"We Have Conquered Infectious Disease!" Not.

“We have conquered infectious disease!” This may sound like Donald Trump, but it wasn't. It was a Surgeon-General of the United States, Luther Terry, in 1964.

No one would make that claim today, except Trump and supporters in the case of coronavirus. Even if we discount the current pandemic of Covid-19, infectious disease is one of the greatest causes of death in the world, accounting for about 25% of deaths worldwide and over 60% of deaths among children. 

But in 1964 the Surgeon-General's claim did not seem far fetched. Mortality from infectious disease had dropped sharply during the previous decades, at least in wealthy countries, and life expectancy had risen steeply, from about 50 to 75.

Many things contributed to the drop in deaths from infectious disease: better nutrition, clothing, and housing, improved sanitation and water supplies, vaccines, and antibiotics. Unfortunately, the drop was not uniform throughout the world:  poorer nations did not see the huge gains in life-span that richer ones did.

But even in the richer nations, the claimed “conquest of infectious disease” began to look like wishful thinking by the late 1970s and 1980s. New or newly recognized infectious diseases appeared, like AIDS, Legionnaires’ Disease, and Ebola, and old ones began to re-emerge, like TB, whooping cough, yellow fever, measles, and diphtheria. 

New, more deadly strains of malaria, cholera, TB, and dengue fever emerged. Many of the new strains of bacterial disease were and are resistant to antibiotics, partly as a result of overuse and incorrect use of these lifesavers. Others were viral, for which antibiotics are useless.

Many of the deaths from infectious disease today, especially among infants and children, are the result of poor sanitation and water supplies. Ironically, we have known how to prevent these deaths for more than a century. It is lack of resources and will, not lack of knowledge, that is the problem.

But it is not always lack of money that produces poor results in terms of controlling infectious disease. The US, which spends far more than any other country on health care, lags well behind many other countries in terms of health care outcomes. The problem is that too many people cannot afford adequate medical care because they cannot pay the high premiums for private health insurance, or cannot get it at all.

Ironically, another US Surgeon-General, Rupert Blue of South Carolina, proposed a national health insurance system in 1911, a universal plan that would cover everyone. “Public health is a public utility,” he said. “We are our brother’s keeper.”

Perhaps Blue didn’t choose the best audience to deliver the message. He spoke to a convention of insurance executives. They made sure Blue's idea didn't become reality. A century later, the US remains the only developed country in the world without a system of national health insurance. Perhaps Blue was just a century or so ahead of his time -- in the case of the USA, that is.

Changing that by itself would not conquer infectious disease, but it would help combat it, especially if combined with an effective program of preventive medicine, which the USA also lacks. It would also go far to reduce anxiety about the costs of medical care in the minds of many millions of Americans. 

A VERY Short History of Medicine

Fathers of Medicine and Allied Arts

Hippocrates & Co. 

Therapeutics

“Doctor, I have an earache.”

2000 BC – “Here, eat this root.”

1000 BC – “That root is heathen, say this 

prayer.”

1850 AD ­– “That prayer is superstition, drink 

this potion.”

1940 AD – “That potion is snake oil, swallow 

this pill.”

1985 AD – “That pill is ineffective, take this 

antibiotic.”

2000 AD – “That antibiotic is artificial. Here, 

eat this root.”

Quackery

Domestic Medicine

Medical Education

Robert Koch Establishes Germ Theory; Sells Chocolate

The Triumph of American Medicine

The New Moral World: Robert Owen's New Lanark

New Lanark, Scotland, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site about 25 miles from Glasgow on the Falls of Clyde. David Dale founded New Lanark as a textile mill village in 1785, taking advantage of the water power the falls provided. It became famous as a model factory town in the early 19th century after Dale's son in law, Welshman Robert Owen, took it over.

Contrary to the ideas of many factory owners of the early industrial era, Owen was convinced that he could treat his workers humanely and still make a profit. Besides offering better wages and shorter hours than most mills, he provided the workers and their families with decent housing and opportunities for education and self-improvement. He established the first infants' school in the UK in 1817, to take care of and educate young children while their parents worked. 

New Lanark flourished. Owen made a lot of money, and the town became well known, attracting the rich and famous from all over the European world. At its height, it was home to 2500 people. Owen's success convinced him that he could replicate it elsewhere, and go further in the direction of what he called "The New Moral World."

Owen believed, in common with many Enlightenment thinkers, that environment shaped human character, and that the right environment would produce morally superior people, a "New Moral World." By the 1820s, he had decided that the right environment was a "cooperative" one, in which people worked together for the common good.

In effect, Owen had embraced what Karl Marx later called "utopian socialism." In 1825, Owen sold New Lanark and sailed to America, where he founded a cooperative community, New Harmony, in Indiana. Below are two images of Owen's concept of the community, with housing, workshops, schools, and factories.

The New Harmony experiment was largely a failure. The inhabitants, not Owen's employees, proved to be un-cooperative. Perhaps, too, Owen was seen as a tyrant, trying to direct people's lives too much. 

After a few years, Owen gave up on New Harmony and sailed back to Britain, though several of his children remained and carved out successful careers in America. Back in Britain, he tried to establish a union of all British workers, The Grand National Consolidated Trades Union. Due in part to government persecution, it failed by 1834, and Owen began to promote a new movement to found producers and consumers co-operatives. The first successful co-op was founded in 1844, in Rochdale, Lancashire, by the Rochdale Pioneers. It soon became a model for countless others since.

New Lanark itself went into a gradual decline after Owen left. It continued producing textiles until 1968. After the mill closed, people moved away and the buildings began to deteriorate. In 1974 a trust was founded to save them, and they have been gradually restored. About 200 people live in the restored housing and thousands more visit the site every year, learning about Owen's "New Moral World."

The old mill is now a hotel and some of the housing is now used as a hostel.

The infants school has also been restored to what it looked like when Owen established it. (School and Mill Race)

Today, New Harmony, Indiana, is also a popular tourist destination and so, in some form, Owen's legacy lives on. 

Further Reading: JFC Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites in England and America: The Quest for a New Moral World (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969)

Tom Paine: The Patriot America Rejected

The triumph of Trump and his MAGA movement of faux patriots tells me it is time to look once again at the career of someone who was a true patriot and friend of mankind, who labored for human rights instead of against them: Thomas Paine.

Poor Tom Paine. Rejected by American Patriots he served so well for being too radical, nearly guillotined by French revolutionaries for being too conservative, he died poor and forgotten in an America he helped to create. Ironically, the country that reveres his memory most is the one he rebelled against: Great Britain.

Paine was born in Thetford, England January 29, 1737. He trained in the same trade as his Quaker father, as a maker of rope stays used on sailing ships (not corset stays as some detractors claimed). At various times he also worked as an excise officer and schoolteacher.

In 1768 he was appointed an excise officer in Lewes, in Sussex, a town with a strong republican tradition. He lived in the 15^th century Bull House.

Paine soon became involved in the town government of Lewes and often held forth on politics at the White Hart Inn, now Hotel. I stayed here on my trip to Lewes a few years ago.

During his years in Lewes, Paine became increasingly anti-monarchical and anti-aristocratic, sentiments he took to America in the autumn of 1774. He emigrated at the suggestion by Benjamin Franklin, then representing colonial interests in Britain. Paine arrived in Philadelphia to find the thirteen colonies on the verge of revolt against British rule. He quickly became involved in politics, and surged to fame with the publication of his immensely popular pamphlet Common Sense in January 1776.

In Common Sense, Paine argued that independence was just that. He avoided the formal, scholarly political discourse of the day, writing in an easy to read, punchy style that rendered politics intelligible to the average reader. The work converted many ordinary Americans to the idea of independence.

At the end of 1776, Paine published a pamphlet series The American Crisis, designed to inspire sacrifice in the struggle for independence. It opens with some of the most famous words ever written: “These are the times that try men’s souls.” Washington had it read aloud to his soldiers.

During the War for Independence, Paine served the revolutionary government in various capacities. It was a bumpy time for him, as he clashed with some of his fellow revolutionaries, accusing them, with some reason, of corruption.

Perhaps Paine’s most important contribution to the revolutionary cause was his mission to France in 1781, with John Laurens of South Carolina. The two men shared something besides their revolutionary fervor: they opposed slavery. Laurens was killed in one of the last battles of the war.

Paine and Laurens succeeded in gaining funds and a French commitment to send a fleet and army to America later that year. The arrival of the French during Washington’s Siege of Yorktown, Virginia played a crucial role in bringing about the surrender of British forces under Lord Cornwallis in October.

Peace talks began a few months after Yorktown, and a treaty recognizing American independence was finalized in 1783.

Paine returned to England in 1787 to pursue business projects. He soon became involved in the Revolution that began in France in 1789. In 1791, he wrote a long defense of the French Revolution, The Rights of Man. It sold over a million copies, to the horror of British conservatives. 

James Gillray's cartoon, below, attacks Paine as he tightens violently Britannia's corset, a reference to his supposed occupation as a corset staymaker.

A second volume of The Rights of Man, in 1792, argued for a comprehensive program of universal, free education and social security. The book helped inspire radical movements, as well as major government efforts to suppress them and the book's author.

Paine went to France to avoid arrest, and became involved in the radical phase of the revolution. He was elected to the National Convention. When Louis XVI was tried for treason in 1792, Paine, who opposed capital punishment, voted against execution. 

Paine's plea to spare the king, although unsuccessful, angered radical Jacobins who soon came to power and began the Reign of Terror. They arrested Paine. He spent ten months in prison and narrowly avoided being guillotined. After his release, he criticized President Washington and other American leaders for not helping him.

In the late 1790s, Paine supported Napoleon, but turned against him when his authoritarian aims became clear. At the invitation of President Jefferson, Paine returned to the United States by 1803. 

Paine's welcome was not warm, partly because of his scathing criticisms of Washington and other American leaders. His opposition to slavery also alienated many people. And another work he wrote in installments during these years, The Age of Reason, attacked Christianity. 

The Age of Reason sold well, but it outraged many people, especially in the new United States, where a great evangelical revival was underway. Paine died impoverished and nearly friendless in New York in 1809. Only six people came to his funeral. Two of them black freedmen. A widely reprinted obituary stated that he “did some good, but much harm.”

In 1819 William Cobbett, a British radical, took Paine’s remains back to England for a proper burial. (image)

The burial apparently never happened and the ultimate disposal of Paine’s remains is unknown. 

During the 19^th century, Paine and his works helped inspire progressive movements in Britain and America. He is remembered fondly in the town of Lewes, Sussex. There is even a Rights of Man pub. Drop in for a pint or two when in town and toast the memory of Tom Paine, a true friend to mankind.

Lewes, Sussex

The Tower of London's Only American Prisoner: Henry Laurens

The Tower of London, originally a royal castle-palace, later a royal prison, has housed many famous prisoners in its thousand year history, including the Little Princes, Anne Boleyn and Sir Thomas More. But only one was an American: Henry Laurens, during the American War for Independence. [Image: Henry Laurens, Boston Magazine, 1784]

Laurens, who had made a fortune in the slave trade in his native Charleston, South Carolina, and owned several plantations, became a leading Patriot during the conflict between colonists and mother country. He served as President of the Continental Congress in 1777-78. Congress then named him minister to the Netherlands. He made a successful voyage there in the spring of 1780, gaining some financial assistance from the Dutch. On a second voyage that autumn, a Royal Navy frigate captured his ship at sea, along with a draft of a treaty with the Netherlands, a document that led the British government to declare war on that country. 

The British government lodged Laurens in the Tower on suspicion of treason. Laurens recorded that the guards of the Tower serenaded him with a rendition of "Yankee Doodle Dandy" when he arrived to take up residence, passing through Traitors Gate on the Thames. (below)

Laurens remained in the Tower for more than a year. During that time two artists painted his portrait, an indication that his treatment was not especially harsh. The portraits are by Lemuel Francis Abbott and John Singleton Copley.

The mildness of Laurens' treatment owed something to important British friends, notably the enormously rich Richard Oswald, a former slave trading partner. Laurens had been Charleston agent for the slave factory at Bunce (AKA, Bance) Island, Sierra Leone, in which Oswald was heavily invested. [Image: 18th century drawing of Bunce Island]

Oswald secured Laurens' release from the Tower on bail in December 1781. Not long after, the British government exchanged Laurens for Lord Cornwallis, the British general who surrendered to Washington at Yorktown in October 1781. Oswald later became chief British negotiator at the peace talks in Paris. 

After Laurens' release, the US government ordered him to join the American peace delegation of John Adams, John Jay, and Benjamin Franklin. [Image: Benjamin West, American Peace Delegation, Paris, 1782, unfinished. Laurens is in the red coat, Franklin, Adams, and Jay to his right.]

Laurens put off going to Paris for months, pleading ill health. He did not arrive until late November, the day before the preliminary treaty was to be signed. He insisted on an addition to the treaty: that the British government return all runaway slaves to their American masters. Thousands had run away to British lines. Despite the fact that the British government had promised the runaways freedom, Oswald agreed to Laurens' addition, and the clause went into the final document. 

The runaway clause proved largely unenforceable. Sir Guy Carleton, the new British Commander in America, refused to hand over thousands of them under his protection in New York. Before evacuating the city, Carleton shipped them to Nova Scotia. Some of them later went to Sierra Leone, where they established a freedmen's colony and the current capital, Freetown. [Image: Early Freetown]

After the preliminary treaty was signed, Laurens returned to Britain and served briefly as US minster to the former mother country. In 1784, he returned to South Carolina. He spent his remaining years restoring his fortune and estates. He avoided politics, dying at his favorite plantation, Mepkin in 1792, surrounded by his slaves. His body was cremated, allegedly one of the first cremations in the United States. Today, Mepkin is a Trappist monastery, Mepkin Abbey.

[Images of Mepkin, by Charles A. Fraser, early 19th century]

Wilkes and Liberty!

John Wilkes (1725-1797) is an enigmatic figure. At various times radical defender of liberty, rake, xenophobe, and conservative politician, he eludes easy categorization.

During the early 1760s, while an MP, Wilkes published a journal called the North Briton, which specialized in attacking the government led by George III's Scots tutor, John Stuart, Lord Bute, and Scots in general.

The North Briton (itself a reference to Scotland) claimed that Bute and other Scots were taking over the government with the goal of establishing a "Stuart" tyranny. The idea resonated with many Englishmen, who feared that Scots immigrants into England and its colonies threatened their livelihoods and liberties. 

In issue No. 45 of the North Briton, Wilkes attacked the King's Speech on the Treaty of Paris (1763) that ended the Seven Years War. Wilkes was incensed by what he saw as the treaty's overly generous treatment of France and blamed Bute. The government prosecuted Wilkes and other involved in the publication for seditious libel. In the end the Court of Kings Bench sided with Wilkes. Radical Whigs cheered the verdict as a major victory for liberty.

During the battle over No. 45 William Hogarth, who disliked Wilkes, immortalized him in a famous engraving.

Wilkes soon overreached himself, helping to write and print an obscene poem, a parody of Alexander Pope's poem, An Essay on Man. The parody, An Essay on Woman, is perhaps best known for the line "Life can little else supply, but a few good fucks and then we die."

Wilkes was a member of the Hellfire Club, AKA Medmenham Monks, a notorious gang of rakes and libertines, who included Lord Sandwich. Unfortunately for Wilkes, he had offended Sandwich, who in revenge read the poem to the House of Lords. Wilkes fled to -- of all places -- France to avoid arrest and prosecution but was found guilty of obscenity and blasphemy in absentia and declared an outlaw. 

Wilkes fell into debt in France, and in 1768 he returned to England. He submitted himself to jail but also put himself up for election to Parliament for the constituency of Middlesex County. The voters elected him by a wide margin, but the House of Commons declared him ineligible due to his conviction. He ran two more times and won each time before the House, bowing to the popular will, finally seated him.

During the campaigns Wilkes' supporters incited riots on his behalf, in one of which several people were killed by government troops. Radicals hailed Wilkes' eventual seating as a victory for the idea that the electorate, not the House of Commons, should determine the fitness of their representatives. 

In Parliament during the 1770's, Wilkes defended the cause of the American colonies, and became a hero to the future Patriots.

In 1780, London's mostly radical voters elected Wilkes Lord Mayor Ironically, he soon ended up cooperating with the government of George III in suppressing the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots (1780). During this episode he led a militia regiment that shot many rioters.

Wilkes' stance during the Gordon Riots cost him much of his popular following, and he gradually became more conservative.

Wilkes was famous for witty repartee. On one occasion, when running for Parliament, he asked a voter for his support. The voter replied, "I'd rather vote for the Devil." Wilkes shot back, "Naturally. But if your friend decides not to run, may I hope for your support?"

Another comeback often attributed to Wilkes may or not be apocryphal. On one occasion Sandwich said to Wilkes, "Sir, I fear you are destined to die on the gallows, or of the pox." (syphilis) Wilkes replied, "That depends my lord, on whether I embrace your lordship's principles or your mistress."

Today, Wilkes is memorialized by the names of several towns and counties in the USA and a statue in Fetter Lane in London.

  
Further Reading: 

George Rude, Wilkes and Liberty (1962)
Peter D. G. Thomas, John Wilkes, Friend to Liberty (1996)

Guns and Amerikan Kultur, Frequently Revised Because...

Another Shooting at Brown University. As usual, Libruls will blame a misinterpretation of the Second Amendment. They will say that it dates from a time when only single shot guns existed, like these:

They will say that the Founding Fathers had no idea that the "well regulated militia" might be carrying semi-automatic weapons, like these: 

But these guns exist to protect you against the bad guys, my dears. And if everyone had one of the above, we'd all be safer. These beauties are dandy for shooting hordes of vermin, too. Think of the impression you can make when entering a restaurant, bar, shop, school, etc. And you don't need big hands to operate one.

Everyone knows that guns don't kill people. People kill people. That's why we send soldiers into battle unarmed or at most armed with spoons, which are also good to eat with. US soldiers used spoons in the war against revolting Filipinos effectively in 1900-02. In the aftermath of one battle, a soldier wrote home, "we gave them the long spoon." It's what they called the bayonet, which as you are no doubt aware, is not a gun. So let's stop blaming guns for people's deaths. 

We always hear that countries with strict gun control have much fewer gun deaths than the US. Maybe, but they have a lot more spoon deaths. Spoons are much more dangerous than guns. 

It is a fact that mass shootings are a mental health problem, not a gun problem. It's unfortunate that the US has more crazy people than other countries, but there you go.

In spite of the above facts, the uninformed will persist in blaming guns for piles of dead people. The best response is to comfort them with your thoughts and prayers, and remind them of the blessed protection afforded the US by Amendment 2, verse 2, as interpreted by the priests of the holy NRA and MAGA. Look it up in the Bible.

I'm sure POTUS Trump will send paper towels to the families of the deceased. 

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Slavery, Disease, and Suffering

“offers an unparalleled look at the early history of Charleston and the economic region of which it was a part. Focusing on the close relationship between the pursuit of wealth and the risk of death, McCandless forces readers to reassess the economic, demographic, and moral foundations of South Carolina’s past. A riveting, if sobering, work by a masterful historian.”  
Peter Coclanis, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, author of Shadow of a Dream

“compassionate, compelling history ... Peter McCandless writes with wisdom and humanity, inspiring us not just to think differently about the past, but also to ask how similar forces are shaping the world today.”  
Elizabeth Fenn, Duke University, author of Pox Americana

“This meticulously researched and smoothly written book provides the first comprehensive history of the Carolina lowcountry’s ferocious disease environment. It navigates masterfully among social, economic, cultural, religious, demographic, military, and medical history, from the 1670s to the Civil War, exploring every aspect of the deadly struggles with malaria, yellow fever, and smallpox.” 
J. R. McNeill, Georgetown University, author of Mosquito Empires

“McCandless does more than provide sound and accessible medical history. He adds an important social and economic twist. The knot that he deftly ties between slavery, disease, and the Lowcountry environment has devastating and lasting implications that stretch far beyond South Carolina. McCandless is quick to absorb and ponder the irony that the continent’s least healthy place swiftly became its wealthiest. Rice, indigo, and then cotton yielded huge profits to a tiny minority of intermarried merchant and planter families, while “most of the population experienced pestilence without prosperity.” Peter Wood, Duke University, author of Black Majority. 

In Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry, Peter McCandless paints a startling portrait of the troubled and troubling history of disease in the South of the United States from the colonial period to the first half of the nineteenth century....Due to his impressive grasp of a variety of sources, McCandless uncovers the problematic reporting of disease and the convoluted ways that Southern physicians often misdiagnosed illness. This analytical move elevates his book from a mere survey of sickness in the South to a sophisticated evaluation of the representation of disease; Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry can thus serve as a primer on how to research the history of public health before the microbiological revolution." Jim Downs, Connecticut College, author of Sick from Freedom: African American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction 

Link: Slavery, Disease, and Suffering

Sawney Bean, Iconic Scotsman, Renowned Philosopher, Cannibal

OK, I made up the philosopher bit just to get your attention. But the rest is absolutely true. England has Robin Hood and King Arthur. Scotland has the Loch Ness Monster and Sawney Bean. No one doubts that the Monster of the dark, deep loch exists. Many historians doubt that Bean existed, but then historians love to question our most cherished beliefs. 

The fact is we have pictures of Bean, so that should settle the matter. Have you ever seen such a clear picture of the Loch Ness Monster as the ones of Bean above and below? I'm sure you haven't. (Images courtesy of FOX news)

If he did exist, Bean lived precisely sometime between the 13th and the 16th century, and exactly somewhere in a cave in Scotland. What is known for absolute certainty is that Bean was the leader of a clan of 48 people who lived by kidnapping people, robbing them of their clothes and other material possessions, and then having them for supper. Not as guests. Bean was a Cannibal and that och aye, rhymes with Hannibal. 

We know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Bean's vicious gang ate over 1000 people and was routed by an army of 400 led by King James I of Scotland, and then executed but not eaten. Some versions say it was King James I of England who beat the Beans. As every schoolboy knows, he was King James VI of Scotland first, before Queen Elizabeth, not the present Elizabeth, but the first one, died without any issue (a kid). (Image: King James, number uncertain.)

As far as we know, that King James, whatever his true number, did not actually eat Queen Elizabeth to gain the throne, but history records that he did enjoy eating English food. After decades of haggis, neeps, and kippers, it's hardly surprising. Stories rapidly circulated that he was particularly fond of bangers and mash, which is actually a euphemism for (censored). 

But I digress. This article is about Mr. Bean. No, not that Mr. Bean. The source of the Sawney Bean story, it appears, is something called The Newgate Calendar, a London publication that related the stories of famous criminals. This has led some thin-skinned Scots to claim that the English made up the story of Sawney to denigrate Scots. (See SNP)

I do not believe this for a minute. My reasoning is that most of the criminals chronicled in the Newgate Calendar were English. If Bean didn't exist, he must have been invented by the Scottish Tourist Board. (Image of Thistle)

What we can properly accuse the English of is appropriating Bean as an icon of Scottish barbarity. In the 18th century, many English folk were troubled to find that by some devious plot, Scotland had craftily managed to unite with England in something called Great Britain.

This union would have been great indeed if all the Scots had left to fight against the French and Indians. But perversely, only some of them did. Others discovered the High Road to London, the Scotsman's favorite prospect. Hordes of starving kilted bagpipers descended upon the capital. Naturally, the good people of England and Nigel Farage did not like this, as the following image reveals:

The biggest problem with these Scots, it seems, was that they lacked proper toilet habits. This complaint was lodged with abundant clarity in a popular cartoon called Sawney in the Boghouse, which I post below, courtesy of Acme Toilet Cleaners.

Needless to say, this sort of thing did not contribute to amicable relations between the North Britons and their southern brethren, as this English cartoon  of 1792 shows. 

Fortunately, relations have improved immensely since then. Other good news: lots of people are making money of the Bean story these days. I hope to be one of them.