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 Disease and History:

From Ancient Times to Covid-19

By

Frederick F. Cartwright & Michael Biddiss

 First published by Rupert Hart-Davis, 1972

Second Edition, 2000

Third Edition, 2014

Copyright © Frederick F. Cartwright & Michael Biddiss

This Fourth Edition published in 2020 by Lume Books

30 Great Guildford Street,
Borough, SE1 0HS

The right of Frederick F. Cartwright & Michael Biddiss to be identified

as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance
with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright
owner.
 CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction: Disease and History

1 Disease in the Ancient World

2 The Black Death

3 The Mystery of Syphilis

4 Smallpox, or the Conqueror Conquered

5 General Napoleon and General Typhus

6 Cholera and Sanitary Reform

7 Gin, Flu, and Tuberculosis

8 Mosquitoes, Flies, Travel, and Exploration

9 Queen Victoria and the Fall of the Russian Monarchy

10 Mob Hysteria and Mass Suggestion

11 Current Problems of Survival

Epilogue: The Covid-19 Pandemic

Further Reading
 PREFACE

This book had its origins in debate and collaboration between a

doctor and a historian, each concerned to provide the general reader
with an accessible account of some of the principal ways in which
disease has often made a dramatic mark upon history.
The first edition was published in 1972, after which it received
various reprintings and was also translated into French and
Japanese. An enlarged and fully revised second edition then
appeared in 2000, and subsequently became the object of a still
wider range of foreign translations. By the time that I undertook
some further updating for a paperback version issued four years
later, my co-author Frederick Cartwright had died at the end of a
very long and distinguished career not only as a consultant
anaesthetist but also as a pioneering writer and teacher on topics
related to the development of medical ideas and practice. A further
edition of the book appeared in 2014, ending with my substantially
enlarged treatment of topics that flow from the past into major
issues of current and future concern. I am grateful to Andrew
Lownie for having now encouraged me to prepare a fourth edition,
reinforcing such analysis with a new and particularly topical
Epilogue. This assesses, as far as is currently possible in the midst of
swiftly changing circumstances, the nature and historical significance
of the Covid-19 pandemic which began to develop so rapidly in the
course of 2020.
 In preparing the present edition I have again enjoyed the
benefit of dialogue with Dr James Willis. His medical knowledge and
wisdom stem from extensive experience in general practice, and I
am most appreciative of the helpful comments that he has continued
to make in precisely the same spirit of inter-disciplinary collaboration
as originally inspired Disease and History. Further warm thanks for
assistance in preparing this updated version are due to Louise
Dilloway and Lesley Willis, as well as to James Faktor and his
colleagues at Lume Books.
MICHAEL BIDDISS
November 2020
 INTRODUCTION

DISEASE AND HISTORY

Historians and doctors have much in common, sharing particularly

an interest in the influences which condition human existence. The
object of this book is to study the area in which those interests most
directly converge, that of the impact of disease upon history. In
medical diagnosis a single cause for disease will often be found; in
historical investigation the causes are likely to be more complex.
Nothing could be more ridiculous than to contend that disease is
always the primary cause of a great historical change but,
particularly at a time when the sociological aspects of history are
being increasingly emphasized, it is worth examining episodes in
which the influence of disease may have been of real importance,
especially when that significance has been neglected or
misconstrued.
Our aim in studying some of the many maladies which have
afflicted the world will be to illustrate their effect not only upon
historically important individuals but also upon peoples. Thus the
study is relevant to History, whether conceived as a saga of great
figures or as the story of social conditions and broader human
development. The ills that have plagued civilized societies are as
much a part of civilization as are their prevention and cure. If
disease itself is historically important, then the conquest of disease is
no less so. And, as we shall see, this conquest, though still only
partial, has itself raised problems that are no less daunting and
equally relevant to our subject.
The picture of primitive human beings isolated in their caves is
misleading. The family unit developed into the tribe living a
communal life. These small communities, a few of which still exist in
remote jungle areas today, dwelt in man-made clearings with little or
no contact between individual settlements. Each group was self-
supporting, dependent upon naturally occurring food sources. In
Central Africa, for instance, bananas and manioc formed a staple
diet, varied by small quantities of palm oil and only rarely by human
or animal flesh. The few enemies of these tribal communities were
snakes, carnivorous beasts and pygmy humans who shot at them
with strophanthin-poisoned arrows. Puerperal fever in childbirth, a
high infant mortality and endemic disease, such as sleeping sickness
and yaws, prevented rapid increase in population. Life span was
short, partly because no reliable cure for illness existed, partly
because a high carbohydrate diet led to early obesity with fatty
infiltration of the vital organs. So tribal growth remained almost
static, increasing in a healthy season when live births outnumbered
deaths, decreasing when infant mortality was high. Such is the
natural process of slow increase in a primitive community which is
adequately fed and protected from major disaster but cannot cope
with the hazards of childbirth and sickness.
Disaster in the form of famine, war or epidemic disease could
strike only from outside. A plague of insects might descend upon the
crops and cause famine. Arab slavers, pushing down from the north
and east of Africa, might chance upon one of these villages, engage
the inhabitants in battle and carry off the survivors into captivity. In
later years Europeans would come, bringing with them new diseases
relatively harmless to themselves but lethal to a community lacking
any inbred or acquired resistance.
When thousands of years ago the peoples that would
eventually create the great civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India
and China began to emerge from self-contained communities the
chances of major disaster multiplied. A greater degree of civilization
brought benefits, including a higher standard of living and a fuller
intellectual life, but it also produced hazards. As mobility increased
so too did the likelihood of contact with unknown diseases. Tracks
became roads that made for easier and faster travel. New diseases
could be carried along such routes, striking down unaccustomed
populations before resistance to the invading organisms could
develop. Cities were built and, as city-dwellers necessarily rely upon
an extraneous food supply, famine became inevitable whenever that
supply failed, for there were no natural resources to take its place.
Hunger, the desire for more and better living space, or the simple
lust of a chieftain for power, would then set one grouping to fight
against another. So mankind’s three great enemies, Pestilence,
Famine and War – the three Horsemen of the Apocalypse who bring
in their train Death upon his Pale Horse – developed on an ever-
increasing scale.
Pestilence, famine and war interact and produce a sequence.
War drives the farmer from his fields and destroys his crops;
destruction of the crop spells famine; the starved and weakened
people fall easy victims to the onslaught of pestilence. All three are
diseases. Pestilence is a disorder of the human. Famine results from
disorders of plants and of animal food sources, caused by inclement
weather or more directly by insect or bacterial invasion. And even
war may be regarded, though perhaps more arguably, as a form of
mass psychotic disorder. In the subsequent chapters, although the
diseases of famine and war must necessarily have their place, our
primary concern will be with those physical ills that have directly
affected humanity.
 CHAPTER ONE
DISEASE IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

Disease associated with civilization is older than written history, for

civilization of a kind existed before the first records were kept. While
archaeologists working on skeletal remains have provided us with an
increasing amount of evidence about disease during the earlier
stages of human development, the oldest textual survivals of any
substance date back only to the epoch around 1500 BC. Most
notable is the papyrus from that period which was found in a tomb
at Thebes by Professor Georg Ebers in 1862. We can readily surmise
that its particularly extensive cataloguing of a wide range of
Egyptian remedial practices is in some ways typical even of more
fragmentary ancient medical records, in the sense that it surely
includes some repetition of older texts now lost and discusses
ailments and attempted cures which, even at the time of writing,
would often have been already centuries-old.
In the biblical Book of Exodus there is an account of the
plague which smote Egypt around 1500 BC, killing all the firstborn in
the land from the firstborn of Pharaoh on his throne to the firstborn
of the captive in his dungeon and all firstborn of cattle. This is one
example of the effect of disease upon history, for the last terrible
visitation upon the Egyptians persuaded Pharaoh to allow his
Israelite slaves to depart. After forty years of wanderings and
tribulations in the wilderness they at last reached what they
regarded as their promised land. The war-pestilence sequence is well
described in the Book of Samuel. We are told that around 1140 BC
the Israelites went out against the Philistines in battle and were
defeated. The Israelites brought out their sacred Ark of the
Covenant and re-engaged the Philistines, but again suffered defeat.
The Philistines captured the Ark and bore it off to Ashdod, where
plague at once broke out. The Ark was then removed – by public
request – to Gath and then to Ekron, both places being immediately
smitten by plague. After seven months of suffering, the Philistines
decided that the only hope was to return the Ark to Israel. It was
delivered to the field of Joshua the Bethshemite, the return being
greeted with sacrifices. But the inquisitive Bethshemites looked into
the Ark and were punished by a great pestilence. It seems that the
disease then spread throughout Israel, bringing death to about fifty
thousand people.
The plague of Athens in 430 BC provides a particularly striking
example of the effect of disease upon history. At the beginning of
the fifth century the Athenian Empire was at the height of its power.
This tiny Greek nation had defeated mighty Darius the Persian in the
land battles of Marathon and Plataea and in the great naval
engagement of Salamis. The enlightened reign of Pericles opened in
462 BC. Under him the temples of Athens and Eleusis, destroyed by
the Persians, were restored through the genius of the architect
Ictinus and the artist Phidias. But this golden age of Greece was all
too brief. In 431 BC the Peloponnesian War broke out, an internecine
struggle between the two main Hellenic powers of Athens and
Sparta. Sparta had a good army but no fleet, while Athens was a
maritime power with a strong navy but a weaker army. Since her
land defences were almost impregnable and ample supplies could be
imported by sea, Athens could neither be brought to battle by land
nor starved into submission. Fighting a defensive battle by land and
an offensive war at sea, she should have been able to defeat Sparta
without great difficulty. During the first year of the war the outcome
seemed inevitable, for Athens was successful both on land and sea,
but her defensive policy on land necessarily led to the Athenians
being crowded and besieged within their city walls.
Disaster struck in 430 BC. The pestilence is supposed to have
started in Ethiopia, whence it travelled to Egypt and was carried
across the Mediterranean by ship to Piraeus and Athens. It raged for
only a short time but caused enormous mortality. Perhaps at least a
third and possibly two-thirds of the population died. More disastrous
still was the breakdown of morale, an unsurprising phenomenon
which we shall meet again in times of pandemic sickness.
Thucydides, who left an account of this horrible time, wrote of the
Athenians: ‘Fear of gods or law of men there was none to restrain
them. As for the first, they judged it to be just the same whether
they worshipped them or not, as they saw all alike perishing. As for
the latter, no one expected to live to be brought to trial for his
offences.’ Thucydides added that even the most staid and
respectable citizens devoted themselves to nothing but gluttony,
drunkenness and licentiousness.
When it seemed that the plague had subsided, Pericles sent a
powerful fleet to capture the Spartan-led stronghold of Potidaea. But
hardly had the navy departed when plague broke out in the ships
with such violence that the fleet was forced to return to Athens. A
similar disaster occurred when Pericles himself led his fleet to
Epidaurus for ‘the pestilence not only carried off his own men but all
that had intercourse with them’. Pericles may have caught the
infection at this time, for he is supposed to have died of plague in
429 BC.
The precise nature of the visitation is unknown. No account of
it occurs in the writings attributed to the master physician
Hippocrates. Thucydides described a very rapid onset, raging fever,
extreme thirst, tongue and throat ‘bloody’, the skin of the body red
and livid, finally breaking out into pustules and ulcers. The disease
attacked all classes, rich and poor. Physicians were helpless and
themselves succumbed in large numbers. Recent majority opinion
has tended towards proposing typhus as the cause, but other
possibilities that have been speculatively cited include scarlet fever,
smallpox and measles, or even some disease long since disappeared.
Whatever its nature, the infection is likely to have come from
another centre of population which had developed its own disease
pattern or pool. The pestilence would then have assumed an
explosive character because the Athenians had had no chance of
acquiring previous immunity. The survivors would gradually develop
increasing resistance as epidemics of the infection recurred and so
the disease became less fatal.
The plague of 430 BC undoubtedly contributed to the downfall
of the Athenian empire. By killing so many, by demoralizing the
capital and, above all, by destroying the fighting power of the navy,
the outbreak prevented Athens from striking a decisive blow against
Sparta. The war dragged on for twenty-seven years and ended with
the defeat of Athens in 404 BC. She was deprived of her navy and
her foreign possessions, while her landward defences were razed to
the ground. Fortunately for posterity, the city and its culture were
left intact.

One of the most stupendous historical events, measured in both the

extent and the longevity of its effects, is the downfall of the Roman
Empire. The causes and consequences of its collapse have been long
debated by historians. Here we shall examine only such factors as
are connected to disease and its prevention.
Under the Romans public health and sanitation were more
advanced around the year AD 300 than they were to be again until
the middle of the nineteenth century. Rome’s great drainage system,
the Cloaca Maxima, was started in the sixth century BC and assumed
the function of a modern sewer, the plan being then repeated in
many places elsewhere. For example, the ruins of Pompeii and
Herculaneum, destroyed by an eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, have
revealed an elaborate system of waterworks connected with flushing
closets; and under the rule of the Emperor Vespasian, about AD 70,
a building with marble urinals was erected in Rome, with a small
charge made for admission. In contrast, London had to wait until the
Great Exhibition of 1851 before any public lavatories were provided.
For that event ‘public waiting rooms’, available to ladies in Bedford
Street and to gentlemen in Fleet Street, were set up by way of
experiment: the charge was two pence for ‘lavatory privileges’ and
fourpence for a hot towel. The cost of constructing them came to
£680 and, despite their distance from the Exhibition in Hyde Park,
admission fees raised £2,470 in five months.
Cleanliness depends upon an adequate water supply. The first
aqueduct brought pure water into Rome as early as 312 BC. At the
beginning of the Christian era there were six, but a hundred years
later ten aqueducts supplied 250 million gallons daily. The public
baths required half this enormous supply but there remained more
than 50 gallons a head for the two million inhabitants, about the
same amount as is used by a citizen of London or New York today.
In 1954 four of these aqueducts had been renovated and sufficed for
the needs of modern Rome. The baths of Caracalla, dating from
about AD 200, could accommodate 1,600 bathers at a time. Those
of Diocletian built eighty years later had no fewer than 3,000 rooms.
The bath, much like the modern sauna, accompanied Roman
civilization wherever it penetrated and some places became famed
for the curative powers of their warm or mineral-impregnated
waters. A few, such as Bath in England and Wiesbaden in Germany,
retain a modest reputation as medicinal spas today.
The huge city-state of Rome had long grown haphazardly, with
crooked narrow streets and squalid houses. Almost two-thirds of this
was destroyed in AD 64 by the great fire in the reign of Nero. More
fortunate than London after the blaze of 1666, Rome was rebuilt to a
master plan, a city of broad streets and wide squares. Cleaning of
the public roads was supervised by the aediles, a body of officials
who also controlled food supply, introducing regulations to ensure
the freshness and quality of perishable goods. Among the public
health measure was the prohibition of burials within the city walls,
causing the much more hygienic method of cremation to become
common. Cremation was not entirely replaced by burial until general
acceptance of Christianity implanted belief in physical resurrection.
In its cleanliness, sanitation and water supply, Rome was much
more akin to twentieth-century London or New York than to
medieval Paris or eighteenth-century Vienna. The Romans were the
first urban-dwelling people on the grand scale. They must have
quickly recognized, probably as a result of painful experience, that a
large body of people cannot live closely together without a pure
water supply, clean streets and efficient sewers. A seventeenth-
century Londoner existed in conditions that would hardly have been
tolerated by a first-century Roman. But they met on one common
ground, for neither knew the cause of disease. If the seemingly clear
water that flowed along the Roman aqueduct happened to come
from a contaminated source, then the Roman was as much at risk as
the Londoners who drew their supply from the muddy Thames. This
lack of essential knowledge rendered the magnificent health
measures of Imperial Rome entirely useless during the long years of
her plague-ridden decadence.
Imagine Rome as a bloated spider sitting in the centre of its
web. At the height of Roman expansion, this web stretched from the
Sahara in the south to the borders of Scotland in the north, from the
Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf in the east to the western shores
of Spain and Portugal. To north and west lay the oceans, to south
and east wide unknown continents in which dwelt less civilized
peoples. Farther beyond, in the dim shadows, lay the ancient
civilizations of India and China. The long land frontiers were manned
by garrisons at strategic points. From these stretched back the
filaments of the spider’s web, the sea routes from Africa and Egypt,
the straight legionary-made roads, all of which led to Rome.
Herein lay the makings of disaster: a wide hinterland hiding
unknown secrets, among them the micro-organisms of
unaccustomed disease, troops who penetrated into that hinterland
and were attacked by its inhabitants, easy transit by ship or along
the roads specially built for swift travel, a densely packed population
living a highly civilized existence but lacking the most rudimentary
means of combating infection. Given this conjunction of
circumstances, it is little wonder that the story of the last centuries
of Roman power is a long tale of pestilence.
In the first century BC an unusually severe type of malaria
seems to have infected the marshy districts around Rome, and then
remained a long-term problem. It produced a great epidemic around
AD 79, shortly after the eruption of Vesuvius. The infection seems to
have been confined to Italy, but there it raged destructively in the
cities and caused so many deaths in the Campagna, the market
garden of Rome, that the whole area went out of cultivation and
remained a notoriously malarial district until the end of the
nineteenth century.
It was primarily due to malaria, though there were other
reasons as well, that the live-birth rate of the Italo-Romans fell
steeply at a time when the birth rate throughout the conquered
regions was rising. Further, the chronic ill-health and weakness
caused by untreated malaria decreased life expectancy and
enervated the nation. By the fourth century AD the mighty fighting
power of the legions was no longer Italian, with officers as well as
common soldiers being drawn increasingly from Germanic tribes.
Possibly malaria, rather than the alleged decadent luxury imported
from the East, accounts for the slackness of spirit which
characterized the latter years of Roman authority.
Malaria may have originated in Africa but another danger came
from the remote East. Towards the end of the first century AD
warrior forces emerged from the region of Mongolia, riding over the
steppes into south-eastern Europe. Their exodus was probably
dictated by disease or famine or a combination of both in the lands
north of China. These mounted invaders were the Huns who, by
pressing on the Germanic tribes of Alans, Ostrogoths and Visigoths
inhabiting the central Euro-Asian land mass, instigated a relentless
western movement which in the end submerged Rome and broke
the empire into a rabble of warring states. The Huns brought with
them new infections which produced a series of epidemics generally
labelled by historians as ‘plagues’. An interesting point is that,
conversely, the Huns probably encountered a European disease
unknown to them: during the years AD 451-4, under Attila, they
reached as far west as Gaul and northern Italy but were turned back
before invading Rome itself, apparently more by epidemic sickness
than by defensive warfare.
The Plague of Antoninus, sometimes known as the Plague of
the physician Galen, started in AD 164 among troops of the co-
Emperor Lucius Verus stationed on the eastern border of the empire.
The sickness was confined to the east for two years, causing havoc
among an army under the command of Avidius Cassius sent to
repress a revolt in Syria. The infection accompanied the legions
homeward, spreading throughout the countryside and reaching
Rome in the year 166. It rapidly extended to all parts of the known
world, causing so many deaths that cartloads of corpses were
removed from Rome and other cities.
The visitation is notable because it caused the first crack in the
Roman defence lines. Until 161 the empire continually expanded and
maintained its frontiers. In that year a Germanic horde forced the
north-east barrier of Italy. Fear and disorganization prevented
retaliation for eight years. In 169 the full weight of Roman arms was
thrown against the invaders. They were driven back but it seems
that sickness carried by the legions played its part, for many
Germans were found lying dead on the battlefield without any sign
of wounding. The pestilence raged until 180, one of the last victims
being the noblest of Roman Emperors, Marcus Aurelius. He died on
the seventh day of his illness, having refused to see his son in case
he should also fall a victim. After a short respite, the pestilence
returned again in 189. This second epidemic was less widespread
but severely affected the city of Rome, causing more than two
thousand deaths a day at its height.
The name of the physician Galen is attached to the plague of
164-89 not only because he fled from it but because he left a
description. Initial symptoms were high fever, inflammation of the
mouth and throat, parching thirst and diarrhoea. Galen described a
skin eruption appearing about the ninth day, sometimes dry and
sometimes pustular. He implies that many patients died before the
eruption appeared. There is here some resemblance to the Athenian
plague, but the undoubted Eastern origin and the mention of
pustules have led many historians to assert that this is the first
record of a smallpox epidemic.
One theory holds that the westward movement of the Huns
started because of a virulent smallpox epidemic in Mongolia, which
they transmitted to German tribes who in turn infected the Romans.
Against this theory must be set the fact that the development of the
Roman outbreak in no way resembles the later history of European
smallpox in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. But, as we shall
see in some of the following chapters, the first appearance of an
infection often takes a form and course quite different from that of
the established disease.
After the year 189 there is no mention of serious ‘plague’ until
250. Then appeared the great Plague of Cyprian which indisputably
changed the course of history in western Europe. The nature of the
infection is, however, unknown. Cyprian, the Christian bishop of
Carthage, described the symptoms as violent diarrhoea and
vomiting, an ulcerated sore throat, burning fever, and putrefaction or
gangrene of the hands and feet. Another account tells of a very
rapid spread of disease all over the body and of an unassuageable
thirst. In neither account is there any mention of a rash or skin
eruption, unless the phrase ‘rapid spread all over the frame’ implies
a visible manifestation. Like the Athenian plague, the place of origin
is said to have been Ethiopia, from where it passed to Egypt and the
Roman colonies in North Africa, which was the granary of Rome. In
this respect the Plague of Cyprian resembles the Plague of Orosius in
the year 125, an example of the famine-pestilence sequence,
preceded by an invasion of locusts that destroyed the north African
cornfields. Cyprian’s mention of gangrenous hands and feet tempts
one to think of ergotism as the cause. Epidemic ergotism, produced
by eating bread made from rye infected with the Claviceps fungus,
has certainly occurred quite frequently but there is little evidence
that rye, a crop of the north rather than of the south, was a staple
bread corn in Rome. The very broad spread and longevity of the
Plague of Cyprian are also arguments against the theory.
The Plague of Cyprian resembled the ‘Spanish flu’ of 1918-19 in
producing a pandemic – at least in the sense of affecting all regions
of the world then known to the West. It advanced with great speed,
not only by human-to-human contact but by means of clothing or
any article used by the sick. The first devastating appearance was
followed by a remission which ended with a renewed epidemic of
equal violence. There was a seasonal incidence, outbreaks starting in
the autumn, lasting through winter and spring, and fading out with
the coming of hot weather in summer: a cycle suggestive of typhus
fever. Mortality is said to have been higher than in any previously
recorded pestilence, the deaths of infected persons outnumbering
those who survived an attack. The acute phase of the Plague of
Cyprian lasted for sixteen years, during which time a general panic
developed. Thousands fled from the countryside to overcrowd the
towns and so caused fresh outbreaks, and wide areas of farmland
reverted to waste; some thought the human race could not possibly
survive. Despite war in Mesopotamia, on the eastern frontier and in
Gaul, the Roman Empire managed to surmount the catastrophe.
However, by the year 275 the legions had fallen back from
Transylvania and the Black Forest to the Danube and the Rhine, and
the situation appeared so dangerous that the Emperor Aurelian
decided to fortify the city of Rome itself.
It is likely that after the acute phase the infection persisted as
a slightly less virulent illness. Throughout the next three centuries,
while Rome slowly collapsed under pressure from Goth and Vandal,
there were recurrent outbreaks of similar pestilence. Gradually the
evidence becomes more blurred, degenerating into a story of
generalized war, famine and sickness, as the darkness descended
over Rome and her mighty empire disintegrated. The Germanic
peoples crowded into Italy and Gaul, crossing the Pyrenees into
Spain, and even into North Africa where an epidemic so weakened
the Vandals themselves in 480 that they were unable to resist a later
invasion by Moors. There are rumours of great mortality in Vienna
around 455 and in Rome itself in 467.
Major sickness also afflicted Britain in the year 444. According
to Bede, mortality was so great that barely enough healthy men
survived to bury the dead, while the pestilence depleted the forces
of the Romano-British chieftain Vortigern to such an extent that he
was unable to cope with the incursions of the Picts and Scots.
Legend relates that, after consulting with his fellow-chieftains,
Vortigern decided to seek help from the Saxons who arrived in 449
as mercenaries under Hengist and Horsa. Thus epidemic disease
may well have made a major contribution to the eventual success of
a broader infiltration that created an Anglo-Saxon society and
culture.
Meanwhile a new Roman Empire had arisen in the East. Asia
Minor had been annexed by Rome in the first century BC. In AD 330
Constantine the Great founded an eastern capital at Byzantium
(Constantinople, now Istanbul). The combined Eastern and Western
Empires lasted about a hundred and fifty years. Then the Western
portion disintegrated, even while the Byzantine one survived in the
East until its overthrow in 1204 by the Latin forces of the Fourth
Crusade. During the sixth century Justinian, perhaps the greatest of
the Byzantine rulers, had almost succeeded in implementing the
aspiration to resurrect Rome and to reunite the two halves of the old
empire. He launched an attack to the west in the year 532. He
recaptured Carthage and much of the north coast of Africa, retook
Sicily and crossed to the mainland of Italy. Naples fell to his general
Belisarius while undefended Rome and most of central and southern
Italy were captured by the imperial armies. By 540 it seemed that
Germanic resistance had been broken. Justinian, having also
recovered part of Spain, formed a bold plan to carry his conquests
into Gaul and even into Britain.
His victories brought no lasting gain. The Moors drove the
Byzantines from most of the newly won African seaboard and in 541
a brilliant young Goth leader, Totila, recaptured the greater part of
Italy. Totila was willing to make terms with Justinian but the emperor
had determined upon total reconquest. There followed eleven years
of bitter warfare in which Rome underwent siege five times. During
one of these sieges the Goths cut the aqueducts in an attempt to
force surrender. Subsequent medieval squalor and uncleanliness
partly derive from this action because Rome, with its magnificent
architecture and historical prestige, never wholly lost its influence
upon European lifestyle. If the city had still possessed a functioning
and plentiful supply of clean water, other European cities might well
have followed its example.
The reign of Justinian should have been a time of imperial
splendour. He girdled his domains with a defensive chain of castles
and forts, and erected many fine buildings, including the cathedral of
St Sophia. His code of laws, embodying those of ancient Rome,
formed the basis of European justice for centuries to come. He
recruited well-trained armies commanded by successful generals
such as Belisarius and Narses. Yet during his long reign the Huns
very nearly succeeded in taking his capital, the Slavs captured
Adrianople and the Persians sacked Antioch. His government, which
had begun in a blaze of glory, steadily declined. When Justinian died
in 565 at the age of eighty-three, he left his empire considerably
poorer and weaker than when he had mounted the throne in 527.
For in 540, the year of his greatest success, an enemy more terrible
than Goth or Vandal had been about to strike.
The Plague of Justinian is one of the most lethal to have ever
emerged. We learn something of it from the account written by
Procopius, the secretary or archivist of Justinian’s reign. The first
known cases were reported in 540 at Pelusium in Lower Egypt from
where the infection spread throughout Egypt and also into Palestine,
which then seems to have been the focus of diffusion to the rest of
the known world. Constantinople was first infected in the spring of
542. The mortality was not initially great but rapidly increased as the
summer advanced until some ten thousand people were dying each
day. Graves could not be dug quickly enough, so roofs were taken
off the towers of forts, the towers filled with bodies and the roofs
replaced. Ships were also loaded with the dead, rowed out to sea
and abandoned.
This is also the first time that we can correctly use the term
‘plague’, for the sickness was undoubtedly a manifestation of its
bubonic form. Victims were seized with sudden high fever. On the
first or second day the typical buboes – swollen glands – appeared
in the groin or armpit. Many patients became quickly comatose,
others developed a violent delirium in which they saw phantoms and
heard voices prophesying death. Sometimes the buboes broke down
into gangrenous sores and the sufferer died in terrible pain. Death
usually occurred on the fifth day of illness or even more quickly, but
it was sometimes delayed for a week or two. Physicians could not
prognosticate which cases would be light and which fatal. They were
quite useless for there was no known remedy, and by the end of the
epidemic some 40 percent of the population of Constantinople were
dead. Procopius makes two particularly interesting points. First, the
plague always started on the coast, and spread inland. Second,
contrary to expectation, doctors or attendants who nursed the sick
and laid out the dead seemed not to fall victim any more frequently
than others.
The plague returned repeatedly, lasting until the year 590. It
spared no town or village, ravaging the most remote settlements. If
a region congratulated itself on having escaped, the plague would
surely appear in due time. As in the Plague of Cyprian, there was a
seasonal rise and fall in intensity, but whereas the first reached its
height in winter, that of Justinian caused the greatest number of
deaths in the late summer months. Gibbon states that entire
countries never regained their previous density of population.
Procopius makes the observation, found in many plague chronicles,
that the depravity and licentiousness during and after a visitation
suggested that only the most wicked survived.
The extent to which disease contributed to the downfall of
Rome and to the wreck of Justinian’s ambitions must remain an open
question. Incurable infectious illness is no respecter of persons but
impartially attacks the highly civilized and the less civilized. The city-
dweller is at higher risk than the countryman and, in a mortal
epidemic, a closely-knit organization will disintegrate more swiftly
than a looser association. Of supreme importance is the fact that
failure of morale is more likely to occur among those who have lived
softly than among people who have known hardship throughout
their lives. Thus, although pestilence may have seriously affected the
fighting spirit of savage tribes, its impact upon Roman and Byzantine
life was likely to have been very much greater. When we consider
the frightful sequence of pestilences that smote the empire during
the time of its decadence we need hardly search for a more potent
contribution to disaster.
Besides undermining the Roman state, the pestilences of the
first three centuries AD produced two far-reaching and long-lasting
effects which are less widely recognized. First, Christianity would
hardly have succeeded in establishing itself as a world force and
would certainly not have taken the form that it eventually did if the
Roman Empire had not been ravaged by incurable disease during the
years which followed the life of Christ. Second, the thousand-year
development of medicine from the fourth to the fourteenth century
would have been very different had its practice not fallen under the
domination of the Christian Church. To understand what happened
we must go back to the beginning of European civilization, when
priest and doctor were one and the same.
In the early days of Greek legend the god Apollo killed a
venomous snake, a symbol of disease. By this act he became
regarded not only as the god of health but also as the bringer of
pestilence which he visited on mortals by his arrows. He must
therefore be both worshipped and placated. Apollo passed the
secrets of his healing powers to the centaur Chiron who in turn
instructed Asklepios or Aesculapius. The latter, possibly confused
with a human healer living around 1250 BC, also became honoured
as a god and was worshipped in temples scattered throughout
Hellas.
 The cult of Aesculapius grew and developed into the ritual of
incubation or temple-sleep. Patients made a sacrifice to the healing
god and purified themselves by bathing (lustration). Then they lay
down to sleep in a long open corridor where Aesculapius himself
might appear in a dream and give advice, or the god’s sacred
serpents might effect a cure by licking sores. In later years the
magical temple-sleep was reinforced by physical therapy consisting
of exercise, diet, massage and bathing. Many patients stayed for
weeks or months in the temple, which developed into something
closely akin to the nineteenth-century ‘hydropathic’. Treatment was
no doubt equally successful in both.
The Greeks initiated the ‘scientific approach’. Pythagoras (c.530
BC) is the father of mathematics but he also founded a system of
medicine. His pupils enunciated the doctrine of the four elements –
earth, air, fire and water – and produced theories of respiration,
sight, hearing and brain function. Their teaching was elaborated in a
collection of writings attributed to the physicians of Cos, or ‘Coan
school’, of which Hippocrates (c.460-377 BC), often regarded as the
Father of Medicine, is by legend the founder. This ‘Hippocratic
Corpus’ developed the theory of humours from the theory of
elements and tended to deny that disease was a punishment sent by
the gods.
By the mid-fourth century BC Greek medicine had ceased to be
mere magic and had acquired a rational basis, but how far this
‘scientific approach’ affected actual practice must remain
problematical. The Coans cannot have been only theorists for they
described recognizable diseases and the results of logical treatment.
But the cult of Aesculapius certainly survived the age of Hippocrates
and it is noticeable that the latter was reputed to be a direct
descendant of the former. The so-called ‘Coan school’ was more
probably an association of physicians than a teaching unit and it is
unlikely that their theories spread widely or exerted much immediate
influence.
That last point is important in the story of Roman medicine.
According to Pliny the Elder, writing in the mid-first century AD,
Romans got on very well without doctors for six hundred years. Yet
there was medicine of a kind. The head of a household treated his
family with folk remedies and sacrifices to the appropriate gods.
Both Apollo and Aesculapius had their votaries, for Rome borrowed
from all countries, but citizens also recognized a number of native
demigods, many of whom were associated with sickness or bodily
functions. So many were there that it has been said that Romans
possessed an appropriate deity for every part of the body and for
every kind of illness, and that each god must be placated by his or
her particular and exact ritual. This made the doctor’s problem
rather simpler than it is today: if the cure did not occur, the wrong
god had been invoked or the incorrect rite performed.
Practice of medicine was beneath the dignity of Roman citizens.
Their early physicians were slaves of Greek extraction. About 220 BC
Archagathus, the first of those identifiable by us, appeared in Rome.
He was followed by many others who seem to have been more
interested in money than in their patients’ welfare. In the first
century BC Julius Caesar granted these slave-physicians their
freedom. Their standing improved under Augustus but, so far as is
known, medical practice tended to remain in the hands of foreigners.
When the great epidemics struck Rome, its citizens could call only on
their ancient gods or Greek physicians. Neither were outstandingly
successful, so it is not surprising that the Romans sought help
elsewhere.
Because of her contacts with foreign nations and because the
empire embraced so many peoples, Rome sheltered and tolerated a
great variety of religions. Not only did it have its own domestic gods
but it honoured others from Greece and the East. For instance,
Mithra, the most popular deity among the legionaries, originated in
India or Persia. Among the conquered peoples whose religion
exerted influence were the Jews. Small Jewish communities settled
throughout the length of the Mediterranean seaboard and the
number greatly increased after the Diaspora following the Roman
destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem in AD 70.
These Jewish communities were renowned for their moral
code, their upright dealing, their charity and their care of the sick
and poor. Many Gentiles found themselves attracted to their way of
living but disliked certain practices such as circumcision and the
refusal to eat meat that had been offered in sacrifice. The more
liberal Jewish communities accepted Gentiles without insisting that
they followed these customs. They were allowed to attach
themselves to the synagogue and form an outer circle known as
‘God-fearers’. The earliest Christian missionaries, among them the
apostle Paul, found their first converts among these ‘God-fearers’
and it was in such para-Jewish congregations that the Christians of
the Roman Empire established themselves. This is why, when the
emperors insisted on their own unique divinity, the monotheistic Jew
and Christian were regarded as one and the same for the purposes
of persecution.
 During much of the first century AD the apostles, the
immediate followers of Christ, were still living and his story was
passed by word of mouth. Eventually the basic pattern of Christian
doctrine began to be summarized in creeds and the text of the New
Testament. The gospels contain accounts of a number of ‘miracles’.
Twenty of these are described by St Luke, and only three are not of
a medical nature. In four cases unclean spirits are cast out; in two
the dead are restored to life; and in eleven sickness or disability is
cured. In addition, Luke states: ‘He called the twelve [apostles]
together and gave them power and authority over all devils, and to
cure diseases.’ This authority was later extended to the seventy
disciples. The miraculous and divine healing power attributed to
Christ was thereby transferred to his main followers.
As we have seen, the second century AD was a time of
epidemic sickness. To the terror-stricken victims Christianity offered
new hope. There was the promise of physical resurrection after
death, coupled with the surety of everlasting bliss for the sinner who
truly repented. Perhaps above all, the miracles credited to Christ and
the healing powers claimed by his followers were an earnest of
divine intervention that might cure sickness and even defeat death
itself. Thus the growth of the Christian Church was aided by its
specific medical mission in a series of pestilences. By the middle
years of the third century the small and scattered Christian
communities had coalesced into an established Church, through a
process greatly accelerated by the Plague of Cyprian and Cyprian’s
teaching. Conversions were more numerous during times of famine,
earthquake or pestilence. At the height of the Plague of Cyprian he
and his fellow-priests in North Africa baptized as many as two or
three hundred persons a day.
So was formed the cult of Christ the Healer. The late-third-
century persecutions of Diocletian failed to stamp out Christianity,
and it received imperial sanction from Constantine the Great in 313.
At the end of the fourth century it became the official religion of the
empire after Theodosius enacted his laws against paganism. Practice
of medicine passed into the hands of the Church, with priest and
doctor again becoming one under the Byzantine emperors. The
Christian followed the Jew in medical caring. Sick-nursing formed
one of the seven duties of Christians and, as communities dedicated
to the purpose appeared, the infirmary formed an essential part of
their lives. Early churches and early hospitals were designed on the
same plan: a central altar with two or four long naves or wards
leading from it with a number of smaller side-wards or chapels, each
under the patronage of a saint. Treatment in these hospitals was
undertaken by priests, assisted by lay brothers and sisters, all of
whom combated disease almost wholly by appeal to supernatural
agency.
The approach of the Byzantine and medieval ‘doctor’ was
essentially the same as that of the modern Christian Scientist.
Disease was a punishment incurred by sin, a lapse from the purity of
Christian life. The cure, if God decided to effect one, could only be
by miraculous intervention. But such cure did not necessarily come
from God alone. Just as the pagan gods of early Rome had
intervened to cure disease, so the demigods or saints of the
Christian Church could be invoked to perform the miracle. In fact
many of the Roman gods and the early Christian saints were one
and the same, a few with almost unchanged names. Thus Febris,
the Roman goddess of fever, became the Christian St Febronia.
Others enshrined the Christian concept of death, resurrection and a
second death. Notable in this particular context are the two ‘medical’
saints Cosmas and Damian. They might be regarded as the patrons
of transplant surgery, since they are recorded as having succeeded
in grafting a new leg to replace an injured one. It is claimed that,
accused of sorcery, they were stoned to death but miraculously
restored to life, only to suffer a second death by decapitation.
The legend of St Sebastian is of special interest, although his
story is now regarded as mythical. He is supposed to have
commanded a company of the Emperor Diocletian’s Praetorian Guard
but secretly became a Christian. He converted others, including two
noble youths. Marcus and Marcellinus. The two youngsters were
accused and confessed under torture their new religious allegiance.
They were condemned to death and their parents implored them to
recant but Sebastian dissuaded them. Impressed by such
steadfastness, their guards and their judges were all converted to
Christianity and suffered death in the year 288. Diocletian himself
urged Sebastian to recant, but he refused and was condemned to be
shot to death by arrows. Left for dead, he was found by Irene, the
mother of the two boys, who nursed him back to health. Despite
being begged to leave Rome, Sebastian stationed himself at the city
gate and pleaded with Diocletian for the lives of his fellow-Christians.
Diocletian ordered him to be flogged to death. His body was flung
into the Cloaca Maxima, but it was found and buried in the
catacombs. The church of St Sebastiano marks the site.
 The cult of St Sebastian as the patron of epidemic sickness
started about the year 680. The earliest representations depict him
as an elderly bearded man, fully clothed, turning aside an arrow with
a fold of his cloak. Later pictures show him as a youth of great
physical beauty, naked except for a loin cloth. Often an arrow
pierces his groin, suggesting an allusion to bubonic plague. The
inference is that Sebastian has become identified with the beauteous
Apollo. There is also the symbolism of the arrow. Those fired by
Apollo conveyed disease. By miraculously surviving, Sebastian
became empowered to protect and restore those who had been so
attacked. His legend is indicative of the ways in which Christian
treatment of disease borrowed from Graeco-Roman practice. The
sacrificial offering to the god became the votive offering to the saint.
The temple-sleep or incubation remained unchanged, but in their
dreams the devotees looked for the appearance of saintly healers.
Ritual purification formed an essential part of Christian treatment but
in time became degraded from beneficial cleansing of the body into
a ceremonial sprinkling with ‘holy water’.
So the cult of Christ the Healer became essential to the work

and faith of the early Church, and to the development of a new

system of medicine. In effect, its practitioners were psychiatrists and

faith healers rather than physicians. For a thousand years they

depended primarily upon supernatural intervention and only

secondarily upon mundane treatment. Most of that treatment itself

was plain magic: swallowing of written prayers or fragments of

saintly bone, penitence, fasting and votive offerings. But there did

also exist a more solid foundation of psychological medicine and

some rational basis of medical theory, of anatomy, and of herbal

remedies. During the second century AD it was Galen who became

the principal authority and unchallenged teacher within this Christian

tradition of medicine. Though he did not directly profess the faith, he

seems to have defended Christianity and preferred monotheism to

the Roman welter of demigods. Born in 129 at Pergamos in Asia

Minor, Galen was appointed surgeon to the gladiators of that town

and later moved to Rome. Here he practised and taught medicine,

conducted scientific experiments and produced a huge quantity of

treatises. He is reported to have fled the city during the plague that

bears his name, but he was recalled by Marcus Aurelius and died at

Rome in 216. A forceful and dogmatic teacher, he achieved a great

and lasting reputation, not least as a means by which Hippocratic

medical thinking was transmitted to future generations. He made

many advances in anatomy and physiology but he fouled earlier and

simpler methods of herbal treatment with a huge collection of

noisome and useless remedies. Hence came the vile mixtures, often

containing as many as fifty ingredients, that survived into the

medieval period.
 For more than a thousand years the lamp of Greek medicine
flickered on in scattered monasteries and in those other islands of
culture that successfully withstood the general decline which
followed the end of Imperial Rome. On the other side of the
Mediterranean, in Alexandria, the school of the so-called Arabian
physicians, many of them Jews and Christians, also added to the art
of medicine. They, too, had learned from the followers of Christ,
deriving knowledge from the congregation of Nestorius, Christian
Patriarch of Jerusalem, who had been banished as a heretic in 431.
The Arabs revered Galen but, more liberal than the Christians, they
questioned, tested and recast his theories. In the end the two
schools merged into one, but this was not to happen fully until a
change in habits of thought ushered in the Renaissance around the
beginning of the fifteenth century. By that time Church domination
of medicine had become oppressive and the influence of Galen had
waxed so great that to challenge his authority was no less than
heresy.
 Chapter Two
THE BLACK DEATH

The most destructive pandemic in the history of Europe occurred in

the years 1348–61. This was a visitation of bubonic plague which
much later became generally known as the Black Death. We shall
continue to apply this familiar label to the fourteenth-century
outbreak, while reserving the word ‘plague’ to cover later epidemics
such as that which afflicted London in 1665.
The word ‘bubonic’ refers to the characteristic bubo or
enlarged lymphatic gland. Bubonic plague is primarily a disease of
rodents and is passed from rat to rat by the fleas which commonly
infest them. The flea bites an infected rat and ingurgitates plague
bacilli with the blood. These bacilli can remain in the flea’s intestinal
canal for as long as three weeks and are regurgitated when the flea
bites another rat or a human. In true bubonic plague the human will
become infected only if fleas migrate from rodents to humans or
from an already infected human to another. Bubonic plague is not
carried by human breath or direct contact.
The common source of infection is the black rat (Rattus
rattus), sometimes known as the Old English Rat. This animal is
companionable with man. It is rather a handsome beast with silky
black fur and, unlike the brown rat, tends to live in houses or ships
rather than in farmyards or sewers. This companionship with man
assists migration of fleas from rats to humans and so permits spread
of bubonic plague. The disease, whether of rat or man, carries a
very high mortality among those infected, a figure of 90 per cent
having been recorded in some epidemics and 60 per cent being
regarded as ‘normal’. The causative bacterium, Pasteurella pestis,
now known as Yersinia, rapidly multiplies in the bloodstream,
causing a high temperature and death from septicaemia (blood
poisoning). But only relatively few human cases will occur in
epidemics of true bubonic plague because transmission requires
heavy infestation with fleas.
So far the story suggests a very dangerous illness, not
common, occurring in isolated cases or small sporadic epidemics. But
in certain circumstances, the nature of which is unknown, the
infection will assume a pneumonic form which does not require the
bite of a flea to infect the human but can be transmitted directly
from one person to another by breath or by contact. Both forms
existed together in the great pandemics, but it is the pneumonic
type which produces a very rapid and wide spread, a higher
incidence of cases and, since the pneumonia is usually fatal, a larger
mortality.

Bubonic plague was rarely, if ever, absent from Europe during

the period 1348–1666, but even over a longer time span only four
world-wide pandemics are known. These are the Plague of Justinian,
AD 540–90, which may possibly have extended as far as England;
the Black Death of 1346–61, reaching England in 1348; ‘the Great
Plague’ of the 1660s; and a pandemic starting in Asia in 1855 which
caused high mortalities in Canton, Hong Kong and Russia, reaching
England in 1900 where a few deaths occurred in Glasgow, Cardiff
and Liverpool. During this last pandemic the Japanese physician
Ogata Masanori noted such a huge mortality of rats that he gave
bubonic plague the name of ‘rat-pest’. The pneumonic type
developed in China and probably Russia, but the rat-flea-man form
dominated in Europe.
In the Plague of Justinian and the Great Plague the pandemic
started as a rat-flea-man infection. The spread was inland from the
coast and those who attended the sick were at little greater risk than
those who did not. In sixth-century Constantinople the number of
cases was small at the beginning but very rapidly rose until the
number of deaths was too great for proper burial. A similar pattern
is seen in the 1665 Plague of London. Samuel Pepys noted two or
three houses in Drury Lane marked with a red cross on 7 June. From
the end of the first week in June until 1 July the deaths from plague
recorded in the Bills of Mortality are 100, 300, 450. Thereafter the
rise became increasingly steep, reaching 2,000 in the last week of
July, 6,500 at the end of August, and over 7,000 at its peak, the
third week in September. The estimated population of London in
1665 was 460,000 and plague was rarely entirely absent from the
city. A rise in the death rate from 200 to 300 a week can be
attributed to an increase in the number of infected rats but a
mortality of thousands indicates a direct human-to-human infection.
Thus at some point in the Plague of Justinian and the Plague of
London the type of illness must have changed from true bubonic
plague to pneumonic. The same must be true of the Black Death.
The Black Death almost certainly started in Mongolia. An
infected Tartar horde carried it to the Crimean isthmus, where the
Tartars besieged a small company of Italian merchants in the trading
post of Caffa, now known as Theodosia. According to one account,
plague broke out in Caffa itself, no doubt carried by rats, in the
winter of 1346–7. A second story relates that it was deliberately
introduced by the Tartars throwing infected corpses over the walls.
Both sides suffered so many deaths that the Tartars raised the siege.
The horde dispersed, carrying plague to the lands around the
Caspian Sea from where it spread north to Russia and east to India
and China, which was first infected in 1352. The surviving Italian
merchants escaped by ship to Genoa. The chronicler Gabriel de
Mussis declared that no case of plague occurred on the voyage but
that it broke out in a deadly form a day or two after the ship docked.
His statement suggests a rat-flea-man infection.
From the European focus in Genoa, plague travelled in a great west
and north half-circle through Italy, France, Germany and
Scandinavia, reaching Moscow in 1352. The devastation was terrible.
Historians have reckoned that some twenty-four million people died:
about a quarter of the European and West Asian population. It
should be mentioned here that the havoc wrought in the
Scandinavian countries may ultimately have had a greater effect on
world history than almost any other event. Ships carried the
infection to the Greenland settlements originally founded by Eric the
Red in AD 936. These colonies were so weakened by the plague and
by failure of supplies from enfeebled Norway that they were wiped
out by Inuit attacks. The last Viking settlers disappeared in the late
fourteenth century and Greenland became unknown country until it
was rediscovered by John Davis in 1585. It is thought that the Viking
settlements maintained sporadic contact with ‘Vinland’, part of the
coast of Canada or Newfoundland, so the Black Death may have
entirely altered the history of North America.
 The Black Death arrived in England about 24 June 1348,
probably carried by a ship from Gascony which docked at the small
port of Melcombe, now part of Weymouth in Dorset. Infection seems
to have remained local and in the bubonic form until early August.
From Melcombe the plague travelled by land and sea, coastal vessels
bringing infection to ports on the south-west coast and along the
Bristol Channel. It moved overland through Dorset and Somerset
with increasing speed, reaching the great port of Bristol, either by
sea or by land, on 15 August. The citizens of Gloucester, learning of
Bristol’s plight, tried to prevent infection by cutting off all
communication, but their efforts were in vain. From Gloucester the
plague passed to Oxford and on to London, reaching the city about 1
November. Westward spread through the sparsely inhabited counties
of Devon and Cornwall was slower, for the plague did not reach
Bodmin in central Cornwall before Christmas. By then the whole
diocese of Bath and Wells, covering the counties of Dorset and
Somerset, had been infected, for on 4 January 1349 the Bishop
wrote of a great mortality and of many parishes left without a priest
to administer the sacraments.
There now came a short respite during the winter months
when rats, fleas and fourteenth-century humans all tended to be less
active. Oxford, infected before November 1348, did not experience
its highest mortality until May 1349. London suffered only a few
deaths during the winter but the number increased rapidly in March,
rose to a peak in April and May, then gradually declined. From
London the main route led through the highly populated eastern
counties, Norwich being infected in March and York towards the end
of May 1349. By now the whole of the south, east and midlands of
England had been attacked and the rate of spread slowed in the
more thinly populated north and extreme west. Ireland received
infection by sea in 1349 but Wales and Scotland were not attacked
until 1350. Scotland might possibly have escaped altogether, had the
Scots not decided to take advantage of England’s difficulties by
invading in the autumn of 1349 when mortality was at its greatest in
the northern counties. Plague broke out in the Scottish army
encamped near Selkirk and was dispersed over the country as the
soldiers returned to their homes.
No one knows how many died in the terrible year of 1348–49.
There were no Bills of Mortality as in the Plague of 1665. no
Domesday Book, no census. No one in the fourteenth century was
able to estimate large numbers, to strike a gross figure from
investigation of a random sample. The situation is further
complicated by the fact that the Black Death did not occur as a
single visitation. There were recurrent epidemics on four or five
occasions before the end of the fourteenth century. The worst of
these, in 1361. infected England, France and Poland, among other
countries. The name Pestis puerorum, given to this outbreak, may
provide a first clue, for it suggests the presence of an abnormally
high percentage of children in 1361, as would be the case if all age
groups had suffered an unusually high mortality thirteen years
before.
Another clue is provided by the Poll Tax levied across England
in 1377. The evidence surrounding this suggests a population in the
range of 2.5 to 3 million. Since the best estimates of the population
in 1347 range from 4.5 to 6 million, the number seems to have
dropped by 2 million or more in thirty years. The population had
risen steadily between the Norman Conquest and 1300. There was
also a fairly continuous increase from the end of the fourteenth
century until a figure of 3 million or so for England and Wales was
again reached in the middle of the sixteenth century. In both cases
the rise can only have occurred because the live-birth rate
outstripped the death rate. Ordinary disease, including outbreaks of
epidemic illness, caused deaths throughout the whole period from
1066 to 1550 and, as the normal process of death continued, so did
the normal process of birth. Thus a shrinkage of at least 2 million
during roughly thirty years between the Black Death and the Poll Tax
can only have been due to an abnormally large mortality. Since a
great diminution of fecund adults would prevent a rising birth rate, it
is safe to assume that maximum mortality occurred at the beginning
of the period.
It is necessary to emphasize these rather dull facts because of
a recent tendency to dismiss the Black Death as ‘just another
epidemic’, causing at most the death of one in ten of the population.
Far more probable is a mortality that exceeded one-third of the
English people. This in itself is certainly high enough to dictate a
social change, but it is the particular pattern of mortality as well as
the total number of deaths that caused the major social upheaval of
the late fourteenth century. Statistical evidence is scanty but a few
monasteries recorded figures. Christchurch, Canterbury, experienced
only four deaths out of eighty inmates, almost certainly from causes
other than plague. The great Abbey of Crowland is another which
seems to have entirely escaped, although its estates suffered badly.
At the other end of the scale are Luffield Priory which lost all its
monks and novices, St Mary Magdalen at Sandon where all perished,
and a nunnery at Wolthorpe with only one surviving sister. Between
the two extremes are eleven houses, the largest group in the series,
which lost over 75 per cent, nine with mortalities of between 50 and
75 per cent and only three which record a death toll from plague of
less than 50 per cent. Although this evidence is slight, it is a fair
assumption that there was some resemblance between the varying
mortalities of monasteries and those of town and village
communities.
This pattern accords with the known behaviour of the
pneumonic form of plague. There was considerable variation in the
incidence of infection, and so of mortality, throughout England and
Europe. The crowded walled towns would obviously have been at
high risk. Density of population and ease of communication
determined both incidence and rate of spread. In the thickly
populated eastern counties of England, where villages lay close
together and roads had been maintained for wagon traffic, the death
toll must have been large. Inland waterways and coastal shipping
would both have favoured rapid dissemination. In the more thinly
populated north and west of Britain, and to a lesser extent in some
southern counties, there must have been wide areas which escaped
entirely, simply because of bad communications. But in 1348 the
riches and the greater part of the English people were concentrated
in the eastern and midland counties. A high mortality here would
have exerted so profound an effect that the relative freedom from
disease of large tracts, partly composed of forest and waste, can be
almost discounted.
We must bear in mind this variation in the pattern of death
when we consider the effect of the appalling mortality on English
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image once permanently impressed by the original sensation.
Wordsworth is exquisitely right when he speaks of the repeated
enjoyment of sensations sweet. “In lonely rooms and ’mid the din of
towns and cities” some sudden touch of the cords of association has
brought to him the soothing joy of a picture—“Forms” with every
grace of symmetry, harmony, venerable antiquity, in the ever fresh
and gracious setting of a beautiful landscape. The eye of his mind is
infinitely gladdened; the ear of his mind, no longer conscious of the
din of cities, hears the chord struck by the Wye in its flow, and the
notes of the birds and the lowing of the cattle and the acuter notes of
the insect world. Again he perceives the odour of the meadow-
sweet, he touches the coolness of the grass, and all these are as
absolutely sensations as when they were for the first time conveyed
to his consciousness by the sensory organs.
We have in these few lines a volume of reasons why we should fill
the storehouse of memory for the children with many open-air
images, capable of giving them reflected sensations of extreme
delight. Our care all the time must be to secure that they do look,
and listen, touch, and smell, and the way to this is by sympathetic
action on our part: what we look at they will look at; the odours we
perceive they too will get. We heard, the other day, of a little girl who
travelled in Italy with her parents, in the days of dignified family
travelling-carriages. The child’s parents were conscientious, and
time was precious, not by any means to be wasted on the mere
idleness of travelling, so the governess and the little girl had the
coupé to themselves, and in it were packed all the paraphernalia of
the schoolroom, and she did her sums, learned her geography,
probably the counties of England, and all the rest of it, with the least
possible waste of time in idle curiosity as to what the “faire londes,”
through which she was passing, might be like. A story like this shows
that we are making advances, but we are still far from fully
recognising that our part in the education of children should be
thoughtfully subordinated to that played by Nature herself.
To continue our study of this amazingly accurate, as well as
exquisitely beautiful, psychological record:—the poet goes on to tell
us that these sensations sweet are “felt in the blood and felt along
the heart,” a statement curiously true to fact, for a pleasurable
sensation causes the relaxation of the infinitesimal nerve fibres
netted around the capillaries, the blood flows freely, the heart beats
quicker, the sense of well-being is increased; gaiety, gladness
supervene; and the gloom of the dull day, and the din of the busy
city, exist for us no more; that is to say, memories of delight are, as it
were, an elixir of life capable, when they present themselves, of
restoring us at any moment to a condition of physical well-being.
But even this is not the whole. Wordsworth speaks of these
memories as “passing into my purer mind with tranquil restoration”—
purer because less corporeal, less affected by physical conditions,
but all the same so intimately related to the physical brain, that the
condition of the one must rule the other. Mind and brain perhaps
have been alike fagged by the insistent recurrence of some one line
of thought, when suddenly there flashes into the “purer mind” the
cognition of images of delight, represented in consequence of a
touch to some spring of association: the current of thought is
diverted into new and delightful channels, and weariness and brain
fag give place to “tranquil restoration.”
If mere sensations are capable of doing so much for our
happiness, our mental refreshment, and our physical well-being,
both at the time of their reception and for an indefinite number of
times afterwards, it follows that it is no small part of our work as
educators to preserve the acuteness of the children’s perceptions,
and to store their memories with images of delight.
The poet pursues the investigation and makes a pointed
distinction; he not only recovers “sensations sweet,” but “feelings,
too, of unremembered pleasure.” Very few persons are capable of
discriminating between the sensations and the feelings produced by
an image recovered by some train of association. Wordsworth’s
psychology is not only delicately nice, but very just, and the
distinction he draws is important to the educator. The truth is “the
feelings” are out of fashion at present; The Man of Feeling is a
person of no account; if he still exists he keeps in the shade, being
aware, through a certain quickness of perception which belongs to
him, that any little efflorescence proper to his character would be
promptly reduced to pulp by the application of a sledge hammer. The
Man of Feeling has himself to thank for this; he allowed his feelings
to become fantastic; his sweet sensibilities ran away with him; he
meant pathos and talked bathos; he became an exaggerated type,
and in self-preservation Society always cut off the offending limb, so
The Man of Feeling is no more. Nor is this the only charge that “the
feelings” have to sustain. So long as the feelings remain objective
they are, like the bloom to the peach, the last perfection of a
beautiful character; but when they become subjective, when every
feeling concerns itself with the ego, we have, as in the case of
sensations, morbid conditions set up; the person begins by being
“over sensitive,” hysteria supervenes, perhaps melancholia, an
utterly spoilt life. George Eliot has a fine figure which aptly illustrates
this subjective condition of the feelings. She tells us that a
philosophic friend had pointed out to her that whereas the surface of
a mirror or of a steel plate may be covered with minute scratches
going in every direction, if you hold a lighted candle to the surface all
these random scratches appear to arrange themselves and radiate
from the central flame: just so with the person whose feelings have
been permitted to minister to his egoistic consciousness: all things in
heaven and earth are “felt” as they affect his own personality.
What are the feelings? Perhaps they are best expressed in
Coleridge’s phrase of “a vague appetency of the mind”; and we may
do something to clear our thoughts by a negative examination. The
feelings are not sensations, because they have no necessary
connection with the senses; they are to be distinguished from the
two great affections (of love and justice) because they are not
actively exercised upon any objects; they are distinct from the
desires because they demand no gratification; and they are
distinguishable from the intellectual operations which we call
thought, because while thought proceeds from an idea, is active, and
arrives at a result, the feelings arise from perceptions, are passive,
and not definitely progressive.
Every feeling has its positive and its negative, and these in almost
infinitely varying degrees: pleasure, displeasure; appreciation,
depreciation; anticipation, foreboding; admiration, contempt;
assurance, hesitancy; diffidence, complacency; and so on through
many more delicate nuances of feeling that are nameable, and yet
more so delicate that language is too rough an instrument for their
expression. It will be observed that all these feelings have certain
conditions in common; none are distinctly moral or immoral; they
have not arrived at the stage of definite thought; they exist vaguely in
what would appear to be a semi-conscious intellectual region. Why
then need we concern ourselves about this little known tract of that
terra incognita which we call human nature? This “why” is the
question of the prose-philosopher—our poet sees deeper. In one of
the most exquisitely discriminating passages in the whole field of
poetry, he speaks of feelings of unremembered pleasure as having
no slight or trivial influence on a good man’s life, as the source of
“little nameless unremembered acts of kindness and of love.” Even
the feeling of “unremembered pleasure”—for it is possible to have
the spring of association touched so lightly that one recovers the
feeling of former pleasure without recovering the sensation, or the
image which produced the sensation, but merely just the vague
feeling of the pleasure, as when one hears the word ‘Lohengrin’ and
does not wait, as it were, to recover the sensation of musical delight,
but just catches a waft of the pleasure which the sensation brought—
intangible, indefinite as they are, produce that glow of the heart
which warms a good man to “acts of kindness and of love,” as little,
as nameless, and as unremembered as the feelings out of which
they spring.
Nameless as they are, our poet does not hesitate to rank these
trifling acts as the “best portion of a good man’s life.” But it is only out
of the good man’s heart that these good issues come, because, as
we have said, the feelings are not in themselves moral, they act
upon that which is there, and the point brought before us is, that the
influence of the feelings is equally powerful and indirect. Why should
the recollection of Tintern Abbey cause a good man to do some little
kind thing? We can only give the ultimate answer that “God has
made us so,” that a feeling of even unremembered pleasure prompts
the good man to give forth out of the good treasure of his heart in
kindness and in love. We have but to think of the outcome of feelings
at the negative pole to convince us of the nice exactitude of the
poet’s psychology. We are not exactly displeased, but unpleased,
dull, not quickened by any feeling of pleasure: let us ask ourselves if,
in this condition of our feelings, we are prompted to any outpouring
of love and kindness upon our neighbours.
Here is another aspect of the feelings of very great importance to
us who have the education of children.
“I do not like you, Doctor Fell,
The reason why I cannot tell,”

is a feeling we all know well enough, and is, in fact, that intuitive
perception of character—one of our finest feelings and best guides in
life—which is too apt to be hammered out of us by the constant effort
to beat down our sensibilities to the explicit and definite. One
wonders why people complain of faithless friends, untrustworthy
servants, and disappointed affections. If the feelings were retained in
truth and simplicity, there is little doubt that they would afford for
each of us such a touchstone of character in the persons we come in
contact with, that we should be saved from making exigeant
demands on the one hand, and from suffering disappointment on the
other.
The public orator plays, by preference, upon the gamut of the
feelings. He throws in arguments by the way; brightens his discourse
with graphic word-picture, metaphor, simile; but for his final effect he
relies upon the impression he has been able to make upon the
feelings of his audience, and the event proves him to be right.
Not only our little nameless acts but the great purposes of our
lives arise out of our feelings. Enthusiasm itself is not thought,
though it arises when we are
“Stung with the rapture of a sudden thought;”
it is a glowing, malleable condition of the forces of our nature, during
which all things are possible to us, and we only wait for a lead.
Enthusiasm in its earliest stage is inconsequent, incoherent, devoid
of purpose, and yet is the state out of which all the great purposes of
life shape themselves. We feel, we think, we say, we do; this is the
genesis of most of our activities.
 But our feelings, as our thoughts, depend upon what we are; we
feel in all things as “’tis our nature to,” and the point to be noticed is
that our feelings are educable, and that in educating the feelings we
modify the character. A pressing danger of our day is that the
delicate task of educating shall be exchanged for the much simpler
one of blunting the feelings. This is the almost inevitable result of a
system where training is given en masse; but not the necessary
result, because the tone of feeling of a head-master or mistress is
almost with certainty conveyed, more or less, to a whole school. Still,
perhaps, the perfect bloom of the feelings can only be preserved
under quite judicious individual culture, and, therefore, necessarily
devolves upon parents. The instrument to be employed in this
culture is always the same—the blessed sixth sense of Tact. It is
possible to call up the feeling one desires by a look, a gesture; to
dissipate it entirely by the rudeness of a spoken word. Our silence,
our sympathy, our perception give place and play to fit feelings, and
equally discourage, and cause to slink away ashamed the feeling
which should not have place. But let us beware of words; let us use
our eyes and our imagination in dealing with the young; let us see
what they are feeling and help them by the flow of our responsive
feeling. But words, even words of praise and tenderness, touch this
delicate bloom of nature as with a hot finger, and behold! it is gone.
Let us consider carefully what feelings we wish to stimulate, and
what feelings we wish to repress in our children, and then, having
made up our minds, let us say nothing. We all know the shrinking, as
of a sore place, with which children receive some well-meant word
from a tactless friend.
The sense of spiritual touch is our only guide in this region of the
feelings, but with this alone we may tune the spirits of the children to
great issues, believing that they are capable of all things great. We
wish them to revere. Now reverence is a feeling before it becomes a
thought or an act, and it is a communicable feeling, but
communicable like the light of a torch only by contact. The sentiment
of reverence fills our own souls when we see a bird on its nest, an
old man at his cottage door, a church in which have centred the
aspirations of a village for many an age; we feel and the children feel
our feeling, and they feel too: a feeling is communicated by
sympathy, but perhaps in no other way. The ignoble habit of
depreciation is in the first place a feeling. It is quite easy to put the
children into that other attitude of feeling called forth by the fitness
and goodness of the thing regarded, and we all know that it is easy
to appreciate or depreciate the same thing. These two feelings alone
illustrate the importance of the delicate culture we have in view, for
among the minor notes of character none tend more to differentiate
persons than this of perceiving cause of satisfaction in an object or a
person, or of perceiving cause of dissatisfaction in the same object
or person. An appreciative habit of feeling is a cause of tranquil joy
to its possessor, and of ease and contentment to the people
connected with him. A depreciative habit, on the contrary, though it
affords a little pleasurable excitement because it ministers to the
vanity of the ego (I dislike this person or this thing, therefore I know
better or am better than others), disturbs tranquillity and puts the
person out of harmony with himself and with his surroundings; no
stable joy comes of depreciation. But even in dealing with feelings of
this class we must remember that tact, sympathy and communicable
feeling are our only implements; the feelings are not thoughts to be
reasoned down; they are neither moral nor immoral to challenge our
praise or our blame; we cannot be too reticent in our dealings with
them in children, nor too watchfully aware that the least inadvertence
may bruise some tender blossom of feeling. This is the risk which
attends the habit of persiflage and banter in family talk; a little is
thoroughly good and wholesome, but this kind of play should be
used with very great tact, especially by the elders. Children
understand each other so well that there is far less risk of hurt
feelings from the tormenting schoolboy than from the more
considerate elder.
There is only one case in which the feelings may not have free
play, and that is when they reflect the consciousness of the ego.
What are commonly called sensitive feelings—that is, susceptibility
for oneself and about oneself, readiness to perceive neglect or slight,
condemnation or approbation—though belonging to a fine and
delicate character, are in themselves of less worthy order, and
require very careful direction lest morbid conditions should be set up.
To ignore wisely is an art, and the girl who craves to know what you
thought of her when she said this or did the other, need not be told
brutally that you did not think of her at all; it is quite enough for her to
perceive that your regard is fixed upon something impersonal both to
her and you; she takes the hint and looks away from herself, and
nothing is said to cause her pain. It appears to be an immutable law
that our feelings, as our sensations, must find their occupation in
things without; the moment they are turned in upon themselves harm
is done. The task of dealing with the susceptibilities of young people
is one of the most delicate that falls to us elders, whether we be
parents or friends. Undiscriminating sympathy is very perilous, and
bluntness of perception is very damaging; we are between Scylla
and Charybdis, and must needs walk humbly and warily in this
delicate work of dealing with the feelings of children and young
people. Our only safeguard is to cherish in ourselves “the soft, meek,
tender soul,” sensitive to the touch of God, and able to deal in soft,
meek, tender ways with children, beings of fine and delicate mould
as they are.
 CHAPTER XIX

“WHAT IS TRUTH?”
It is said that we English are no longer to be characterised as a
truth-speaking people. This is a distressing charge, and yet we
cannot put it away from us with a high hand. Possibly we are in a
stage of civilisation which does not tend to produce the fine courage
of absolute truthfulness. He who is without fear is commonly without
falsehood; and a nation brought up amid the chivalries of war dares
to be true. But we live in times of peace: we are no longer called on
to defend the truth of our word by the strength of our hand. We
speak with very little sense of responsibility, because no one calls us
to account; and, so far as we are truth-tellers, we are so out of pure
truth of heart and uprightness of life. That is, we may be, as a nation,
losing the habit of truth to which the nation’s childhood was trained,
in ways however rough and ready; but we are growing up, and the
truth that is among us is perhaps of a higher quality than the more
general truthfulness of earlier days. Now, truth is indeed the white
flower of a blameless life, and not the mere result of a fearless habit.
The work before us is to bring up our children to this higher manner
of truth. We no longer treat this or that particular lie or bit of deceit as
a local ailment, for which we have only to apply the proper lotion or
plaster; we treat it as symptomatic, as denoting a radical defect of
character which we set ourselves to correct.
Opinion without knowledge, says Darwin, has no value, and to
treat the tendency to untruthfulness that children often show, one
should have a good deal of knowledge of a special kind. To treat a
child de novo, place him under a moral microscope, record our
observations, and formulate opinions based upon that child, and as
many more as we can get into focus, is, no doubt, useful and
important work. But it is work for which we must qualify ourselves.
The child is a human being, immature, but yet, perhaps, a human
being at his best. Who amongst us has such gifts of seeing,
knowing, comprehending, imagining, such capacities for loving,
giving, believing, as the little child in the midst! We have no higher
praise for our wisest and best than that they are fresh and keen as
little children in their interests and loves.
Now, we maintain that it is not sufficient to bring unaided common
sense and good intentions to this most delicate art of child-study. We
cannot afford to discard the wisdom of the past and begin anew with
the effort to collect and systematise, hoping to accomplish as much
and more in our short span than the centuries have brought us.
In this matter of lying, for example, unaided common sense is
likely to start upon one of two theses: either the child is born true,
and you must keep him so; or, the child is born false, and you must
cure him of it. Popular opinion leans strongly to the first theory in
these days; and, as we perceive only that which we believe, the
tendency is, perhaps, to take the absolute truthfulness and honour of
children a little too much for granted. If you would have children true,
you must, of course, treat them as if they were true, and believe
them to be true. But, all the same, wisdom may not play the ostrich.
In the last generation, people accepted their children as born false,
and, what more likely to make them so than this foregone
conclusion? Possibly some falling off in truthfulness in our day is
traceable to the dogmatic teaching upon which our forbears were
brought up.
The wisdom of the ages—i.e., philosophy, and the science of the
present, especially physiology, and more particularly what we may
call psycho-physiology—show us that both these positions are
wrong, and that all theories founded upon either position, or upon
any midway point between the two, must needs be wrong too. A
child is born neither true nor false. He is absolutely without either
virtue or vice when he comes into the world. He has tendencies,
indeed, but these are no more either virtuous or vicious than is the
colour of his eyes. Even the child of a liar is not necessarily born a
liar, because, we are assured, acquired tendencies are not
transmitted. But there is this to be said. The child born of a family
which has from generation to generation been in a subject position
may have less predisposition to truthfulness than the child of a family
which has belonged for generations to the ruling class. As in the
natural world all substances must be reduced to their elements
before they can be chemically dealt with, so in the moral world, if we
wish to treat an offence, it is best to trace it to that elemental
property of human nature of which it is the probable outcome. Now,
lying, even in its worst forms, is by no means elemental. Ambition is
elemental, avarice, vanity, gratitude, love and hate. But lying arises
from secondary causes. The treatment is all the more difficult. It is no
longer a case of—the child has lied, punish him; but, where is the
weak place in his character, or what is the defect in his education,
which has induced this lying habit, if it be a habit? How shall we, not
punish the lie, but treat the failing of which it is symptomatic. From
this point of view let us consider the extremely interesting
classification of lies presented to us by an American
educationalist.[15]
I. Pseudophobia. Janet thinks she may have glanced at Mary’s
slate, and seen the answer to her sum. A comparison of the two
slates shows that she has not done so, and that Janet, in the effort to
save herself from a lie, has actually told one. This sort of morbid
conscientiousness is Argus-eyed for other forms of sin. We knew a
sick girl of fourteen, who was terribly unhappy because she was not
able to kneel up in bed when she said her prayers. Was this the
“unpardonable sin”? she asked, in unaffected terror. We agree with
the writer in question, as to the frequent occurrence of this form of
distress, and also in tracing it, not to moral, but to physical causes.
We should say, too, it is more common in girls than in boys, and in
the home-taught than in the school-taught child. Healthy interests,
out-of-door life, engrossing and delightful handiworks, general
occupation with things rather than with thoughts, and avoidance of
any word or hint that may lead to self-consciousness or the habit of
introspection, will probably do much to carry the young sufferer
through a difficult stage of life.
 II. The Lie Heroic. The lie heroic is, par excellence, the
schoolboy’s lie, and has its rise, not in any love for lying, but in a
want of moral balance; that is to say, the boy has been left to form
his own code of ethics.
Who spilled the ink? little Tom Brown is asked. “I did,” he says;
because Jack Spender, the real culprit, is his particular hero at the
moment. Faithfulness to a friend is a far higher virtue in Tom’s eyes
than mere barren truthfulness. And how is Tom to know, if he has not
been taught, that it is unlawful to cherish one virtue at the expense of
another. Considering how little clear, definite, authoritative teaching
children receive on ethical questions, the wonder is that most
persons do elaborate some kind of moral code, or code of honour,
for themselves.
III. Truth for friends, lies for enemies. A lie under this head differs
from the lie heroic chiefly in that it need not bring any risk to the
speaker. This class of lies again points to the moral ignorance which
we are slow to recognise in children because we confound
innocence with virtue. It is quite natural for a child to believe that
truth is relative, and not absolute, and that whether a lie is a lie or not
depends on whom you are speaking to. The children are in the
position of “jesting Pilate.” What is truth? they unconsciously ask.
IV. Lies inspired by selfishness. This is a form of lying for which
superficial treatment is quite idle. The lie and the vice of which it is
the instrument are so allied that those two cannot be put asunder.
Professor Stanley Hall well points out that school is a fertile field for
this kind of lying. But it is the selfishness and not the lying that must
be dealt with. Cure the first, and the second disappears, having no
further raison d’être. How? This is a hard question. Nothing but a
strong impulse to the heroism of unselfishness, initiated and
sustained by the grace of God, will deliver boy or girl from the vice of
selfishness of which lying is the ready handmaid. But let us not
despair; every boy and girl is open to such impulse, is capable of
heroic effort. Prayer and patience, and watchfulness for opportunities
to convey the stimulating suggestion—these will not be in vain.
Every boy and girl is a hero in posse. There is no worse infidelity
than that which gives up the hope of mending any flaw of character,
however bad, in a young creature. All the same, happy those parents
who have not allowed selfishness and virtue (whether in the form of
truthfulness, or under some other name), to come to hand to hand
conflict. It is easy to give direction to the tendencies of a child; it is
agonisingly difficult to alter the set of character in a man.
V. The Deception of imagination and play. I passed little Muriel in
the park one day; the child was not looking; her companion was
unknown to me. I was engaged with my companion, and believed
that Muriel had not noticed me. The little girl went home and told her
mother that I had kissed her and asked various questions about the
family health. What could be the child’s motive? She had none. Her
active imagination rehearsed the little dialogue which most naturally
would have taken place; and this was so real to her that it obscured
the fact. The reality, the truth, to Muriel, was what she imagined had
taken place. She had probably no recollection whatever of the actual
facts. This sort of failure in verbal truthfulness is excessively
common in imaginative children, and calls for prompt attention and
treatment; but not on the lines a hasty and righteous parent might be
inclined to adopt. Here is no call for moral indignation. The parents
and not the child are in fault. The probability is that the child’s
ravenous imagination is not duly and daily supplied with its proper
meat, of fairy tale in early days, of romance, later. Let us believe of
the children that “trailing clouds of glory do they come” from the
place where all things are possible, where any delightful thing may
happen. Let us believe that our miserable limitations of time and
space and the laws of matter irk them inconceivably, imprison the
free soul as a wild bird in a cage. If we refuse to give the child outlets
into the realms of fancy, where everything is possible, the delicate
Ariel of his imagination will still work within our narrow limits upon our
poor tasks, and every bit of our narrow living is played over with a
thousand variations, apt to be more vivid and interesting than the
poor facts, and, therefore, more likely to remain with the child as the
facts which he will produce when required to speak the truth. What is
the cure? Give the child free entrance into, abundant joyous living in,
the kingdom of make-believe. Let him people every glen with fairies,
every island with Crusoes. Let him gift every bird and beast with
human interests, which he will share when the dear fairy godmother
arrives with an introduction. Let us be glad and rejoice that all things
are possible to the children, recognising in this condition of theirs
their fitness to receive and believe and understand, as, alas! we
cannot do, the things of the Kingdom of God. The age of faith is a
great sowing time, doubtless designed, in the Divine scheme of
things, especially that parents may make their children at home in
the things of the Spirit before contact with the world shall have
materialised them.
At the same time the more imaginative the child, the more
essential is it that the boundaries of the kingdom of make-believe
should be clearly defined, and exact truthfulness insisted upon in all
that concerns the narrower world where the grown-ups live. It is
simply a matter of careful education; daily lessons in exact
statement, without any horror or righteous indignation about
misstatements, but warm, loving encouragement to the child who
gives a long message quite accurately, who tells you just what Miss
Brown said and no more, just what happened at Harry’s party,
without any garnish. Every day affords scope for a dozen little
lessons at least, and, gradually, the more severe beauty of truth will
dawn upon the child whose soul is already possessed by the grace
of fiction.
VI . Pseudomania. We have little to say on this score, except to
counsel parents to keep watch at the place of the letting out of
waters. No doubt the condition is pathological, and calls for curative
treatment rather than punishment. But we believe it is a condition
which never need be set up. The girl who has been able to win
esteem for what she really is and really does, is not tempted to
“pose,” and the boy who has found full outlet for his energies,
physical and mental, has no part of himself left to spend upon
“humbugging.” This is one of the cases which show how important it
is for parents to acquaint themselves with that delicate borderland of
human nature which touches the material and the spiritual. How
spiritual thought and material brain interact; how brain and nerves
are inter-dependent; how fresh air and wholesome food affect the
condition of the blood which nourishes the nerves; how the nerves
again may bear tyrannous sway over all that we include under
“bodily health;” these are matters that the parent should know who
would avoid the possibility of the degradation described as
Pseudomania from being set up in any one of his children.
It is as well that those who have to do with young people should
be familiar with one or two marked signs of this mentally diseased
condition; as, the furtive glance from under half-closed lids, shot up
to see how you are taking it all; the flowing recital, accompanied by a
slightly absent pre-occupied look, which denotes that the speaker is
in the act of inventing the facts he relates.
We have not space to enlarge upon palliatives, lies of terror, or
one or two more classes of lies, which seem to us of frequent
occurrence, as lies of display (boasting), lies of carelessness
(inaccuracy), and, worst of all, lies of malice (false witness).
We would only commend the subject to the attention of parents;
for, though one child may have more aptitude than another, neither
truthfulness nor the multiplication table come by nature. The child
who appears to be perfectly truthful is so because he has been
carefully trained to truthfulness, however indirectly and
unconsciously. It is more important to cultivate the habit of truth than
to deal with the accident of lying.
Moral teaching must be as simple, direct and definite as the
teaching which appeals to the intellect; presented with religious
sanctions, quickened by religious impulses, but not limited to the
prohibitions of the law nor to the penalties which overtake the
transgressor.

FOOTNOTES:
[15] Professor G. Stanley Hall, in an article which appeared
in the American Journal of Psychology, Jan. 1891.
 CHAPTER XX

SHOW CAUSE WHY

We have been asking, Why? like Mr. Ward Fowler’s Wagtail, for a
long time. We asked, Why? about linen underclothing, and behold it
is discarded. We asked Why? about numberless petticoats, and they
are going. We are asking Why? about carpets and easy chairs, and
all manner of luxurious living; and probably the year 1900 will see of
these things only the survivals. It is well we should go about with this
practical Why? rather than with the “Why does a wagtail wag its tail?”
manner of problem. The latter issues in vain guesses, and the
pseudo-knowledge which puffeth up. But if, Why? leads us to
—“Because we should not; then, let us do the thing we should.”—
This manner of Why? is like a poker to a dying fire.
Why is Tom Jones sent to school? That he may be educated, of
course, say his parents. And Tom is dismissed with the fervent hope
that he may take a good place. But never a word about the delights
of learning, or of the glorious worlds of nature and of thought to
which his school studies will presumably prove an open sesame.
“Mind you be a good boy and get a good place in your class,” is
Tom’s valediction; and his little soul quickens with purpose. He won’t
disappoint father, and mother shall be proud of him. He’ll be the top
boy in his class. Why, he’ll be the top boy in the whole school, and
get prizes and things, and won’t that be jolly! Tommy says nothing of
this, but his mother sees it in his eyes and blesses the manly little
fellow. So Tommy goes to school, happy boy, freighted with his
father’s hopes and his mother’s blessings. By-and-by comes a
report, the main delight of which is, that Tommy has gained six
places; more places gained, prizes, removes—by-and-by
scholarships. Before he is twelve, Tommy is able to earn the whole
of his future schooling by his skill in that industry of the young
popularly known as Exams. Now he aims at larger game; “exams”
still, but “exams” big with possibilities, “exams” which will carry him
through his University career. His success is pretty certain, because
you get into the trick of “exams” as of other crafts. His parents are
congratulated, Tom is more or less of a hero in his own eyes and in
those of his compeers. Examinations for ever! Hip, hip! Never was a
more facile way for a youth to distinguish himself, that is, if his
parents have sent him into the world blessed with any inheritance of
brains. For the boy not so blessed—why, he may go to the Colonies
and that will make a man of him.
The girls come in a close second. The “Junior,” the “Senior,” the
“Higher,” the “Intermediate,” the “B.A.,” and what else you will, mark
the epochs in most girls’ lives. Better, say you, than having no
epochs at all. Unquestionably, yes. But the fact that a successful
examination of one sort or another is the goal towards which most of
our young people are labouring, with feverish haste and with undue
anxiety, is one which possibly calls for the scrutiny of the
investigating Why?
In the first place, people rarely accomplish beyond their own aims.
The aim is a pass, not knowledge, “they cram to pass and not to
know; they do pass and they don’t know,” says Mr. Ruskin; and most
of us who know the “candidate” will admit that there is some truth in
the epigram. There are, doubtless, people who pass and who also
know, but, even so, it is open to question, whether passing is the
most direct, simple, natural and efficacious way of securing
knowledge, or whether the persons who pass and know are not
those keen and original minds which would get blood out of stone,—
anyway, sap out of sawdust. Again—except for the fine power of
resistance possessed by the human mind, which secures that most
persons who go through examination grind come out as they went in,
absolutely unbiassed towards any intellectual pursuits whatever—
except for this, the tendency of the grind is to imperil that individuality
which is the one incomparably precious birthright of each of us. The
very fact of a public examination compels that all who go in for it
must study on the same lines.
 It will be urged that there is no necessary limitation to studies
outside the examination syllabus, nor any restrictions whatever as to
the direction of study even upon the syllabus; but this is a mistake.
Whatever public examinations a given school takes, the whole
momentum of pupils and staff urges towards the great issue. As to
the manner of study, this is ruled by the style of questions set in a
given subject; and Dry-as-dust wins the day because it is easier and
fairer to give marks upon definite facts than upon mere ebullitions of
fancy or genius. So it comes to pass that there is absolutely no
choice as to the matter or manner of their studies for most boys and
girls who go to school, nor, for many of those who work at home. For,
so great is the convenience of a set syllabus that parents and
teachers are glad to avail themselves of it.
It appears then that the boy is in bondage to the schoolmaster,
and the schoolmaster to the examiner, and the parents do no more
than acquiesce. Would parents be astounded if they found
themselves in this matter a little like the man who had talked prose
all his life without knowing it? The tyranny of the competitive
examination is supported for the most part by parents. We do not
say altogether. Teachers do their part manfully; but, in the first place,
teachers unsupported by parents have no power at all in the matter;
not a single candidate could they present beyond their own sons and
daughters; in the next place, we do not hesitate to say that the whole
system is forced upon teachers (though, perhaps, by no means
against their will) by certain ugly qualities of human nature as
manifested in parents. Ignorance, idleness, vanity, avarice, do not
carry a pleasant sound; and if we, who believe in parents, have the
temerity to suggest such shadows to the father basking in the
sunshine of his boy’s success, we would add that the rest of us who
are not parents are still more to blame; that it is terribly hard to run
counter to the current of the hour; and that, “harm is wrought through
want of thought.”
Ignorance is excusable, but wilful ignorance is culpable, and the
time has come for the thoughtful parent to examine himself and see
whether or no it be his duty to make a stand against the competitive
examination system. Observe, the evil lies in the competition, not in
the examination. If the old axiom be true, that the mind can know
nothing but what it can produce in the form of an answer to a
question put by the mind itself, it is relatively true that knowledge
conveyed from without must needs be tested from without. Probably,
work on a given syllabus tested by a final examination is the
condition of definite knowledge and steady progress. All we contend
for is that the examination shall not be competitive. It will be urged
that it is unfair to rank such public examinations as the Universities’
Local—which have done infinitely much to raise the standard of
middle-class education, especially amongst girls, and upon which
neither prize nor place depends—as competitive examinations. They
are rarely competitive, it is true, in the sense of any extraneous
reward to the fortunate candidate; but, happily, we are not so far
gone from original righteousness but that Distinction is its own
reward. The pupil is willing to labour, and rightly so, for the honour of
a pass which distinguishes him among the élite of his school. The
schools themselves compete (con + petere = to seek with) as to
which shall send in the greatest number of candidates and come out
with the greatest number of Honours, Scholarships, and what not.
These distinctions are well advertised, and the parent who is on the
look-out for a school for his boy is all too ready to send him where
the chances of distinction are greatest. Examinations which include
the whole school, and where every boy has his place on the list,
higher or lower, are another thing; though these also appeal to the
emulous principle, they do not do so in excess, the point to be noted.
But, why should so useful an incentive to work as a competitive
examination be called in question? There are certain facts which
may be predicated of every human being who is not, as the country
folk say, “wanting.” Every one wants to get on; whatever place we
occupy we aim at the next above it. Every one wants to get rich, or,
anyway, richer; whether the wealth he chooses to acquire be money
or autographs. Every one wants the society of his fellows; if he does
not, we call him a misanthrope and say, to use another popular and
telling phrase, “He’s not quite right.” We all want to excel, to do better
than the rest, whether in a tennis-match or an examination. We all
want to know, though some of us are content to know our
neighbours’ affairs, while others would fain know about the stars in
their courses. We all, from the sergeant in his stripes to the much
decorated commanding officer, want people to think well of us. Now
these several desires, of power, of wealth, of society, of excelling, of
knowledge, of esteem, are primary springs of action in every human
being. Touch any one of them, in savage or in savant, and you
cannot fail of a response. The Russian Moujik besieges a passing
traveller with questions about the lands he has seen, because he
wants to know. The small boy gambles with his marbles because he
wants to get. The dairymaid dons a new bow because she wants to
be admired, the only form of esteem to which she is awake. Tom
drives when the children play horses because he wants to rule.
Maud works herself into a fever for her examination because she
wants to excel, and “to pass” is the hallmark of excellence, that is, of
those who excel.
Now these primary desires are neither virtuous nor vicious. They
are common to us all and necessary to us all, and appear to play the
same part towards our spiritual being that the appetites do to our
material existence; that is, they stimulate us to the constant effort
which is the condition of progress, and at the same time the
condition of health. We know how that soul stagnates which thinks
nothing worth an effort. He is a poor thing who is content to be
beaten on all hands. We do not quarrel with the principle of
emulation, any more than we do with that of respiration. The one is
as natural and as necessary as the other, and as little to be brought
before a moral tribunal. But it is the part of the educator to recognise
that a child does not come into the world a harp with one string; and
that the perpetual play upon this one chord through all the years of
adolescence is an evil, not because emulation is a vicious principle,
but because the balance of character is destroyed by the constant
stimulation of this one desire at the expense of the rest.
Equally strong, equally natural, equally sure of awakening a
responsive stir in the young soul, is the divinely implanted principle
of curiosity. The child wants to know: wants to know incessantly,
desperately; asks all manner of questions about everything he
comes across, plagues his elders and betters, and is told not to
bother, and to be a good boy and not ask questions. But this only