Name: 疾病!世界史速成班203 (Disease! Crash Course World History 203)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T05:15:25.000Z
Duration: 11 min 37 s
Description: 【看影片學英語】數萬部 YouTube 影片，搭配英漢字典即點即查，輕鬆掌握單字發音與用法，長久累積看電影不必再看字幕。

Hi, I'm John Green, this is Crash Course World History,

情態副詞

and today we're gonna to talk about a subject that makes me profoundly uncomfortable: disease.

轉承詞

This is a tough subject for me personally because I'm a bit of a hypochondriac,

but to be fair, my fears are kind of rational.

I am afraid that my existence will be ended by a soulless, microscopic organism,

and to be fair, they have killed a lot of people.

You're not paranoid if germs are actually out to get you,

Fortunately, we live in the twenty-first century, when communicable disease does not play such a massive role in human history,

unless of course you count bird flu, or SARS, or HIV/AIDS, or antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Alright, Stan, let's just go to the intro!

Okay, so long-time viewers of Crash Course will remember the sixteenth-century Great Dying in the Americas,

not only as an example of historians' total inability to name things,

but also as perhaps the most important and wide-ranging effect that disease has had on human cultures in millennia.

But traditionally, the study of history hasn't focused much on diseases,

partly because they're mysterious and terrifying,

and partly because they don't fit in very well with our ideas about history being the result of human agency.

We like to imagine that things happen because we did good things, or because we did bad things, or at least because we did some kind of thing,

but, in fact, history often happens because lots of people got smallpox.

There's also the fact that diseases were often seen to be the result of divine will, or else divine wrath.

Plus, because people didn't know that much about disease, they didn't write about it very often,

and when they did write about it, they didn't always write about it particularly well.

So when you read primary sources, often they're like, "Why'd they die? Well, too much of that miasma."

So given all that, we are going to have to engage in a bit of speculation here.

Mr. Green, Mr. Green! I love speculation; it's way more fun than history,

like what would have happened if the South won the Civil War?

No, me from the past, not that kind of speculation,

the kind of speculation where you guess what DID happen, not what would have happened.

So diseases have been with humans as long as there have been, like, humans.

And humans first appeared in tropical regions in Africa, which are home to a wide variety of microparasites,

so it's probably a good bet that those parasites played a role in keeping human populations really low for a long, long time.

It's only after we see migration out of Africa and into regions less amenable to diseases, about 64,000 years ago,

that we start to see the growth of human populations necessary to create what we, problematically, call civilizations.

So humans migrated into river valleys that became the cradles of civilization, with agriculture, and surpluses, etc.

This allowed us to escape those population-limiting tropical diseases, but it created all kinds of new disease problems.

The communities in river valleys had more people and more population density, which allowed for epidemics.

I mean, one of the great things about hunting and gathering is that diseases cannot wipe out a city if you don't have cities.

Also, river valleys could be breeding grounds for disease, especially where cultures developed irrigation,

which often relied on slow-moving or standing water,

and if you've ever had to clean a bird bath, you'll know that standing water is the perfect environment for disease-carriers and nasty microorganisms.

For example, schistosomiasis was recorded in Egypt as early as 1200 BCE. What is, what is that, Stan?

Oh, apparently, it's a parasitic flatworm, do we still have that?

Anyway, lots of diseases come from domesticated animals, but you can't have bacon without swine flu.

That's gonna be a hilarious joke when we all die of swine flu. Just kidding! We're all gonna die of bird flu.

But from like a macro historical perspective, it's not like disease is all downside,

I mean, sometimes it's helped populations shield themselves from conquest; that was the case in Africa until the nineteenth century.

Okay, so we'd like to say that one of the hallmarks of civilization is writing,

and pandemic diseases were the type of events that people tended to write about in early civilizations, because they were a big deal.

Like pestilence appears in the epic of Gilgamesh; early Chinese historians described the increase in disease as populations spread from the northern Yellow River region to the more tropical Yangtze River region;

Ancient Greece was relatively disease-free because of its climate and also the isolated nature of city-states,

but the more the cities became involved in trade, the more susceptible to epidemics they were.

The best example of this was the plague that struck Athens in 430 and 429 BCE during the Peloponnesian War,

and that leads us to a very important point, which is, there is a decent correlation between war and disease.

Armies tended to carry it along with them, and food shortages and displacements made civilians more likely to get sick.

That is still very much the case, and the weird, symbiotic relationship between war and disease is something that we're going to look a lot at in the next several weeks.

But nothing spreads disease quite like trade.

Trade is so good for economies and so bad at keeping individual human beings not dead.

Like Ancient Rome's integration into transcontinental trade networks, like the Silk Road, may explain why the historian Livy recorded at least eleven pestilential disasters,

and it is very likely that disease and the accompanying decline in population contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire.

But of course, you can't talk about the history of disease without mentioning the most famous epidemic of all time: the Black Death.

I mean, if the Black Death were a soccer team, it would be Liverpool Football Club.

If the Black Death were a band, it would be the Beatles.

If the Black Death were an industry, it would be eighteenth-century textile processing in Liverpool.

The plague, which struck Europe in the mid-fourteenth century, originated in fleas that came from rats, and Bubonic plague can be found throughout the world, even in the western US today.

It's more treatable now, thankfully, but anyway, the Black Death started in China and spread westward over the caravan routes,

really picking up steam when plague-carrying rats jumped onto Mediterranean trading ships.

So the death rate from this plague was incredibly high; perhaps a third of people living in Europe died.

Oh look, it's the Grim Reaper. Stay away from me.

Dear Black Death, I don't want to compliment you, but that term, "Black Death," is just some fantastic branding.

Such a scary term; it's a shame that people in the actual fourteenth century didn't use it.

It was first coined in 1832 by a German doctor and professor of the history of medicine, J.F.K. Hecker.

And the term became popular in English after it was used in A History of England by Elizabeth Cartwright Penrose.

It took a historian who was also a doctor to come up with a name as catchy as the "Black Death," but for once, historians, you did it!

A terrifying thing got the terrifying name it deserved. Best wishes, John Green.

So we're not 100% sure that the Black Death was Bubonic plague; its virulence suggests that in some places, it might have been pneumonic,

but we have descriptions of it that match Bubonic plague, like this one from Florentine chronicler, Matteo Villani:

"It was a plague that touched people of every condition, age, and sex.

They began to spit blood and then they died -- some immediately some in two or three days, and some in a longer time..."

"...most had swellings in the groin, and many had them in the left and right armpits and in other places;

one could almost always find an unusual swelling somewhere on the victim's body."

Stan, I appreciate you doing that in text and not pictures because it sounds truly horrible. Thank goodness that was the last we saw of outbreaks of Bubonic Plague.

What's that? There was an outbreak in 1904 in San Francisco? Oh boy.

Obviously, the plague affected a lot of individuals' lives, but it also affected world history.

Like, plague probably contributed to the fall of the Yuan Dynasty in China in the fourteenth century, but its greatest effects were felt in western Europe.

There's some debate about whether the Black Death kickstarted Europe's economy and ended the Middle Ages.

It probably did create some opportunity, like guilds were forced to admit new members to replace the many workers who had died,

and persistent European inflation until the end of the fourteenth century suggests both a shortage of products and higher wages.

Again, Matteo Villani provides us with some evidence of the effect of the plague on Italy's economy:

"Nurses and minor artisans working with their hands want three times or nearly the usual pay,

and laborers on the land all want oxen and all seed, and want to work the best lands, and to abandon all others."

So the plague may have actually been good for workers, at least those who survived.