The Renaissance

No two dates for the Renaissance ever seem to coin­cide. If we judge from art and literature, Giotto and Dante would place the starting date in the four­teenth century. If we follow the reasoning of Hans Baron that the Renaissance is a reflection of a civic image, the date shifts to 1405.

Two changes in European disease ecology stand out strongly. Both result from the new trade and exploration involving the Far East and the Ameri­cas. On the one hand, Europe became a major ex­porter of its endemic diseases to the Americas and appears to have acquired two diseases in return.

It has become increasingly apparent in recent years that the role of the introduction of European diseases such as smallpox into the Americas was a factor in the ability of the tiny European armies to conquer empires inhabited by millions of persons. Since it appears that the native American popula­tion had no previous exposure to such pathogens, the results were disastrous, and estimates have gone so far as to suggest that in the century after the estab­lishment of contact with the Americas, up to 95 percent of the population of the major centers of American civilizations had perished. In part, the shift from ruler to ruled (or, in effect, enslaved) probably worsened the situation, as did the forced adoption of European religion, language, and cus­toms. Europe’s extensive prior experience with infec­tious diseases was to prove catastrophic later when, for example, the Polynesian peoples were exposed to measles. Smallpox was probably the most disastrous disease for the post-Columbian Indians.

Within a few years of Columbus’s discoveries, Eu­rope perceived itself to be plagued by two new dis­eases, namely syphilis and typhus.

Typhus was also seen as new. Here the question is more difficult. First, it is not clear at this time whether recognition of typhus preceded the discov­ery of the New World. In any case, Europe’s ties with new trading partners very likely caused typhus to appear in western Europe. Furthermore, typhus was not conclusively differentiated from typhoid fever until the nineteenth century, and thus the question of recognizing a new disease is extremely difficult. Nonetheless, it was perceived as new, and that in itself is of some importance.

In the case of syphilis and typhus, the perception of new diseases helped to end the rather static medi­cal models of the time. They stimulated considerable written discussion and, of course, the poem from which the name syphilis comes. The perception of these diseases as “new” aspects of the human disease experience is perhaps most significant, but it is not clear at what point this perception began. Plague was known, at least in writing, from centuries past when it struck again in 1347, but syphilis and ty­phus were perceived as new. Probably the most im­portant aspect of the diseases in Europe is the fact that the quality of Renaissance thought permitted observation to allow what mindset would have pro­hibited in the past.

Syphilis seems to have had a much more fulmi­nant course than would be expected now. This again suggests a new disease in a previously unexposed society. As time passed, the pressure of the dis­ease probably altered European population genetics toward genetic makeups capable, in most cases, of staving off the organism or coexisting with it.

From the point of view of disease ecology, the Re­naissance marks the era of new diseases in two senses. The following years would see more and more precise and, to modern physicians, identifiable descriptions of diseases that had no doubt been ex­tant for many years. Medicine did not, except in exceedingly rare instances, prove capable of com­batting them, but at least it differentiated them.

The second sense of new diseases lies in the Euro­pean export of diseases to previously unexposed peo­ples. F. Braudel (1979) has argued convincingly that, of the great civilizations of around the year 1500, Europe excelled only in its shipping. That shipping made it richer and more powerful, and permitted it to devastate the Americas and, later, other lands with its own combination of infectious diseases. Al­though the appearance of cycles of epidemic dis­eases, often from elsewhere, mark the history of ancient Greece, Rome, and the medieval world, the Europe of the Renaissance and later tended to be a potent exporter of disease.