Hello and welcome to the How Epidemics and Project based at the University of Oxford.
My name is Erica Charters and I'm very pleased to have with me today two international experts on the history of disease,
Monica Green and Catholic Monica and both of you have extensively researched and published on the history of various diseases.
But I think it's fair to say that the disease that both of you have worked on most
extensively and continue to work on is plague and especially the second plague pandemic.
So, Monica, can you tell us a little bit about plague and specifically about the second plague pandemic?
When did it take place and where did it take place?
The second plague pandemic is the term we use now for the late mediaeval expansion of plague across Eurasia and extending into Africa.
Most people know it is the black death. And that's one of the transformative things that we've witnessed the last few years,
is moving from what we think was a fairly short episode of the Black Death.
The dates that are usually given are thirteen forty six to thirteen fifty three,
moving from that massive spread of plague through the Mediterranean to Europe
and actually seeing it's part of a much larger and much longer phenomenon.
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.
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,
but scientists are interested in studying it. People who work on health policy want to understand how plague happened, how it ended.
Can you tell us a little bit about why plague is so important to so many scholars?
Yes, I mean, a plague is actually very central to many of the ideas and practises that developed since the late mediaeval
period and continue throughout the early modern into the modern period for the development of epidemiology,
public health, medicine and many of the working concepts that were still used today about epidemic disease,
pandemic disease, endemic disease and how to control and mitigate those.
So in that sense,
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.
And Monica, I know that you really came to play as a mediaevalist,
so historian of the mediaeval period, someone who probably worked with archives and with texts,
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.
Can you explain a little bit more about what this means and how this changes our understanding of the history of plague?
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,
I have always understood how to look at the construction of scientific knowledge.
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.
And what emboldened me to to try to engage with with this new kind of science was really two things.
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,
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.
And over a very, very broad landscape, students want to know how it happened.
They want to know why it happened. They want to know why it happened, when it happened.
And for most of my teaching career, I couldn't answer it.
Nobody could answer it. There was a long, long dispute, about 30 years, about what really caused the black death.
And nobody can answer it. And that's really frustrating in a classroom, is is is not being able to do that.
So anyway, I was I was watching the work that was coming from the scientists when they were saying we figured it out.
And I sing like, wait a minute, how do you do that?
And so I started reading their work and realising that they were disputing amongst themselves about their methods.
And again, as a historian of science, that's completely normal to me.
So I was just sitting on the sidelines watching.
But over the course of several years, they finally came to a consensus about their methods, about interpretations.
And I was like, wow, I need to start paying attention this.
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,
but also my what I've done actually most of my career was work as a philologist, which means I had text.
And the very simple explanation is what geneticists do in analysing a genome
is essentially the same thing that a philologist does in analysing a text,
which is you look for errors and then you track the errors and the errors define lineages.
And once you have lineages, then you have a narrative.
And then you have history, I think I loved that you also call it what you call it, the historicist sciences, right.
So thinking about how history in the sciences worked together and in some ways are looking at some of the same questions,
even if they're using different kinds of evidence.
But I especially thought it was interesting that you've written about how in some ways this this use of the sciences.
So things like bio archaeology has let us think beyond archives,
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.
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?
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.
So I as a historian, work closely with with written text.
That means I have to read the languages that they're written.
And there are some phenomenal polymaths out there who know 12, 20 different languages.
I'm not one of them. But because I work on the history of science and medicine,
I have always paid attention to the Islamic world because there's just a phenomenal
transmission between the Islamic world and in Europe in the Middle Ages.
So I knew to keep an eye out and I knew to ask questions about a broader landscape.
And what that did was simply mean that when I started reading the genetics,
I started seeing, wait a minute, this has implications for areas more than Europe.
So even though to date almost all the samples that the genomes that had been sequenced come from Europe,
they still can tell stories about other places. And that's the amazing thing.
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.
We don't necessarily have proof or anything. But the thing is, the inference is the beginning of the questioning and new research agendas.
And I think I can also say that you have a global approach to understanding the history of disease,
but yours comes very much as a historian of the Ottoman Empire.
So how how is this shaped the way that you study the history of the second plague pandemic?
Yeah, I was not trained as a historian of science or medicine, I was trained as an Ottoman historian.
And for me to start working on the history of the second pandemic from the vantage point of the Ottoman Empire was actually
really taking a position on the margins of the field of studies when I first started working on this on the history of plague.
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,
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.
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
I was asked a lot in the earlier years of my career is that why does it matter?
Why should we study plague in the Ottoman Empire if it's the same as what we know, that is to say,
the plague experience of Europe, why should we understand or pay attention to this?
And if it is different, I was tasked of telling the larger community of historians about why was it different?
And so it was in a way, for me a task to explain why plague was important to the historians of the Ottoman Empire,
but also thinking about potential differences and contributions to the larger story.
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,
especially for the history of the early part of the second pandemic. Let me say, because the 19th century,
late 18th and 19th centuries had been somewhat explored in the context of plague and cholera in the Ottoman Empire.
But really anything before that had not been fully explored until I started doing they were doing my research.
And so the problem is, yes, it is the same disease.
So in many ways we're talking about a similar kind of experience.
But there are also differences and those differences,
I think we need to think about the contributions of potential research coming from different geographical
areas to integrate into the story that we know or we think we know about the history of plague,
thinking about different geographies, different landscapes, different climates.
Topography is different flora and fauna.
These are all components of research that can not only diversify our knowledge and enrich our knowledge about the history of play,
but they can also transform our notions about the history of play in the sense that, for example,
looking at the history of the larger second pandemic from the vantage point of the Ottoman Empire,
that made it possible for me to understand well that the second pandemic lasted a lot longer than we previously assumed.
In fact, in a way, we can say that the second pandemic never ended.
So looking at Ottoman history made it possible for me to see that the behaviour of the disease changed,
its circulation patterns changed over time, and also how it's recovered, how it persisted and how it disappeared.
So all of these questions, again, we need to think of different geographies and expand both the temporal and the spatial scope of the
study of past pandemics so we can have a fuller picture and a richer picture to to understand them.
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,
the end of the second plague pandemic as happening in the seventeen hundreds.
But you've pointed out that's actually just the period when it disappears from Europe.
Right. And so one of the things that a global approach or global historical approach
is trying to get us to think about is from what geographic standpoint are we?
Are we writing our histories where from what geographic standpoint our sources are evidence, where is it being recorded?
So what happens if we no longer focus exclusively on Europe to define say something as an ending?
So I wonder if both of you can just say a little bit more about them.
As you said, in some ways you're suggesting if we go beyond Europe, the pandemic has actually never ended.
Is that a fair point? And Monica, do you agree with this?
Absolutely, I mean, I do agree that the second pandemic lasted a lot longer than we thought we knew,
but at the same time and I'll let Monica through to to to continue on that and that line.
But let me also say the the narratives of end of pandemics, especially the one that was produced in Europe,
was also incorporating all sorts of other narratives that have been produced
throughout the early modern period and in Europe about how about the place of Europe,
the Eurocentric bias, but also the colonial context in which that body of knowledge was produced and implemented in in the colonies.
So in that sense, I think so. It's not only about when the disease actually end,
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.
So there's a pandemic, the legacy that it leaves behind that we need to tackle with.
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.
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.
It was in every published study. It still is everywhere is wrong.
It's wrong because it doesn't tell us where anything came from.
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,
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.
And then we would tell a story about miraculous interventions of of of vaccines,
tell the same story from the perspective of India, and tell that same story from the perspective of Brazil.
It's the exact same organism around the world.
We know that on but completely different experiences of it.
And so that's what what I'm trying to do is let's look at that longer.
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,
in fact, the fact of the matter is, we still don't know why, even in Europe, the second pandemic ended.
So we are working with a.
We have been overly comfortable thinking that that we knew that these these stories and
what I'm finding is we've we've only touched the tip of the iceberg with most of them.
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,
but also in the past. So, Monica, and thank you very much for sharing your expertise,
for explaining how your global approach to the history of plague revises how we should understand the end of the second plague pandemic,
but also how we should study pandemics in general. And thank you all very much for watching our videos.
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