England. Ague originally meant any acute fever, and while epidemic fevers before the 14th century were labeled as agues or plague-agues, contemporary descriptions suggested that malaria was not the cause and may have been describing typhus (Chin & Welsby, 2004). By the 14th century ague was referred to as tertian or quartan fevers (fevers occurring every third or fourth day) and appeared in the literary works of Chaucer and Shakespeare. It was only much later that the causes of the agues were discovered to be the parasites Plasmodium vivax, P ovale and P falciparum with its tertian periodicity and by P malariae with a quartan periodicity (Chin & Welsby, 2004). From 1564 to the 1730s-the coldest period of the Little Ice Age-malaria was an important cause of illness and death in several parts of England (Dobson, 1980). Infection was thought to be caused by the "bad air" (which gave rise to the term "malaria") from marshes and lakes during the wet summer months. Not until the end of the 19th century was it discovered that malaria was caused by parasites transmitted to humans and animals by the Anopheles mosquito. The disease was prevalent in the breeding grounds of this mosquito, such as brackish water along river estuaries, in the Fens, the marshes of the Thames estuary and southeast Kent, low lying country in Somerset, and the Ribble district of Lancashire. The Lambeth and Westminster marshes in London were also notorious, and in the 18th and 19th centuries ague extended into Scotland, with occasional transmission as far north as Inverness (Chin & Welsby, 2004). Malaria was characterized by feverish chills that came off and on. The sick patient is short-winded, disposed to sighing, and indisposed to exertion as the blood is forced into the lungs and rendered thick. The pulse rate speeds up, weakens, and becomes irregular as the fever increases in severity and the body collapses and dies unless it manages to recover with luck. The cure was not discovered until the next century with the use of cinchona bark, a tree found in the Andes in South America and processed into the present remedy quinine. Those who survived a bout of ague become lifetime carriers of the parasite, and though they do not transmit it to others even with the exchange of bodily fluids, the feverish bouts could recur but without the fatal consequences. The poor farmers who lived near the marshlands were the first to succumb to malaria, but the upper classes who loved to hunt in those areas also became victims of the disease as described by the famous writer Defoe (1986). Ordinary people suffered in these marshes but had to risk living there because the land was excellent for rearing high-quality sheep and cattle, and landlords were willing to pay high wages. However, the non-immune were in great danger, and as Defoe observed, it was common for a man to have as many as fifteen wives in his lifetime as their wives from other parts of the land were infected and died early, usually during childbirth, or if the poor wife survived, she would be left weak and emaciated, so the men just looked for another. Aside from the effect that malaria had on the female population and the morality of the sheep and cattle farmers in the area, the disease had similar effects on the people of all social classes. With annual mortality rates of as much as 10% of the marshland population, malaria affected the distribution of lands from the 16th century onwards and increased the incomes of the hardy farmers who decided to stay to do farming until the eradication of the disease with the discovery of cheaper medications and the use of chemicals in the 20th century (Dobson, 1994). The Plague (Bubonic) The plague in its various forms was the most serious killer disease that England had ever known until it suddenly and mysteriously subsided after the Great Plague of London in 1665 (Creighton, 1965; Gottfried, 1978/1983; Shrewsbury, 1970). Various estimates showed that as much as 40% of the living population of every town and city in England perished during the plagues that ravaged the country beginning in the 14th century at the start of the Black Death epidemic in 1348. Thought to have originated somewhere in India, the plague inched westward to Europe through traders bringing goods from the East and from refugees fleeing the mysterious deaths taking place in the region (Twigg, 1993). The plague was spread when rat fleas carrying deadly bacteria later identified as Y pestis infested humans living in crowded conditions. The bacteria caused internal hemorrhaging, fever, buboes, swelling of the lymph node, and freckles or pestilential points, darkish points or pustules covering large areas of the body. The disease reached epidemic proportions upon transmission of bodily fluids from an infected person and, much later, when graveyards became so overcrowded that decomposed bodies released bacteria into the soil, farm products, and the water supply. Poor sanitation, the increased movements of the people escaping disease and war that led to greater human contact from the infected to the clean, and the religious crisis the led to moral confusion and promiscuity accelerated the spread of the plague (Twigg, 1993). As in other places in the world where plague epidemics erupted, there were radical social consequences. Populations were decimated as the disease struck rich and poor alike. The properties of the dead were claimed by the survivors, who saw their wages rise as labor shortages took place in the farms, pastures, and in the royal courts. Each plague was then followed by an economic boom as the newly rich began spending on clothes, furnishings, and all other possessions. At the same time, the discarded clothes of the plague victims were converted into paper that was in increasing demand shortly after the discovery of printing by Gutenberg in the late 15th century (Twigg, 1993). The plague also resulted in the sharp decrease of Catholic clergy in a country fighting against the spread of Protestantism, as most Catholic religious dedicated themselves to caring for the sick were infected and died. The decline in the number of religious and the relaxation of morals among the survivors marked the beginning of a social change in the behavior among the English as in other places in Europe (Creighton, 1965). However, not all the survivors decided to stay behind. Those who were persecuted in parts of England and who found the economic situation chaotic and the prospects of political freedom gloomy decided to flee Europe and sail to the West. Whether as adventurers seeking new sources of wealth or ordinary survivors of the plague looking for cleaner lands to start a new life, the Pilgrims who sailed to the New World became the tough, hard-working, and freedom-loving people who were the ancestors of the white Americans (Diamond, 2005). Conclusion: Epidemics and English History Epidemics were a factor in the development of English history given the example of 16th century England. The epidemics of sweating sickness, malaria, and the plague decimated populations and redistributed wealth, helped realign political and religious affiliations, freed natural resources and helped these to adapt to the demands of the population, and resulted in a relaxation of morals, civil disorder, and the drafting of laws to help establish social order. 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