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Hello and welcome to the How Epidemics and Project based at the University of Oxford.

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My name is Erica Charters and I'm very pleased to have with me today two international experts on the history of disease,

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Monica Green and Catholic Monica and both of you have extensively researched and published on the history of various diseases.

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But I think it's fair to say that the disease that both of you have worked on most

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extensively and continue to work on is plague and especially the second plague pandemic.

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So, Monica, can you tell us a little bit about plague and specifically about the second plague pandemic?

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When did it take place and where did it take place?

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The second plague pandemic is the term we use now for the late mediaeval expansion of plague across Eurasia and extending into Africa.

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Most people know it is the black death. And that's one of the transformative things that we've witnessed the last few years,

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is moving from what we think was a fairly short episode of the Black Death.

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The dates that are usually given are thirteen forty six to thirteen fifty three,

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moving from that massive spread of plague through the Mediterranean to Europe

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and actually seeing it's part of a much larger and much longer phenomenon.

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And I think I think one of the things we'll know, I mean, everyone's heard of the Black Death, they definitely know plague.

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But sometimes I think plague is also known as a kind of textbook case of disease or something that not only historians are interested in studying,

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but scientists are interested in studying it. People who work on health policy want to understand how plague happened, how it ended.

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Can you tell us a little bit about why plague is so important to so many scholars?

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Yes, I mean, a plague is actually very central to many of the ideas and practises that developed since the late mediaeval

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period and continue throughout the early modern into the modern period for the development of epidemiology,

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public health, medicine and many of the working concepts that were still used today about epidemic disease,

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pandemic disease, endemic disease and how to control and mitigate those.

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So in that sense,

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we can talk about how plague played a central role in the development of a body of knowledge and a set of practises across centuries.

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And Monica, I know that you really came to play as a mediaevalist,

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so historian of the mediaeval period, someone who probably worked with archives and with texts,

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but you've been at the forefront to new approaches to understanding plague in the past, really implementing what you refer to as the genetics turn.

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Can you explain a little bit more about what this means and how this changes our understanding of the history of plague?

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Yes, first of all, I should make absolutely clear I'm not a geneticist, but I was trained as a historian of science and in that respect,

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I have always understood how to look at the construction of scientific knowledge.

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And what I was able to do over the last 15 years or so was actually look at a new field of scientific knowledge coming into being under our eyes.

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And what emboldened me to to try to engage with with this new kind of science was really two things.

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One was my experience as a teacher is that I actually had to go in a classroom and explain to students about the largest pandemic in human history,

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the really that is the inevitable claim to fame that the Black Death has is the highest numbers of the highest percentage of of deaths.

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And over a very, very broad landscape, students want to know how it happened.

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They want to know why it happened. They want to know why it happened, when it happened.

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And for most of my teaching career, I couldn't answer it.

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Nobody could answer it. There was a long, long dispute, about 30 years, about what really caused the black death.

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And nobody can answer it. And that's really frustrating in a classroom, is is is not being able to do that.

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So anyway, I was I was watching the work that was coming from the scientists when they were saying we figured it out.

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And I sing like, wait a minute, how do you do that?

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And so I started reading their work and realising that they were disputing amongst themselves about their methods.

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And again, as a historian of science, that's completely normal to me.

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So I was just sitting on the sidelines watching.

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But over the course of several years, they finally came to a consensus about their methods, about interpretations.

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And I was like, wow, I need to start paying attention this.

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I need to take it into the classroom with me. And the other thing that helped me was not simply the training as a historian of science,

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but also my what I've done actually most of my career was work as a philologist, which means I had text.

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And the very simple explanation is what geneticists do in analysing a genome

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is essentially the same thing that a philologist does in analysing a text,

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which is you look for errors and then you track the errors and the errors define lineages.

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And once you have lineages, then you have a narrative.

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And then you have history, I think I loved that you also call it what you call it, the historicist sciences, right.

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So thinking about how history in the sciences worked together and in some ways are looking at some of the same questions,

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even if they're using different kinds of evidence.

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But I especially thought it was interesting that you've written about how in some ways this this use of the sciences.

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So things like bio archaeology has let us think beyond archives,

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which are often based in Europe and have really let us understand the history of human health and the history of disease on a global scale.

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So can you talk a little bit about this relationship between the kinds of sources that you work with and this global understanding of a plague?

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The issue of where sources are and what they can tell us is complicated for any field, it's but it's also the basis of of of any field.

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So I as a historian, work closely with with written text.

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That means I have to read the languages that they're written.

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And there are some phenomenal polymaths out there who know 12, 20 different languages.

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I'm not one of them. But because I work on the history of science and medicine,

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I have always paid attention to the Islamic world because there's just a phenomenal

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transmission between the Islamic world and in Europe in the Middle Ages.

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So I knew to keep an eye out and I knew to ask questions about a broader landscape.

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And what that did was simply mean that when I started reading the genetics,

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I started seeing, wait a minute, this has implications for areas more than Europe.

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So even though to date almost all the samples that the genomes that had been sequenced come from Europe,

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they still can tell stories about other places. And that's the amazing thing.

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And that's that's also kind of the point of speculation that the field is is in now is we have to make inferences about what those other stories are.

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We don't necessarily have proof or anything. But the thing is, the inference is the beginning of the questioning and new research agendas.

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And I think I can also say that you have a global approach to understanding the history of disease,

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but yours comes very much as a historian of the Ottoman Empire.

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So how how is this shaped the way that you study the history of the second plague pandemic?

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Yeah, I was not trained as a historian of science or medicine, I was trained as an Ottoman historian.

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And for me to start working on the history of the second pandemic from the vantage point of the Ottoman Empire was actually

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really taking a position on the margins of the field of studies when I first started working on this on the history of plague.

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And in fact, it was a transformative experience not only for me, I believe in trying to understand what really happened in the Ottoman Empire,

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but the findings of my research, I believe, also can be used to understand the history of the second pandemic in a much larger area.

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And so one of the most important questions, in fact, the double question for me to to tackle throughout my research and a question that

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I was asked a lot in the earlier years of my career is that why does it matter?

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Why should we study plague in the Ottoman Empire if it's the same as what we know, that is to say,

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the plague experience of Europe, why should we understand or pay attention to this?

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And if it is different, I was tasked of telling the larger community of historians about why was it different?

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And so it was in a way, for me a task to explain why plague was important to the historians of the Ottoman Empire,

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but also thinking about potential differences and contributions to the larger story.

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And in a way, I think it was very rewarding to work on a body of sources that had not been explored before and working on a part of the world,

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especially for the history of the early part of the second pandemic. Let me say, because the 19th century,

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late 18th and 19th centuries had been somewhat explored in the context of plague and cholera in the Ottoman Empire.

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But really anything before that had not been fully explored until I started doing they were doing my research.

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And so the problem is, yes, it is the same disease.

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So in many ways we're talking about a similar kind of experience.

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But there are also differences and those differences,

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I think we need to think about the contributions of potential research coming from different geographical

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areas to integrate into the story that we know or we think we know about the history of plague,

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thinking about different geographies, different landscapes, different climates.

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Topography is different flora and fauna.

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These are all components of research that can not only diversify our knowledge and enrich our knowledge about the history of play,

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but they can also transform our notions about the history of play in the sense that, for example,

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looking at the history of the larger second pandemic from the vantage point of the Ottoman Empire,

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that made it possible for me to understand well that the second pandemic lasted a lot longer than we previously assumed.

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In fact, in a way, we can say that the second pandemic never ended.

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So looking at Ottoman history made it possible for me to see that the behaviour of the disease changed,

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its circulation patterns changed over time, and also how it's recovered, how it persisted and how it disappeared.

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So all of these questions, again, we need to think of different geographies and expand both the temporal and the spatial scope of the

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study of past pandemics so we can have a fuller picture and a richer picture to to understand them.

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I think because if I've understood you correctly, I think what people might not realise is that many people still talk about the end of plague,

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the end of the second plague pandemic as happening in the seventeen hundreds.

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But you've pointed out that's actually just the period when it disappears from Europe.

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Right. And so one of the things that a global approach or global historical approach

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is trying to get us to think about is from what geographic standpoint are we?

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Are we writing our histories where from what geographic standpoint our sources are evidence, where is it being recorded?

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So what happens if we no longer focus exclusively on Europe to define say something as an ending?

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So I wonder if both of you can just say a little bit more about them.

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As you said, in some ways you're suggesting if we go beyond Europe, the pandemic has actually never ended.

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Is that a fair point? And Monica, do you agree with this?

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Absolutely, I mean, I do agree that the second pandemic lasted a lot longer than we thought we knew,

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but at the same time and I'll let Monica through to to to continue on that and that line.

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But let me also say the the narratives of end of pandemics, especially the one that was produced in Europe,

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was also incorporating all sorts of other narratives that have been produced

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throughout the early modern period and in Europe about how about the place of Europe,

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the Eurocentric bias, but also the colonial context in which that body of knowledge was produced and implemented in in the colonies.

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So in that sense, I think so. It's not only about when the disease actually end,

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but it's also about how that ending narratives are embedded in understanding history and how it retroactively changes the way we study that history.

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So there's a pandemic, the legacy that it leaves behind that we need to tackle with.

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And I would add to that to say that the work that I've been doing the last couple of years is to look at the beginning of the second pandemic.

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And I have added 150 years to the narrative is that that 13 forty six beginning date that we had all used, it was in every textbook.

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It was in every published study. It still is everywhere is wrong.

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It's wrong because it doesn't tell us where anything came from.

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And. The one of the analogies I use is if we told the story of the covid-19 pandemic only from the perspective of the United States,

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we would tell a story that starts, say, in February or March of 20, top 20, we would tell a story of a peak in January of twenty twenty one.

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And then we would tell a story about miraculous interventions of of of vaccines,

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tell the same story from the perspective of India, and tell that same story from the perspective of Brazil.

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It's the exact same organism around the world.

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We know that on but completely different experiences of it.

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And so that's what what I'm trying to do is let's look at that longer.

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Let's look at that whole story about how pandemics start, because I think that gives us new insight on how and why they and because,

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in fact, the fact of the matter is, we still don't know why, even in Europe, the second pandemic ended.

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So we are working with a.

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We have been overly comfortable thinking that that we knew that these these stories and

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what I'm finding is we've we've only touched the tip of the iceberg with most of them.

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I love that we're we're revising what we know about history and we're revising the ways that we should think about disease not only in the present,

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but also in the past. So, Monica, and thank you very much for sharing your expertise,

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for explaining how your global approach to the history of plague revises how we should understand the end of the second plague pandemic,

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but also how we should study pandemics in general. And thank you all very much for watching our videos.

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