Category: History

In Middle Ages the Less Credentialed Offered “Daily Care,” While “Experts” Theorized

(p. 12) A new book about medieval views on medicine helps explain the Oby nuns’ contentment with the cheapness of their lives. In “Medieval Bodies: Life and Death in the Middle Ages,” the British art historian Jack Hartnell tackles a difficult phenomenon: the medieval embrace of medical “theories that have since been totally disproven to the point of absurdity but which nevertheless could not have seemed more vivid or logical in the Middle Ages.”

The doctors of Europe and the Mediterranean were not practical specialists but rather scholars of Greek and Roman natural philosophy, which taught a theory of nature composed of four basic elements (fire, water, earth, air). Each was associated with differing levels of moisture and heat. The human body contained four viscous liquids or “humors”: phlegm, blood, yellow bile and black bile. A doctor’s job was to correct an uneven humoral balance, drying up perceived wetness with spices or relieving an excess of heat with cooling herbs.

While experts promulgated theory, daily care was mostly administered by midwives, apothecaries, dentists and the odd entrepreneurial carpenter. A local barber might puncture your neck to drain three pints of blood if you complained of a headache.

For the full review see:

Josephine Livingstone. “Death by a Thousand Cuts.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, January 5, 2020 [sic]): 12.

(Note: the online version of the review has the date Nov. 19, 2019 [sic], and has the title “Bad Bishops, Bloodletting and a Plague of Caterpillars.”)

The book under review is:

Hartnell, Jack. Medieval Bodies: Life and Death in the Middle Ages. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019.

Not All Indians Were Peaceful Saints

The scalp of William Thompson. Source of photo: Omaha Public Library.

As I child I played cowboys and Indians. We used to fire the fake rifles at the frontier fort on Tom Sawyer Island in Disneyland. Today you cannot do that since it is politically correct to believe that before the arrival of universally evil Europeans all Indians were peace-loving environmentalists. The belief is false. But The Walt Disney Company in California has bought the falsehood, closing the Disneyland frontier fort so that children can no longer pretend to defend civilization. (In Florida, where civilization yet survives, The Walt Disney Company still allows children to play in the Magic Kingdom version of the frontier fort.)

(p. E1) I’m leading off with my nomination for the most bizarre item ever exhibited in Omaha. It’s been around for more than 150 years, and it’s a shame if you haven’t seen it–that is, as long as you’re not too squeamish It used to belong to William Thompson, an Englishman who was employed by Union Pacific on the new transcontinental railroad.

In 1867, while working at Plum Creek Station, near Lexington, Nebraska, Thompson was scalped by a band of the Northern Cheyenne. He was left for dead, but when he recovered consciousness, he found his scalp not far away. Remarkably, he put it in a bucker of salt water and headed to Omaha on a rescue train. On arrival he asked Dr. Richard Moore to reattach it. That wasn’t possible, so he kept it as a souvenir. Later he gave the preserved scalp to Moore, who donated it to the Omaha Public Library in 1900. Since then, it has been exhibited from time to time at both the old Union Pacific Museum and the main library. OPL took it off public exhibit in 1977, but it made a surprise appearance in 2012 for the library’s 140th anniversary celebration. I am grateful to library specialist Lynn Sullivan for a private showing last year of the desiccated scalp, complete with a nice shock of sandy-orange hair.

For the full story see:

Marks, Bob. “Weird, Wild and Wonderful Exhibits Here.” Omaha World-Herald (Sunday, March 21, 2024): E1-E2.

During Black Death Only 7 of 21 Regions of Europe Had Catastrophic Decline in Agricultural Activity

(p. D4) In the mid-1300s, a species of bacteria spread by fleas and rats swept across Asia and Europe, causing deadly cases of bubonic plague. The “Black Death” is one of the most notorious pandemics in historical memory, with many experts estimating that it killed roughly 50 million Europeans, the majority of people across the continent.

“The data is sufficiently widespread and numerous to make it likely that the Black Death swept away around 60 percent of Europe’s population,” Ole Benedictow, a Norwegian historian and one of the leading experts on the plague, wrote in 2005. When Dr. Benedictow published “The Complete History of the Black Death” in 2021, he raised that estimate to 65 percent.

But those figures, based on historical documents from the time, greatly overestimate the true toll of the plague, according to a study published on Thursday [Feb. 10, 2022]. By analyzing ancient deposits of pollen as markers of agricultural activity, researchers from Germany found that the Black Death caused a patchwork of destruction. Some regions of Europe did indeed suffer devastating losses, but other regions held stable, and some even boomed.

. . .

Losing half the population would have turned many farms fallow. Without enough herders to tend livestock, pastures would have become overgrown. Shrubs and trees would have taken over, eventually replaced by mature forests.

If the Black Death did indeed cause such a shift, Dr. Izdebski and his colleagues reasoned, they should be able to see it in the species of pollen that survived from the Middle Ages. Every year, plants release vast amounts of pollen into the air, and some of it ends up on the bottom of lakes and wetlands. Buried in the mud, the grains can survive sometimes for centuries.

To see what pollen had to say about the Black Death, Dr. Izdebski and his colleagues picked out 261 sites across Europe — from Ireland and Spain in the west to Greece and Lithuania in the east — that held grains preserved from around 1250 to 1450.

In some regions, such as Greece and central Italy, the pollen told a story of devastation. Pollen from crops like wheat dwindled. Dandelions and other flowers in pastureland faded. Fast-growing trees like birch appeared, followed by slow-growing ones like oaks.

But that was hardly the rule across Europe. In fact, just seven out of 21 regions the researchers studied underwent a catastrophic shift. In other places, the pollen registered little change at all.

. . .

Monica Green, an independent historian based in Phoenix, speculated that the Black Death might have been caused by two strains of the bacteria Yersinia pestis, which could have caused different levels of devastation. Yersinia DNA collected from medieval skeletons hints at this possibility, she said.

In their study, Dr. Izdebski and his colleagues did not examine that possibility, but they did consider a number of other factors, including the climate and density of populations in different parts of Europe. But none accounted for the pattern they found.

“There is no simple explanation behind that, or even a combination of simple explanations,” Dr. Izdebski said.

. . .

“What we show is that there are a number of factors, and it’s not easy to predict from the beginning which factors will matter,” he said, referring to how viruses can spread. “You cannot assume one mechanism to work everywhere the same way.”

For the full essay see:

Carl Zimmer. “Questioning the Toll Of a 1300s Pandemic.” The New York Times (Tuesday, February 15, 2022 [sic]): D4.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the essay was updated Feb. 15, 2022 [sic], and has the title “Did the ‘Black Death’ Really Kill Half of Europe? New Research Says No.”)

The book cited above as over-estimating the death toll of the Black Death is:

Benedictow, Ole J. The Complete History of the Black Death. Martlesham, UK: Boydell Press, 2021.

The academic article co-authored by Izdebski and mentioned above is:

Izdebski, A., P. Guzowski, R. Poniat, L. Masci, J. Palli, C. Vignola, M. Bauch, C. Cocozza, R. Fernandes, F. C. Ljungqvist, T. Newfield, A. Seim, D. Abel-Schaad, F. Alba-Sánchez, L. Björkman, A. Brauer, A. Brown, S. Czerwiński, A. Ejarque, M. Fiłoc, A. Florenzano, E. D. Fredh, R. Fyfe, N. Jasiunas, P. Kołaczek, K. Kouli, R. Kozáková, M. Kupryjanowicz, P. Lagerås, M. Lamentowicz, M. Lindbladh, J. A. López-Sáez, R. Luelmo-Lautenschlaeger, K. Marcisz, F. Mazier, S. Mensing, A. M. Mercuri, K. Milecka, Y. Miras, A. M. Noryśkiewicz, E. Novenko, M. Obremska, S. Panajiotidis, M. L. Papadopoulou, A. Pędziszewska, S. Pérez-Díaz, G. Piovesan, A. Pluskowski, P. Pokorny, A. Poska, T. Reitalu, M. Rösch, L. Sadori, C. Sá Ferreira, D. Sebag, M. Słowiński, M. Stančikaitė, N. Stivrins, I. Tunno, S. Veski, A. Wacnik, and A. Masi. “Palaeoecological Data Indicates Land-Use Changes across Europe Linked to Spatial Heterogeneity in Mortality During the Black Death Pandemic.” Nature Ecology & Evolution 6, no. 3 (March 2022): 297-306.

“Large Citizen Science Projects” Use Data Mining to Explore Risk Factors for Canine Cancers

(p. 2) Every dog has its day, and July 14, 2004, belonged to a boxer named Tasha. On that date, the National Institutes of Health announced that the barrel-chested, generously jowled canine had become the first dog to have her complete genome sequenced. “And everything has kind of exploded since then,” said Elaine Ostrander, a canine genomics expert at the National Human Genome Research Institute, who was part of the research team.

. . .

In the 2000s, scientists identified the genetic underpinnings of a variety of canine traits, including curly coats and bobbed tails. They pinpointed mutations that could explain why white boxers were prone to deafness. And they found that corgis, basset hounds and dachshunds owed their stubby legs to a genetic aberration in a family of genes that also regulates bone development in humans.

These early studies “highlighted both the potential that we could learn from dogs, but also that we were going to need bigger sample sizes to do it really well,” said Elinor Karlsson, a geneticist at UMass Chan Medical School and the Broad Institute. And so, researchers began creating large citizen science projects, seeking DNA samples and data from dogs across the United States.

Pet owners rose to the challenge. The Golden Retriever Lifetime Study, which began recruiting in 2012, has been following more than 3,000 dogs in an effort to identify genetic and environmental risk factors for cancer, which is especially common in the breed. Since 2019, the Dog Aging Project, a long-term study of health and longevity, has enrolled nearly 50,000 dogs.

Dr. Karlsson’s own project, Darwin’s Dogs, is at 44,000 canines and counting. (Some 4,000 have had their genomes sequenced.) Researchers are mining the data for clues about bone cancer, compulsive behavior and other traits.

For the full story see:

Emily Anthes. “Scientists’ New Best Friends.” The New York Times, Pets Special Section (Sunday, June 30, 2024): 2.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the same date as the print version, and has the title “How Science Went to the Dogs (and Cats).”)

Mountains Are Not Sublime if You Need a Plain to Survive

(p. 13) Most of the people who have lived on this planet since the invention of agriculture have been peasants.

. . .

The cultivators, it is often assumed, are dreadfully uncultivated. And this alleged lack of sophistication has made them fair game for every kind of depredation. The food they produce has been expropriated by their overlords, by marauding armies and by totalitarian states. They have been conscripted as cannon fodder; entangled in debt and dependency as sharecroppers and serfs; starved, sometimes deliberately, in famines and prisons; forcibly converted to their masters’ religions; herded onto collective farms and slaughtered mercilessly when they revolt.

. . .

. . . very few of the countless millions who have eked a living from the land left enduring accounts of their own lives.

“This,” Joyce wrote, “is a world of a very ancient form of silence, peasant silence, something enmeshed in cultures that are largely oral in nature.”

. . .

“The wild as our sublime,” he writes, “makes no sense to the peasant.” (Joyce cites a Polish peasant interviewed in the 1960s who said, “I like it where the plain is; when I was in America I saw a mountain, and this was an awful view.”)

. . .

Joyce shows how the supreme value of the peasant is generational survival: The great task is to hand on to the child the land the peasant has inherited, making one’s own existence a kind of interlude between past and future.

For the full review, see:

Fintan O’Toole. “Fanfare for the Common Man.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, March 10, 2024): 13.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review was updated Feb. 28, 2024, and has the title “A Love Song to His Roots.”)

The book under review above is:

Joyce, Patrick. Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World. New York: Scribner, 2024.

Chernow Channels McCloskey’s Index Card Advice

In her wonderful paper on how to research well and write clearly, Deirdre McCloskey suggests that we always carry with us a pack of 4 by 6 cards, so that we have them handy when we are hit by an epiphany or hear a relevant quote. (The suggestion probably also appears in the later book versions of her wonderful paper, but I do not have a copy handy to check.)

(p. C11) Mr. Chernow usually spends about twice as much time researching a book as writing it. He types up his research on a computer, so that he has it backed up, and then prints out the individual entries on paper with perforated edges that he can tear into 4-by-6-inch cards. (He was inspired to use index cards by Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote his novels on them.) He then files the cards chronologically and indexes them. His research on Grant fills some 25,000 cards packed into 22 boxes, all stacked up in the office of his Brooklyn brownstone under a big abstract painting.

For the full interview, see:

Alexandra Wolfe. “WEEKEND CONFIDENTIAL; Ron Chernow.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Sept. 16, 2017 [sic]): C11.

(Note: the online version of the interview has the date Sept. 15, 2017 [sic], and has the title “WEEKEND CONFIDENTIAL; Ron Chernow’s New Chapter: Ulysses S. Grant.”)

The main Chernow book discussed in the interview is:

Chernow, Ron. Grant. New York: The Penguin Press, 2017.

McCloskey’s wonderful paper, mentioned above, is:

McCloskey, Deirdre. “Economical Writing.” Economic Inquiry 23, no. 2 (April 1985): 187-222.

Common Ritualistic Human Sacrifice Detract from the Myth of the Past as Golden Age

(p. D2) One thing that’s definitely gotten better over time: not as much ritualistic human sacrifice.

. . .

The authors list some run-of-the-mill techniques for human sacrifice, but others they mention are more, let’s say, specific: being crushed under a newly built canoe, or being rolled off the roof of a house and then decapitated.

For the full story see:

Tatiana Schlossberg. “Hierarchies: A Grisly Social Order.” The New York Times (Tuesday, April 5, 2016 [sic]): D2.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date April 4, 2016 [sic], and has the title “Why Some Societies Practiced Ritual Human Sacrifice.” Where the versions differ, in the passages quoted above I follow the more detailed account in the online version.)

The article quoted above references the following academic article:

Watts, Joseph, Oliver Sheehan, Quentin D. Atkinson, Joseph Bulbulia, and Russell D. Gray. “Ritual Human Sacrifice Promoted and Sustained the Evolution of Stratified Societies.” Nature 532, no. 7598 (April 4, 2016): 228-31.

Mao’s Red Guard “Just Wanted to Beat Us to Death”

(p. C7) The Cultural Revolution is the monster that lurks behind the Communist Party’s claims of harmonious, orderly leadership in China. Under Mao’s direction, fanatical youth turned on their teachers, their parents, all figures of authority. This was an era of torture and violence, committed in many cases by mere children. Nobody was safe—perpetrators became victims, and victims took revenge. As many as two million died, and tens of millions had their lives destroyed.

. . .

In “Red Memory” the author explores how people in 21st-century China continue to process a collective trauma that the government would prefer to erase, even as the Party itself cannot put Mao behind it. The book unfolds as a series of portraits of people and settings tied to the events from half a century ago.

. . .

A music composer who was savagely tortured tells Ms. Branigan that he used to think there was some catharsis at work behind the violence, a correction of some kind to help bind people together. But there was not. “I wasn’t helping them at all,” he said of his tormentors. “They just wanted to beat us to death.”

. . .

The reporting in this book was gathered between 2008 and 2015, when Ms. Branigan was a Guardian correspondent in China. Poignantly, she observes that she could not have conducted such interviews today. In the past several years, even greater pressure has come down on those who wish to remember a past the Party wants to forget. People who spoke freely with her 10 years ago might not risk doing so today. The internet sites of commemoration have been shut down.

For the full review, see:

Stephen R. Platt. “The Chairman’s Children.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, May 13, 2023): C7.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 12, 2023, and has the title “‘Red Memory’ Review: China’s Cultural Revolution Still Echoes.”)

The book under review is:

Branigan, Tania. Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2023.

Before Europeans Arrived, “Conflict Was Endemic” Among Native American Indians

The left’s narrative of peaceful Native American Indians brutalized by colonizing Europeans, is rhetorically used to undermine the legitimacy of property rights that are a foundation of a system of innovative dynamism. The history is messy, but before and after the arrival of Europeans, Indians were frequent violent aggressors.

(p. C8) . . . Wayne E. Lee’s “The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500-1800,” [is] an ambitious and thoughtful reassessment of Native American war-making before and after permanent European settlement in the early 17th century.

. . .

Rather than simply harassing enemies, Native American fighters sought to isolate and destroy them. It was a technique that could be scaled up as opportunity allowed, ranging from the elimination of an unwary scouting party to the surprise of an unsuspecting town.

. . .

The notorious fate of the Mystic Pequots provides an example of Mr. Lee’s approach. Witnessing the conflagration, the New Englanders’ Narragansett allies were appalled by the indiscriminate slaughter, and reproached them for waging, as they put it, a war that was “too furious.” But as Mr. Lee points out, this reaction was not primarily an expression of “culture shock” at the use of “fire and mass killing.” Rather, the Narragansetts were aggrieved because such ruthlessness denied them their anticipated harvest of prisoners.

“Paradoxically,” Mr. Lee notes, Native American attitudes toward captives demonstrated “both the most and least restraint in the overall violence of their warfare.” Prisoners were living proof of victory. Taking scalps—a pre-Columbian practice encouraged by colonial bounties and often cited by Europeans to epitomize Native American “barbarity”—was a poor substitute. Adult males, especially, became the objects of communal vengeance, tortured to death in prolonged rituals that channeled a community’s frenzied grief. Luckier captives were adopted to replace the casualties. Others, as recent research indicates, were effectively enslaved.

. . .

. . ., precontact conflict was endemic, driven by blood feud in a grim cycle of retribution that was hard to break “in a society ill-suited to top-down coercion,” and further motivated by the pursuit of respect, resources and dominion.

For the full review, see:

Stephen Brumwell. “The Native American Way of War.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023): C8.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed word, added.)

(Note: the online version of the review was updated October 4, 2023, and has the title “‘The Cutting-Off Way’ Review: Native Americans at War.”)

The book under review is:

Lee, Wayne E. The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500–1800. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2023.

9,000 Years Ago 10,000 Humans Lived in the City of Catalhoyuk

The Catalhoyuk section of Four Cities appears germane to the question: how long have humans more or less like us existed on earth? Apparently at least 9,000 years. But only in the last few hundred years have some humans flourished. The bigger question is: what novel economic system has allowed the the flourishers to leapfrog previous humans?

(p. 16) Nine thousand years ago, the people of Catalhoyuk, maybe 10,000 of them, lived in cuboid clay houses packed against one another above the Konya Plain of south-central Turkey. Their dwellings were uniform, suggesting a highly regulated society: one or two rooms, painted in white or with red ocher designs. You exited not via a front door but by climbing a ladder to the roof. Much of life was lived up there: cooking, socializing, ambling along sidewalks that ran across the top of the city.

Let me say that again in case you missed it: This was 9,000 years ago. In terms of human society, that is just an imponderable span of time. The oldest of the books of the Hebrew Bible date to roughly 3,000 years ago; the pyramids of Egypt go back about 5,000 years. These were not prehumans or near relatives. They were like us: complex, organized, alive to meaning and living at a time beyond reckoning.

. . .

At Catalhoyuk, Newitz hangs out with Ruth Tringham of the University of California, Berkeley, who has devoted years to humanizing the remnants of this city of the dim past by focusing on one skeleton, of a woman she has dubbed Dido. Dido replastered her walls regularly, kept her home swept clean, covered the floor in reed mats and decorated the place with art: clay figures of animals and stylized human females. In other words: much like us.

Catalhoyuk was founded by pioneers of urban living. “When the earliest construction began,” Newitz writes, “many people coming to live at Catalhoyuk were only a generation or two removed from nomadism.” It was brand-new, this fixed settlement thing, but it proved remarkably successful. By the time Dido was born, the city was about 600 years old. I’m tempted to repeat a number yet again. Think of the settled, structured history Dido could look back on. As evidence of her awareness of the past, Dido, like everyone else in town, buried her ancestors in her home, beneath her bed. Some were given a special honor: Their skulls sat in niches in the walls. Dido could enjoy the comfort of her forebears’ empty eye sockets following her as she went about her daily chores. In other words: not so much like us.

. . .

Perhaps looking back 9,000 years can yield practical guidance on how to move forward from where we are. For me, the effect of reading “Four Lost Cities” was more meditative. This is a long, long, long ride we are on. Much is beyond our control. Humanity trundles on.

For the full review, see:

Russell Shorto. “In Ruins.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, March 14, 2021 [sic]): 14.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date Feb. 25, 2021 [sic], and has the title “Searching for Our Urban Future in the Ruins of the Past.”)

The book under review is:

Newitz, Annalee. Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2021.

“We Rarely Get the Disaster We Expect”

I disagree with the reviewer quoted below on much that is in his review. I have chosen to quote passages that emphasize what I think is interesting and promising in the book.

If Ferguson is right that “we rarely get the disaster we expect,” then we might be better off growing our general capabilities, rather than invest huge taxpayer funds in preparing for the wrong specific disaster. The best way to grow our general capabilities is to defend an economic system of innovative dynamism.

(p. 16) Niall Ferguson is, in many ways, a historian of the old school. He was trained in the history of business and finance, but over the past two decades his interests have broadened.

. . .

Ferguson’s latest book, “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe,” . . . [seems] to wave away concerns about climate change . . . in favor of extended speculation about “Black Swan” and “Dragon King” events that defy efforts at prediction? His bewildering answer is that “we rarely get the disaster we expect, but some other threat most of us are currently ignoring.”

. . .

“Doom” is often insightful, productively provocative and downright brilliant.

For the full review, see:

Damon Linker. “Catastrophe Is Coming.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, May 16, 2021 [sic]): 16.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 4, 2021 [sic], and has the title “Niall Ferguson Examines Disasters of the Past and Disasters Still to Come.”)

The book under review is:

Ferguson, Niall. Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe. New York: Penguin Press, 2021.