The Very Ancient Origin of Contagionism - Germ Theory

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Very Ancient Origin of Contagionism

by Peter Morrell

 

" Interestingly Fracastoro the physician-poet from Verona (who

christened Syphilis the French disease) had proposed a germ theory of

disease in 1546, one hundred years before Leeuwenhoek's ground

breaking discoveries under the microscope. " [1]

 

Some conceptual errors seem to have crept into this account. The idea

of contagion entirely precedes the discovery of bacteria and is very

ancient. Of course, the germ theory was conceived many centuries

before germs were physically detected with microscopes. Scientists

and medics seem too eager to accept as gospel the most

simplistic 'external teachings', while condemning our ancestors as

befuddled old fools who knew nothing. In fact, ancient peoples had a

much more subtle mentality and rather than being so easily bedazzled

by the simple, superficial glance that satisfies people today, they

clearly understood the deeper internal workings of things as a

complex, living reality.

 

" Rudimentary modern concepts such as bacteria, toxins, personal

cleanliness, and public sanitation were either unknown and largely

absent from the social database. Quarantines were common and had been

utilized for hundreds of years, but the scientific idea of contagion

was confused and interrelated with religion, piety, sin, and " God's

Justice. " [2]

 

The germ theory first arose in very ancient times as a conception

that disease is passed around in some nebulous manner between and

amongst people. This attitude was most obvious for the clear

contagions like Plague and Leprosy [later Cholera] of which people

were understandably very fearful.

 

" Guy de Chauliac concerning...the Black Death: 'it was so

contagious...that even by looking at one another people caught

it.'... " [3]

 

This primitive form of 'contagionism' was found in all cultures and

was intrinsically a form of taboo, holding that even though an ill

person is primarily ill for their own inner, spiritual, God-driven

reasons, they should still be avoided because they carry, in some

mysterious way, the 'seeds' or 'vapours' of the disease, which can be

passed on to others. This was called the miasmata theory of ill-airs

and strange vapours that can pass among the populace. By no means an

unreasonable conception, it derived in an evidence-based manner,

mostly from observation and experience of epidemics, admittedly laced

with certain religious concepts. Whether a microscope later provided

confirmation for such a conception in the minds of men is, of course,

rather superfluous to the general validity of the conception itself,

which vastly predates the actual microscopes themselves.

 

The discovery of physical 'infective particles' need not be regarded

as confirmation of the ancient idea of contagion, but might be seen

as a separate idea altogether, one fundamentally different in modern

therapeutics compared to the more ancient idea of contagion that

preceded it. Thus, a rather subtle and spiritual conception became

displaced by a crude and materialistic one - a pattern that keeps

repeating itself down to modern times. The idea of contagion more

properly belongs to the magical worldview, a view that minutely

scrutinises phenomena and always looks for anomalies or non-

conformities in the world. A view holding that all non-conformities

contain pattern and meaning, have power and that this power can be

utilised or transmitted - being passed around through contact.

 

There are numerous examples of the power of an anomaly. The albino in

Africa is an anomaly who is revered as a god. The weapon that killed

someone is an anomaly. The place where the slaughter took place has

power and contagion. Prayers are intoned and flowers placed at the

site of an accident. Candles are lit for the dead. Churches are

filled with perfume. Holy water is sprinkled. Cathedrals are filled

with light and music. Ointment is rubbed into the sword as well as

the wound it caused. A rationale lies behind all such actions. A

pervasive and profound notion of resonance abounds in the magical

worldview and lies at the heart of this whole matter of contagion.

Write it all off as superstitious nonsense if you like, but this

sense of resonance touches everything, interconnecting them in an

unseen web of links between events, people, places, concepts,

objects, practices. Nothing happens without a [spiritual] cause and

everything affects everything else. What if ought has medicine truly

gained from science? And what has it lost?

 

Even in fame and celebrity, the idea of contagion persists. John

Lennon's piano or Mercedes must have some special power. A guitar

once owned by Eric Clapton. The bedroom where Marilyn Monroe died.

The baseball that won a whole series. Erroll Flynn's jockstrap. These

are all examples of objects deemed to be suffused with some invisible

and special power. They are unusual to the degree that they possessed

special power once and so mysteriously must still contain a fading

vestige of it. They are anomalies. A superstitious mode of thinking,

that we all innately possess, contends that they still possess this

power and will always possess it, and that we can annoint ourselves

with it somehow and so sanctify our lives. Getting close to the rich

and famous is thus as alluring a pursuit as ever.

 

Similarly, the sick person is a type of non-conformity - a deviation

from normality - and represents a puzzle to the magical mind - a

puzzle capable of solution. The sick person has a power that can

affect others. This was well known to ancient and medieval people.

Plague and leprosy were especially feared not only as great killers,

but of being passed on to people coming into close contact with the

sufferer, such as neighbours and members of the same family.

 

" With few exceptions the contemporary sources, medical and lay, that

discuss the various outbreaks of pestilential disease in the later

Middle Ages reveal a strong belief in the extremely contagious nature

of the 'pest'... " [4]

 

Malaria, Typhus and Cholera were associated with damp or foul places.

Leprosy and Syphilis were deemed to be basically sexual in origin,

and thus a whiff of wickedness surrounded anyone contracting them.

Deviantised in this way by their condition, they had to be isolated

from everyone else.

 

" Beliefs of this kind continued to play a major role throughout the

Middle Ages and into the 16th and 17th centuries, with disease being

associated with the work of Satan and with demonic possession.

Plagues and pestilences were believed to be visitations from God, to

punish or try sinful people. Protestants long continued to see

disease as the finger of Providence. " [5]

 

Lepers and syphilitics were shunned because of the 'negative

emanations' that were deemed to hang around them. Only 'bad' people

could contract such diseases. This was not a form of contagion

strictly like the bacteria doctrine. It was primarily the view that

as special non-conformities these sick persons possessed some special

and transmissible negative power or subtle energy. It was not

conceived of as an infective particle. Such is almost a crude and

more modern degradation of the original theory of contagion.

 

" Cholera most often affected those persons who lived dissolute,

alcoholic, drug related, sexually excessive, and filth ridden lives;

cholera's victims were simply being punished by God. It was the

consequence of sin and " was the inevitable and inescapable judgment "

of the Divine Power. " Cholera was a scourge not of mankind but of the

sinner. " And, it was a known and seemingly irrefutable fact that

cholera was most commonly found in those areas of the world least

populated by Christians. " [6]

 

In the ancient [pagan] and in the Christian view that power was

conceived as bad and could transmit to another person the same

sickness. In other words, close proximity to such a person could

induce the same sickness in others. It could not induce sickness

universally, but only in sinners, in 'unprotected' persons and those

who are wicked or corrupted in a similar way to the sufferer. The old

idea of contagion did not contend that the illness was spread

universally amongst all people or that it was transmitted regardless

by some physically detectable particle. These are entirely modern

amendations based upon the bacteria doctrine. Only those deigned by

God to succumb could succumb.

 

" In ancient civilizations, disease was routinely interpreted as the

consequence of sin, crime, or moral fault, as precipitated by evil

spirits, or as the work of black magic. Disease was thus personalized

and given a moral or religious meaning. " [7].

 

Any moral or religious sense of meaning about illness in the life of

the individual has been entirely eclipsed from view since the

bacteria doctrine displaced prior theories.

 

One urgent aspect of ancient contagion was how to obtain and confer

protection from sickness. This was a special power exercised by kings

and leaders and by clerics and physicians. Holy water and special

amulets such as religious relics, were used to confer spiritual

protection. This protection bestowed upon a person the ability to

work with the sick without any fear of contagion. Such persons were

revered as very special. Their manifest ability to resist contagion

was abundant confirmation of their spiritual purity. The folk

tradition in most countries is packed with examples of this theme of

purity and contagion.

 

Several problems exist with the modern bacteria doctrine. One is that

infection is not universal and nor is the disease cured by removal of

the germ. There is also the problem of why someone gets ill and why

others don't. These are partially explained by immunology, but the

suspicion persists in many quarters that some more subtle form of

contagion must still operate. And then there are the inner personal

reasons behind an ill person. Who cares about those any more?

Narrative medicine touches upon some of them; some have been

provisionally adopted by psychology; the rest go begging wherever

they can find a home, mostly among the holistic therapies.

 

It is also invalid to contend, as many medical historians do,

inebriated as they too often are by the hallucinatory wine of modern

science, that the idea of contagion was the bacteria doctrine in a

simpler form waiting to become somehow completed, modernised or

rendered more sophisticated by the germ theory. As I said, they are

very different ideas and although they both share many concepts like

contagion, transmission, infectivity, susceptibility, protection,

immunity and isolation, quarantine, etc, it is just not true that the

old theory was 'waiting' for the discovery of infective particles

that confirmed and completed the older idea. The older idea was solid

and dependable in its own right, comprising part of a very different

conceptual worldview, and was not really in need of any completion.

And they are as different today as chalk and cheese.

 

It is also clear that the idea of contagion served a very different

purpose in ancient times than the idea of bacteria in the germ

theory. Contagion, purity and impurity are all aspects of the idea of

resonance between objects, persons and events within a magical or

religious conception of the world. Cures can be induced by subtle

means using resonance, sympathy and the natural power in cognate

objects. The doctrine of signatures was also thoroughly imbued with

this very idea of resonance and healing was as much a form of

contagion as the illness itself. He caught the illness and must now

catch the cure. Powdered rhino horn and lion's tooth are magical

medicines because of the place they come from and their functions in

the lives of the animals. A very different type of rationale from

chemistry!

 

Disease as contagionism in the ancient world is, therefore, merely

one example of a more generalised belief in contagion, sympathy,

analogy [good and bad] and what we might call a 'spiritual resonance'

between people, places, things and events. It is instructive to

contemplate the relevance of such notions to medicine today. To some

extent these old ideas will never go away - they queue patiently at

the back door - and must eventually be re-admitted into mainstream

medicine. They are integral aspects of the way patients [human

beings] integrate illness into their own life experience and how they

conceptualise the world we live in to be. Science blunders on

heedless of these subtle realities, but they are real and lasting

aspects of pathology too long ignored. Just as pesticides will never

destroy malarial mosquitoes, so it seems just as bizarre - and as

futile - that medicine should continue to commit itself to an assault

upon the world of bacteria. Conceptually, there is an error in such a

policy.

 

Sources:

 

[1] BMJ letter, Bernadette Purcell, Germ theory predates discovery of

microbes, 9 March 2001

http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/322/7284/498#EL4

 

[2] Illnesses in the 1800's 19th Century Responses By G. William

Beardslee, Causation: Sin, Contagion, Miasma, Injustice, Ethnicity,

and Race?

http://www.thackerworld.com/USHistory/ushist07.htm

 

[3] Amundsen, Darrel W, Medicine, Society, and Faith in the Ancient

and Medieval Worlds, Johns Hopkins University Press. Baltimore, 1996,

295

 

[4] Amundsen, 289

 

[5] 'Disease' by Roy Porter, in Hutchinson Family Encyclopoedia:

http://ebooks.whsmithonline.co.uk/encyclopedia/52/F0000152.htm

 

[6] Illnesses in the 1800's 19th Century Responses By G. William

Beardslee, Causation: Sin, Contagion, Miasma, Injustice, Ethnicity,

and Race?

http://www.thackerworld.com/USHistory/ushist07.htm

 

[7] 'Disease' by Roy Porter, in Hutchinson Family Encyclopoedia:

http://ebooks.whsmithonline.co.uk/encyclopedia/52/F0000152.htm

 

The Disease Detectives, Bernadette Purcell, BMJ 2001; 322: 498 [24

February]

http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/322/7284/498

 

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