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DREAD
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DREAD
HOW FEAR AND FANTASY
HAVE FUELED EPIDEMICS FROM THE
BLACK DEATH TO AVIAN FLU
PHILIP ALCABES
PublicAffairs
New York
1586488093-text_Layout 1 1/29/10 1:24 PM Page iv
To my father
Copyright © 2009 by Philip Alcabes
Hardcover first published in the United States by PublicAffairs™,

a member of the Perseus Books Group.
Paperback first published in 2010 by PublicAffairs.
All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America.
The lines from Thucydides’ Histories, Book 2, originally translated by P. J. Rhodes, as modified
by G. E. R. Lloyd in The Grip of Disease: Studies in the Greek Imagination (Oxford, 2003), appear
here with permission of Oxford University Press and Aris & Phillips Publications.
Portions of chapter 6 originally appeared in different form in The American Scholar (2006).
No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written
permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For
information, address PublicAffairs, 250 West 57th Street, Suite 1321, New York, NY 10107.
PublicAffairs books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by
corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact
the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street,
Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, call (800) 810-4145, extension. 5000, or e-mail
special.markets@perseusbooks.com.
Designed by Trish Wilkinson

Text set in 11.5 point Goudy
The Library of Congress catalogued the hardcover as follows:
Alcabes, Philip.
Dread : how fear and fantasy have fueled epidemics from the black death to avian flu /
Philip Alcabes. — 1st ed.
p. ; cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-58648-618-1 (alk. paper)
1. Epidemics—History. 2. Communicable diseases—History. 3. Epidemics—
Psychological aspects. 4. Epidemics—Social aspects. 5. Nosophobia. I. Title.
[DNLM: 1. Disease Outbreaks—history. 2. Fear—psychology. 3. Anxiety—
psychology. 4. Communicable Disease Control. 5. Communicable Diseases—history. 6.
Health Behavior. WA 11.1 A346d 2009]
RA649.A43 2009
614.4—dc22 2009000248
Paperback ISBN 978-1-58648-809-3
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
1586488093-text_Layout 1 1/29/10 1:24 PM Page v
CONTENTS
Introduction to the Paperback Edition vii
Introduction The Origins of Dread 1
Chapter 1 The Sense of an Epidemic 7
Chapter 2 Plague: Birth of the Model Epidemic 21
Chapter 3 Cholera, Poverty, and the Politicized Epidemic 53
Chapter 4 Germs, Science, and the Stranger 83
Chapter 5 The Conquest of Contagion 119
Chapter 6 Postmodern Epidemics 143
Chapter 7 Managing the Imagined Epidemic 181
Epilogue The Risk-Free Life 215
Acknowledgments 231
Notes 235
Selected Bibliography 289
Index 297
v
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1586488093-text_Layout 1 1/29/10 1:24 PM Page vii
INTRODUCTION TO
THE PAPERBACK EDITION
A half-year after the hardcover publication of Dread, sleeves

across America were being rolled up for the swine flu vaccine.
New York City set out to inoculate schoolchildren, and pregnant
women lined up to get vaccinated at their obstetricians’ offices. Al-
though the swine flu outbreak had caused less harm in the six
months since it started than almost any flu event of the past century,
everyone was alarmed. And everyone had questions.
At a symposium in Holland, people asked me whether I thought
their government really needed to buy up enough flu vaccine for
every Dutch citizen. A reporter in Chicago told me he saw boycotts
of soccer games involving Mexican teams, because people thought
the flu could be spread by Mexicans. A Canadian radio host asked
whether her country was worrying too much about the flu. An Aus-
tralian physician and another in France chided me for my refusal to
endorse the sky-is-falling rhetoric of flu preparedness. Around the
U.S., hand-sanitizer dispensers flowered at supermarket checkouts,
airport security points, libraries, and classrooms; colleagues and
friends wondered whether the sanitizing gel could really stop the flu
virus. At home in New York, nurses cried foul at mandatory immu-
nizations (later rescinded). Physicians expressed frustration at the
difficulty of persuading parents to have their kids immunized against
flu. Parents everywhere were wary of exposing their child to yet an-
other vaccine, and wondered if they were being sold a bill of goods by
health officials. The Boston Globe reported that vaccine manufactur-
ers were expecting to take in $7 billion from swine flu in 2009 alone.
vii
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viii INTRODUCTION TO THE PA PERBACK EDITION
A big threat—or just big hype? In the fall of 2009, no one could
ignore the swine flu. It was in the headlines, a feature of television talk
shows, the subject of conferences and official press releases, the theme
for posters reminding us to wash our hands, the reason why some
people donned masks on the subway and others refused to shake hands,
the trigger for new policies in schools and colleges and, of course, the
billions of taxpayer dollars, euros, and yen spent on vaccines.
Swine flu, or “H1N1 2009,” made the premise of this book seem
prophetic. As an epidemiologist and compassionate observer, it’s im-
possible for me to be happy about a nasty disease outbreak responsi-
ble for thousands of deaths. As an author, though, it’s gratifying that
the outbreak, and its attendant debates, so quickly proved the book’s
point: that a society’s epidemic narrative reflects its own anxieties
and dreads—not necessarily real harm or ensuing suffering.
From the beginning, both media and health officials depicted the
flu outbreak of 2009 as a crisis. American newsmakers and media in
particular had a decided influence on international news.
The crisis began in April 2009, when brief reports of an unusual
flu strain in California and Texas were followed by a summary article
in the New York Times that effectively set the stage for pandemic
worry. The first major news coverage, the Times’s article “Unusual
Strain of Swine Flu Is Found in People in 2 States,” made several
points that were crucial to shaping the pandemic narrative. The arti-
cle hinted that a new strain of flu was afoot, that it came from Mex-
ico, and that it had some of the characteristics of past pandemic
strains. Although no link had been established between seven cases
of flu in California and Texas and an outbreak of adult respiratory ill-
ness in Mexico, the article reported that Mexican authorities had
noted a high death rate there—essentially creating an association in
people’s minds. It reported that the new flu was made up of genetic
elements “from North American swine, bird, and human flu strains
as well as one from Eurasian swine.” And it pointed out that all the
new cases were under the age of 55, lower than the usual age range
for serious flu cases.
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INTRODUCTION TO THE PA PERBACK EDITION ix
The next day’s Times story, “Fighting Deadly Flu, Mexico Shuts
Schools,” explicitly linked the Mexican outbreak to the disastrous
flu outbreak of 1918, which killed tens of millions of people world-
wide in a matter of months. Measured in deaths per month, the
Spanish Flu has never been equaled. When the Times piece pointed
out that the young age of the 2009 flu victims was worrisome be-
cause “pandemic flus—like the 1918 Spanish Flu . . . —often strike
young, healthy people the hardest,” alarm bells went off.
In the first two days of reporting, America’s premier newspaper
had established the grammar for the story of a new pandemic: There
was a new strain of influenza. It came from animals. It was causing a
big outbreak in a country that, significantly for Americans, is not
only poor but has long been suspected of exporting noxious influ-
ences northward—including drugs, the Spanish language, and un-
documented immigrants. Its pathologic pattern was similar to that of
the 1918 flu (and so was its origin in animals). As in 1918, schools
were being closed. The story of global threat was being written, and
read, widely.
As is so often true, the epidemic is a story of crisis. And a pandemic
becomes a pandemic as the crisis story is recounted by the media. The
New York Times’s flu coverage jumped in 2003. That year, the paper
ran fifty articles on flu, mostly focusing on the threat posed by H5N1,
the avian flu. In the following year, while the government in Wash-
ington shifted from bioterrorism preparedness to flu-pandemic pre-
paredness (the White House had kicked off the bioterrorism
preparedness fad with Project Bioshield in 2002, but issued a new pan-
demic plan focusing on flu in August 2004), flu coverage in the Times
climbed to over ninety articles per year, where it remained for some
time. The Washington Post showed a similar pattern, with flu coverage
nearly tripling between 2002 and 2004 and continuing to rise there-
after. A Times reader would have encountered an article on flu roughly
every six weeks before 1996; by 2006 she would see one every four
days. A Post reader would have seen flu mentioned in the paper’s A
section about once a week in 2002, but nearly once per day by 2006.
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x INTRODUCTION TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION
But don’t blame the news media alone. They package the news
on diseases as it is created by health officials, scientists, funding agen-
cies, regulatory agencies, and others. It’s better to look at the account
of swine-flu-as-global-threat as the Preparedness Crusade—a rhetori-
cal campaign launched by a virtual industry whose product is health
threats. Public health officials, agencies and foundations that provide
monies for research, scientific and health researchers, industries that
make products supposedly designed to protect against threats, and,
yes, the media, all benefit when the public is alarmed.
For government agencies, an aim of the preparedness rhetoric has
been to play on people’s ingrained sense of vulnerability in the mod-
ern world, and on putatively highlighted fears after the September 11
disasters. But this unease hardly began in 2001; it is a most unmodern
feeling that can be traced back at least to the Middle Ages. It is the
very reason why Christians of the Black Death era thought God had
sent plague to punish impiousness, and why when cholera arrived in
1848 Americans held a national fast day to expiate what many saw as
the faithless imprudence of a restless nation. The worry that our social
arrangements invite disaster in ways that our forebears’ social arrange-
ments did not—the sense that the good old days were safer and hap-
pier—always crystallizes when there is a threat of epidemic illness. We
suspect we are receiving our just deserts. Those who want our affec-
tion, our dollars, or our votes have always been able to capitalize on
that anxiety. The preparedness rhetoric, as promoted by the White
House but endorsed by the industries of public health and medicine in
America and, increasingly, abroad, evokes a frightening future. It as-
serts that only scientists and health officials can read its auguries cor-
rectly. And it demands that the public allow officials to state what is
going to go wrong and what must be done to prevent that.
Forecasting a frightening future that’s manageable only by state
officials is not purely an American habit. Although it was the direc-
tor of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who
forthrightly called swine flu “a major problem [that] requires a major
response,” he was not alone. The Chinese government invoked spe-
1586488093-text_Layout 1 1/29/10 1:24 PM Page xi
INTRODUCTION TO THE PA PERBACK EDITION xi
cial authority to restrict liberties in the name of staving off epi-

demics—and used it to quarantine foreigners visiting the country.
British officials were criticized for failing to force widespread flu test-
ing, and the U.K. health minister responded with an incautious (and
fantastical) forecast of 100,000 new cases per day. Russia officially
banned pork imports from the U.S. And Egypt’s regime set out to kill
300,000 pigs.
In early June 2009, the World Health Organization declared
swine flu a pandemic. Dire scenarios involving widespread death and
economic duress were predicted. In August, a White House scientific
advisory committee predicted that flu might infect a third to a half of
all Americans—up to 150 million people, that is—and lead to as
many as 1.8 million hospitalizations and 90,000 deaths. Committee
members defended their inclusion of such a horror scenario in their
supposedly scientific report, claiming they were not predicting but
merely attempting to examine scientifically the plausible upper edge
of possible outcomes of the outbreak. But were they really shocked
when the news media seized on their “scenario” as a certainty and
broadcast the news that the president’s science advisors thought
swine flu would kill 90,000 Americans?
The dire forecasts were useful to some people, though. Opinion
makers and moral entrepreneurs had been issuing sky-is-falling warn-
ings about flu for years, part of the new American industry devoted to
creating health scares. Now, health professionals pointed to the new
flu forecasts as if the mere suspicion of mass hospitalization and
death—the “scenario” alone—verified the earlier predictions. For the
business of health scare manufacturing, even a mild outbreak of flu
can be engineered into the apparent fulfillment of wild expectations.
The expectations came from the preparedness campaign, much
promoted by the World Health Organization and supported by
statute in the U.S. The preparedness campaign insisted that a cata-
clysmic global influenza outbreak was bound to happen. It is com-
forting to think that public policy and planning are based on the
observed facts of a disease—incidence, mortality, vaccine efficacy,
1586488093-text_Layout 1 1/29/10 1:24 PM Page xii
xii INTRODUCTION TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION
rate of spread, and so forth. But with flu, expectations of future harm,
not facts, drive the discussion. It is as if, once a future has been fore-
cast, it is real and should be treated as real or, as many like to say,
“scientific.” The facts of infection rate, vaccine effectiveness, and so
forth, appear to validate the forecast—except when the facts debunk
the forecast and de-claw the threat, in which case they’re ignored.
As of the end of 2009, about 12,000 people had died from con-
firmed swine flu infection worldwide. Even accounting for up to
36,000 additional deaths from other causes triggered by swine flu, the
2009 flu killed fewer people in the eight months after the outbreak
began than diarrheal illnesses do in the world’s poor countries in any
single month. Malaria, TB, and AIDS are likewise far deadlier than
swine flu: together they are responsible for 5 million deaths a year,
almost all of them in impoverished nations. Swine flu’s toll in 2009
was 100 times less.
But the clemency of flu by comparison to diarrhea, malaria, TB, or
AIDS was not a fact deemed relevant in the response to swine flu.
Nor was the fact that, in clinical trials, the best flu vaccines protect
only about 70 percent of recipients against infection with influenza
virus. Or that of the 147 children who died of flu in the U.S. between
September ’08 and September ’09, 70 percent also had bacterial infec-
tions—suggesting that the problem might not have been flu per se but
a failure of medical care to offer appropriate antibiotic treatment to
those with severe cases of flu. The fact that antiviral medications like
oseltamivir (Tamiflu) have never been shown to reduce the spread of
influenza virus was not part of the discussion about distributing the
drug; nor was the fact that the U.S. president had successfully pressed
for authorization to purchase $1.7 billion worth of Tamiflu in 2005, or
that the man who was U.S. secretary of defense at the time had held
stock in a company (Gilead Sciences, which had held the original
oseltamivir patent) that profited from Tamiflu sales, or that the ap-
pearance of swine flu in 2009 upped the purchase of Tamiflu world-
wide to 200 million doses, representing additional profit for
manufacturer Roche. The facts deemed relevant were the ones that
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INTRODUCTION TO THE PA PERBACK EDITION xiii
supported the preparedness campaign and its parent industry, the one
that creates health scares. As this book explains, this pattern is now
common with health officials: calling an event an epidemic frees
them from the burden of producing facts.
Only a short time after the swine flu outbreak, debate arose over
the appropriation of the terms “epidemic” and “pandemic.” On June
11, 2009, the World Health Organization raised its so-called pandemic
threat indicator to 6, the highest possible level. “Pandemic,” con-
cocted out of “epidemic,” indicated an outbreak that affects the whole
world, and WHO meant it that way. But the agency took flak from
public health professionals who decried the delay in declaring a pan-
demic. At the same time, the agency was attacked by other health pro-
fessionals who feared that WHO’s proposal that an outbreak’s severity
(and not just its extent) should determine whether it was a global
threat would dilute what they thought (erroneously) to be the purely
scientific meaning of the term pandemic. Another group of commen-
tators criticized WHO for creating such a hubbub over an outbreak
that, after three months, was responsible for fewer deaths worldwide
than occur in a single weekend on roads in the EU countries.
The debate over whether swine flu should be considered a pan-
demic, and the more circumscribed debates over whether schools
should be closed, travel delayed, Tamiflu stockpiled, etcetera, tended
to obscure some of the more compelling questions about flu and epi-
demics in general.
How much does the sense that swine flu is a global threat stem
from its initial recognition in America, for instance? If there had
been no flu fatalities in the U.S., would there have been so much de-
mand for a “response” to this pandemic threat? What makes news in
the United States, especially when the news is conveyed by the New
York Times, Washington Post, or a few other core sources, is especially
likely to be carried in non-U.S. news media.
Would people have demanded that WHO raise its pandemic
threat barometer to the highest level if their sense of foreboding had
not been whetted by years of the pandemic preparedness campaign,
1586488093-text_Layout 1 1/29/10 1:24 PM Page xiv
xiv INTRODUCTION TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION
with its high price, high profile, and repeated reminders of the hor-
rors of the 1918 flu? When the alleged bioterrorism threat turned out
to be chimerical, the preparedness campaign that had manipulated
America’s public into supporting endless war shifted to flu. That
gave it a more global appeal. But it was still based on the idea of secu-
rity. How would people have responded to the flu problem if public
health, rather than preparedness, had been our watchword? Might
we have decided that swine flu was a lesser concern than, say, auto-
mobile fatalities—a source of unremitting harm (over 30,000 Ameri-
cans die in vehicle accidents each year, far more than swine flu
claimed in 2009), which, unlike influenza, could really be abated per-
manently with public policy adjustments regarding public transporta-
tion, gasoline prices, urban planning, food industry regulation, and so
on? Might we have decided that other global problems that don’t
affect our own society as much—childhood diarrhea, malaria, or
AIDS, for instance—really deserved more attention than swine flu?
Had there been no campaign to create flu fears, this mild out-
break surely would have carried less meaning. But “epidemic” is a
loaded term. The discussions about an epidemic—and there have
been many, with swine flu—are not really about the facts of illness or
death; they are about the competition to impart meaning and con-
vince others that one preferred meaning is correct.
In that sense, the swine flu experience brings to life the central
message of this book: throughout history, the facts of harm have of-
ten been distant from the perceptions of threat, and the struggle to
close the gap has given rise to assertions about risk. When we heed
warnings about the supposed need to invest in more germ-fighting
technology, when we buy the rhetoric that an epidemic illness must
be confronted because of its alleged capacity to damage future gen-
erations, when we ignore the self-evident distress of others in order
to attend to risk in our own people, or when we agree to give up lib-
erties in exchange for protection from risk, we are acting in the
modern version of an old drama, a story in which fears and anxieties
are transformed into meaning—into the epidemic.
1586488093-text_Layout 1 1/29/10 1:24 PM Page 1
Introduction
THE ORIGINS OF DREAD
Death in it self is nothing; but we fear

To be we know not what, we know not where.
—John Dryden, A URENG -Z EBE (1675)
E pidemics fascinate us. Look at all the ways we offer accounts of

epidemics, and how often. There are thousands of books in print
about epidemics. There are histories of epidemics past, like the Black
Death of the 1340s, the yellow fever outbreaks of 1793, cholera in the
mid-1800s, the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, and polio in the mid-
twentieth century. There are dozens of books reporting on today’s
pandemic, AIDS. There are books about possible future epidemics,
like avian flu. There are “what-if” books about made-up epidemics
sparked by bioterrorism. There are textbooks on epidemic malaria,
SARS, dengue fever, encephalitis, HIV infection, and more. There
are books about present-day epidemics of obesity, celiac disease, mac-
ular degeneration, hepatitis C, anxiety, asthma, attention-deficit/
hyperactivity disorder, autism, childhood bipolar disorders, restless-
leg syndrome, mind-body disorders, anger, teen sex, inflammation,
methamphetamine use, terror on the Internet, absentee and permis-
sive parents, and “affluenza.” There are myriad fictional accounts of
1
2 D RE A D
epidemics, including Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, Camus’s The

Plague, Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain, and Myla Gold-
berg’s Wickett’s Remedy. There are dozens of films (Outbreak, The Sev-
enth Seal, 28 Days Later, Panic in the Streets, and more). The television
programs, magazine articles, and Web sites on all aspects of epidemics
are simply countless.
Yet amid the outpouring of words and images about epidemics,
much remains hazy. There’s no constant, neatly defined thing that we
can all agree is an epidemic. Nor do we agree on how to describe one.
For Camus, a plague outbreak in an Algerian city reveals what is most
human about its residents. In Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, the
AIDS epidemic stands as a metaphor for the sickness within Ameri-
can society in the 1980s. An epidemic of a mysterious “leprosy” in
Karel Mapek’s 1937 play The White Scourge is a straightforward alle-
gory of ideology-driven imperialism. Cholera reflects the fevered
erotic state of Aschenbach, the main character of “Death in Venice,”
and the epidemic sets the stage for his demise as he yearns for an in-
accessible love. These authors were not ignorant of the scientific find-
ings on disease (by the time Mann wrote “Death in Venice,” in 1912,
the Vibrio cholerae bacterium, which causes the disease, had been
known for decades, and the means by which it is transmitted were
well understood). When F. W. Murnau made Nosferatu, the first film
version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula story, in 1922, the details of plague
epidemics were well known. But Murnau made use of plague as a
harrowing visual motif for the deadly havoc wrought by his film’s
vampire, Count Orlock. At almost the same time as Murnau was
filming the plague-carrying vampire rising out of a rat-infested ship’s
hold to spread disease, public-health authorities were using scientific
knowledge to curtail real plague epidemics in Paris and Los Angeles.
Perhaps these contrasts represent no more than instances of artis-
tic license. Leave art aside, then. Our own reactions to illness and
death reveal similar contrasts. More than 100,000 Americans die
every year from unintentional injuries, including about 40,000 fatali-
THE ORIGINS OF DREAD 3
ties associated with motor-vehicle crashes. American teens and

young adults are more likely to die from unintentional injuries than
from any other cause; only homicide and suicide come close. Yet we
don’t speak about an epidemic of accidents in the United States, be-
yond the conversation about automobile safety—and even when we
do talk about vehicle mishaps, we rarely go beyond drunk driving. By
contrast, there are seven- or eightfold fewer deaths from AIDS in the
United States (about 14,000 annually). Still, AIDS provides grounds
for continuing admonitions about the perils of drugs and sex, as well
as discussions about health-care delivery, community awareness, and
sex education. Pneumonia and kidney failure are far more common
causes of death, and nobody talks about those as public-health crises.
What accounts for the mismatch between the human costs of disease
and popular rhetoric about epidemics?
One answer is that epidemics create opportunities to convey mes-
sages. The Progressive movement of the early 1900s used epidemics
as a rationale to further its program of preventing venereal disease by
reshaping sexual mores. The U.S. medical establishment leaned on
the epidemic message about infantile paralysis—poliomyelitis—to
enable it to finance and carry out a national effort to develop a polio
vaccine in the mid-twentieth century. Parents of autistic children in
Britain and America today put the epidemic of autism to work to de-
mand that vaccines not be used. Pharmaceutical companies raise the
specter of epidemic cervical cancer to promote the vaccine against
human papillomavirus. The nature of the epidemic message is nei-
ther clear nor constant. Often, the message seems to have less to do
with the actual disease burden or death toll than political oppor-
tunism. Or money.
Sometimes the lesson we are supposed to learn from an epidemic
threat is not the result of any realistic assessment of dangers, but of
maneuvering by the fastest claimant or most powerful bidder. What
message did “epidemic” convey when, in 2007, a man said to have
“XDR” tuberculosis was arrested by federal authorities, removed from
4 D RE A D
the hospital where he was in isolation, and made the subject of a

press conference (and lawsuits) in the name of preventing an epi-
demic of TB—even though he was not infectious? What does “epi-
demic” signal when the World Health Organization announces that
it sees a global threat in the epidemic of obesity—even though most
of the people who are considered “overweight” or “obese” are less
likely to die than are people who are very thin? What should we un-
derstand by “epidemic” when it is a label we can apply equally to the
Black Death and restless-leg syndrome?
When officials or entrepreneurs make use of an epidemic threat
to create politically or financially useful lessons, they follow a long
tradition. Medieval Christians burned Jews in hopes of warding off
epidemics of plague; outbreaks of cholera in the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury were blamed on Irish immigrants in England and America;
early-twentieth-century epidemics of plague in San Francisco and
Los Angeles were said to be caused by immigrants (Chinese and
Mexican, respectively); and venereal disease epidemics have been at-
tributed historically to “loose women.”
A deeper answer to the question about why hype about epidemics
doesn’t line up with the scale of damage has to do with fear. We hu-
mans dread death. It is only natural that the mass mortality brought
by a great plague makes us afraid. And besides our dread of death, we
are frightened by the prospect of social disruption. To live in civilized
society is to bear a dread that goes beyond the fear of death.
Perhaps this is what we really mean when we call ourselves devel-
oped countries: we live in relative comfort for a comparatively long
time (some more comfortably and longer than others, but even our
poor are generally better off than most residents of the so-called de-
veloping world); we are fearful about losing this way of life. We of the
developed nations seem to load epidemics with anxieties about death
or the collapse of society. Sometimes we are right to be afraid of cata-
clysmic disease. The Black Death was a sudden catastrophe. Usually,
though, nature is subtler.
THE ORIGINS OF DREAD 5
The deeper answer, and the one this book explores, has to do with
anxieties that go beyond the normal dread of death or destitution. To
judge by our response to epidemics that are less sudden or cata-
strophic than the Black Death, we fear much more besides: strangers,
flying things, modern technology, female sexual desire, racial differ-
ence, parenting, the food we eat, and so on. These concerns, beyond
the simple dread of death, are part of our makeup. They identify us as
citizens of the society we live in and distinguish our world from the
ancient world of demons. The way we have responded to epidemics
like polio, AIDS, and SARS, and the way we are currently respond-
ing to obesity, autism, and addiction, reveal that we bring fears to the
prospect of any sort of epidemic, deadly or not.
This book looks at epidemics throughout Western history, going
back to the Greeks and Romans, moving up through the Black
Death and the development of epidemiology in the nineteenth cen-
tury, and continuing to the present day. It looks at epidemics from
three different perspectives. First, an epidemic registers as a physical
event: there is a microbial disturbance in an ecosystem with accom-
panying shifts in the well-being of different human populations. An
epidemic also plays a role in social crisis: the illness and death that
spread widely act as destabilizers, disrupting the organization of
classes, groups, and clans that make up the society we know. Finally,
an epidemic has an identity as a narrative that knits its other aspects
together: we tell ourselves stories about ourselves, accounts that
make sense of what we see happening as well as what we fear (and
hope) will happen. These three aspects of the epidemic can’t be di-
vorced from one another: all significant spread of illness also creates
a social phenomenon; every social crisis moves us to make sense of it;
each revision of the story of our society alters the way we study dis-
ease (and even how we define illness) and changes the pitch of social
change. To read the history of epidemics is to follow a long story of
the fears that go beyond the dread of death, the anxieties that make
us who we are.
6 D RE A D
Epidemics often start with an outbreak of disease, but not always—

and not all disease outbreaks spark us to tell an epidemic story. The so-
called Spanish Flu of 1918 was the most acutely devastating outbreak
of all time, with upwards of 40 million deaths worldwide in barely a
year. Camouflaged by World War I, or perhaps just too catastrophic to
dwell on, the flu outbreak registered hardly at all in the Western imag-
ination, at least to judge by the absence of mention in literature or art
for decades afterward. Then, in the 1970s, it became not just an epi-
demic but a central element of the epidemic imagination when scien-
tists who were interested in promoting their theory that devastating
flu outbreaks occur every decade or so made the 1918 outbreak an ob-
ject of historical interest. Today, all discussions of flu involve some ret-
rospection on the Spanish Flu epidemic, the rationale for “pandemic
preparedness.” There is an imagined epidemic that carries meanings
not self-evident in the original event.
Some epidemics start without any disease being in evidence at all,
as the creation of today’s obesity epidemic reveals. An epidemic is a
story that has different morals for different “readers”: it teaches vari-
ous lessons, follows differing accounts (depending on who is telling us
what is happening), and can be a sounding of the alarm or a lament
or an admonition. This book tells the story of epidemics—of how the
way of looking at disease outbreaks affects what people see when
there is one, and how, in turn, the epidemic we see changes how we
act and what we fear. The story changes as society changes. As such,
it has the capacity to illustrate the times in question and reveal the
people themselves.
Chapter 1
THE SENSE OF AN EPIDEMIC
And which of the gods was it that set them on to

quarrel? It was the son of Jove and Leto; for he was
angry with the king and sent a pestilence upon
the host to plague the people, because the son of
Atreus had dishonoured Chryses his priest.
—Homer, THE I LIAD , Book I
S even years after an autumn 2001 epidemic of anthrax closed

U.S. mail-sorting facilities and killed five Americans, the FBI
has its man. Or so the agency claims: the master bioterrorist who
spread spores and a certain amount of havoc in the tense autumn of
2001 was, the Bureau now alleges, Bruce Ivins. He was a scientist
who worked on biological weapons at a U.S. government installa-
tion (we must call this “biodefense” because if the U.S. government
were researching offensive biological agents, it would be violating
the 1972 international convention on biological weapons). We can-
not know whether Ivins was the culprit: he killed himself in July
2008, just before the FBI made its case against him public. But by
now it is obvious that the anthrax scare and the years of hysteria it
provoked over biological mayhem engineered by foreigners was
based on a chimera.
7
8 DREAD
The Axis of Evil, so-called nonstate actors like Al Qaeda, out-

of-work scientists from the former Soviet Union, other supposedly
nefarious outsiders and historical enemies—none of these has had a
role in creating American epidemics. Besides the postal anthrax
event of 2001, in which twenty-two people became sick and five
died, only one other epidemic can be plausibly attributed to biologi-
cal weapons in North America, a smallpox outbreak among tribes of
the Ohio Valley during the French and Indian War in 1763. Neither
incident was the work of enemy fighters or religious zealots. If hu-
man invention produced the two epidemics, it seems to have been
perfidy by government agents: in the first case, a British military of-
ficer’s “gift” of infected blankets to the tribes aligned with the en-
emy; in the recent one, a disgruntled scientist. The $20 billion that
the United States has spent on protecting the public from epidemics
created by human hands in the past decade might be pointless or
might itself be putting people in danger, but in any case it has not
solved an epidemic-by-bioterrorism problem, since such a problem
never really existed.
The hysteria around anthrax began with an extraordinary welling
up of dread. The September 11 disasters were a still-smoldering
memory. The new gravity of life seemed to mute the customary talk
of risk, as if organizing daily activities in order to maximize health
(the low-fat diet, the buckled seat belt, the drinking of a single glass
of red wine with dinner) had come to seem like self-indulgent effron-
tery in the face of the prospect of dying in a falling building, or as if
health were simply in the hands of God or fate and not up to us. But
when the bacterium Bacillus anthracis arrived by letter in October
and people came down with anthrax, dread coalesced around the
threat of an anthrax epidemic.
An industry fueled by fears of epidemics by bioterrorism existed
before September 11, but it was little more than a start-up. Anthrax
kicked it into high gear. As if to corroborate our fiercest anxieties,
sci-fi scenarios were professed. In late October 2001, a symposium at
THE SENSE OF AN EPIDEMIC 9
Harvard’s School of Public Health featured estimable researchers

and health officials lecturing on the possibility of crop dusters spray-
ing pestilence. Admonitions about smallpox were heard. Pundits
painted horrendous scenarios of cities wiped out by germs dropped
from airplanes. Professor Walter Laqueur, chair of the International
Research Council and a member of the Center for Strategic and In-
ternational Studies in Washington, observed that “according to a
1980 study, spreading one ounce of anthrax spores . . . in a domed
stadium could infect 60,000 to 80,000 people within an hour.” The
state of horror was so poignantly highlighted by the new anthrax
cases that, to some, such scenarios seemed prophetic.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the federal
agency charged with protecting the American public from disease
threats, was unable or unwilling to define how people were contract-
ing anthrax, who would not contract it, or what could be done to
render safe those venues in which infections had occurred. The CDC
is usually prompt in investigating outbreaks, but it was hampered by
the FBI in this case when the Bureau insisted that some information
was classified because of an “ongoing criminal investigation.” Al-
though much information was made public, almost none of it was
usefully informative as to how little chance anyone ran of encounter-
ing anthrax spores, how nearly impossible it was to acquire anthrax
from a person who had been infected, and how consequently minus-
cule the odds were that there would be a broad epidemic.
The anthrax outbreak of 2001 was an epidemic by the epidemiol-
ogist’s definition, but it was an unusual provocation for panic. To an
epidemiologist, an epidemic exists whenever there are more cases of
a disease in a specified place during a particular period than would be
expected based on experience. Tuberculosis, with 9 million new cases
each year worldwide and almost 2 million deaths, is not epidemic by
this standard: its toll is great, but epidemiologists have learned to ex-
pect it. Ditto malaria, which kills three-quarters of a million African
children each year. Because anthrax outbreaks are extremely rare,
10 DREAD
twenty-two cases in the eastern United States in a two-month period

constituted an epidemic. But there was no person-to-person trans-
mission, and in a world that has seen AIDS, TB, and malaria, it was
hardly a public-health disaster.
k
“Epidemic” has always been a troubled term, shifting with human-
kind’s fears. The history of our encounters with epidemic disease is a
story of people making sense of the extraordinary in terms of the or-
dinary. Some themes have been constant through recorded history:
from malady in the ancient Middle Eastern land of Chaldea to the
biblical plagues in Egypt to postal anthrax in the United States,
the way we have thought about epidemics has involved ideas about
place and disaster, two more-or-less concrete notions about the natu-
ral world, and a more elusive understanding of disease. For the past
2,500 years our understanding of disease has evolved with the state of
knowledge about how we are affected by nature, and it has borne a
changing burden of anxieties about bodies, souls, and the way we live
in the world we have made. Prominently, ancient suspicions of con-
tamination, divine punishment, and moral correction have perme-
ated humanity’s awareness of disease and continue to influence our
grasp of the epidemic.
The modern use of the word “epidemic” to describe diseases was
introduced by Hippocrates, the early Greek medical writer, who lived
around 400 BC. In Part Three of his canonical work, On Airs, Waters,
and Places, Hippocrates drew the first distinction between epidemic
and endemic conditions:
Pleurisies, peri-pneumonias, ardent fevers, and whatever diseases

are reckoned acute, do not often occur, for such diseases are not
apt to prevail where the bowels are loose. Ophthalmias occur of a
humid character, but not of a serious nature, and of short dura-
tion, unless they attack epidemically from the change of the sea-
sons. And when they pass their fiftieth year, defluxions superven-
ing from the brain, render them paralytic when exposed suddenly
to strokes of the sun, or to cold. These diseases are endemic to
them, and, moreover, if any epidemic disease connected with the
change of the seasons, prevail, they are also liable to it.
Hippocrates is celebrated by modern physicians as the father of

medicine, but the significance of Hippocratic thought is neglected
by almost everyone else—most lamentably by epidemiologists and
other social scientists. His philosophical project was revolutionary;
we owe the very essence of public health to it. For centuries before
Hippocrates’ time, Greeks had been attributing disease to the gods.
In proposing that illness comes from elements that can be observed
in the real world, not the acts of inscrutable deities, Hippocrates was
both amending a traditional viewpoint and reconfiguring the basic
idea of disease. His views weakened the influence exerted by human
beings’ inchoate dread of the unknown, positioning disease as a
piece of the puzzle of nature—a puzzle with rules, or at least logic,
that mere humans could assess. By loosening the grip of innate
dread of the unknown, Hippocrates opened the door to investing
disease with fears and hopes grounded in the known world.
Hippocrates did not invent the word “epidemic.” It predated him
by centuries. Derived from the Greek word for people or populace
(demos), epidemiou (επιδημιου) in ancient times meant to be in, or
come to, one’s people: a modern English approximation might be
“having to do with being at home” or “toward home.” In The Iliad,
Homer refers to civil war as polemos epidemios. The meaning evolved,
and “epidemic” eventually came to mean something like “indigenous”
or “native.”
Hippocrates used “epidemic” exactly in the “native” sense, apply-
ing it to illness as part of his project to take disease out of the hands
of the gods. The Hippocratic theory of illness was that each place
had characteristic diseases. Some diseases could be related to particu-
lar environments, such as the seaside, marshes, mountains, and so
12 D RE A D
forth, and therefore were prone to establish themselves in certain

places. They were “epidemic” in the sense that they were native, like
the epidemic ophthalmias (inflammations of the eye) in the passage
above. Hippocrates denoted as “endemic” diseases related to the
“fluxes,” or internal fluids, whose nature therefore corresponded to
individuals, not places. Hippocrates’ distinction between epidemic
and endemic was not, as modern public-health textbooks claim,
based on an early observation that diseases that strike occasionally
but in intense episodes (epidemic) differ from those that are ever
present (endemic). That was a much later development, which re-
quired a more modern consciousness.
Nor did Hippocrates connect epidemic disease to contagion.
The clustering of disease was interesting to Hippocrates, since the
accumulation of cases in relation to demonstrable elements of ter-
rain and climate served his theory. For instance, he noted that what
appear to be the well-known tertian and quartan fevers (those that
come with a three- and four-day periodicity) of malaria occurred in
proximity to marshy regions, even though two millenniums would
go by before it would be known that malaria is spread by mosquitoes.
His descriptions also seem to point to other recognizable conditions,
such as dysentery and diphtheria. But the transmission of disease in
the Hippocratic model had to do with fluxes, not invisible conta-
gious particles.
The Greeks had inherited ancient ideas of malady as an effusion
of the underworld and translated them into specific diseases result-
ing from explicit actions of the gods. Hippocrates’ theories broke
with theology. Hippocrates made illness empirical.
k
In Homer’s day, pestilence was understood as an act of the gods. The
disease that decimates the Achaean army at the beginning of The Il-
iad is ignited by a flaming arrow shot by the god Apollo (the son of
Jove by Leto), who is angry with the Achaean leader, Agamémnon,
for his treatment of the priest Khrysês. Attributing to the gods the
power to strike people ill or dead in retribution for improper acts,
the ancient Greeks tried to make sense of illness and gave disease a
moral meaning as well as a physical one.
The idea of pestilence as punishment lost its power with the
Greeks, to be revived much later with Christianity. But even before
Hippocrates’ work was widely known, Greeks were moving away
from the assumption that the gods were angry when pestilence
struck. The historian Thucydides, roughly a contemporary of Hip-
pocrates, saw no particular godly reprisal in the Plague of Athens of
427 BC. Writing circa 410 BC, he says:
[The Peloponnesians and their allies] had not yet spent many
days in Attica when the disease [nosos] first struck the Atheni-
ans. It is said to have broken out previously in many other
places, in the region of Lemnos and elsewhere, but there was no
previous record of so great a pestilence [loimos] and destruction
of human life.
Making an explicit connection between disease and pestilence,

Thucydides nonetheless offers only a speculation about its provenance:
The plague is said to have come first of all from Ethiopia beyond
Egypt; and from there it fell on Egypt and Libya and on much of
the King’s land. It struck the city of Athens suddenly. People in
[the Athenian port city of] Piraeus caught it first, and so, since
there were not yet any fountains there, they actually alleged
that the Peloponnesians had put poison in the wells.
Thucydides’ observation effectively hammers home the intensity of

the plague by pointing out that it was too awesome and unprece-
dented to allow for theories about cause: “All speculation as to its
origin and its causes, if causes can be found adequate to produce so
great a disturbance, I leave to other writers.” He had freed himself of
14 D RE A D
the old Homeric certainties that the gods must be behind an ex-
traordinary event. But the ordinary provided no clues as to why such
a catastrophe would occur.
Pestilence remained a malleable term. Sometime before 29 BC, in
the Georgics, Virgil invokes the word “pestilence” (pestis in Latin)
when he reports on an outbreak of disease among cattle, pecudum
pestes, in the Alpine regions north of the Adriatic. An agrarian trea-
tise rather than a work of history, the Georgics had a practical out-
look: to describe bad things that could happen to livestock if they
were not managed properly. Virgil’s text explicitly states that pesti-
lence can be wholesale: “Not single victims do diseases seize, but a
whole summer’s fold in one stroke.” But he also used “pestilence”
metaphorically to indicate a scourge, a bothersome thing—like the
adder he calls pestis acerba boum, the “sore plague” of cattle, capable
of gliding under the straw that shelters the herd and harming cows
with its venom. Pestis could point to something dire without imply-
ing what we would call an epidemic.
The distinction between “pestilence” and “plague” becomes cru-
cial. The first implies uncertain origins without connoting punish-
ment, while the second implies intent. From pestis came the French
word peste and the German Pest, as well as the English word “pesti-
lence.” Peste and Pest denote a cataclysmic outbreak of disease. But
in English the development was different: over time, the Latin word
for delivering a blow, plagare, “to strike” (from the Doric Greek plaga
[πλαγα], meaning “stroke” or “wound”), became the English word
“plague.” The same word, not accidentally, became the modern
medical name for the disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis,
the organism that was responsible for the Black Death. Whereas
German, French, and other languages that use a word derived from
pestis to mean “plague” reflect the Virgilian era, the English “plague”
connects words associated with punishment (strike, blow) insepara-
bly to the idea of disastrous disease outbreaks.
k
The connection between plague and epidemics traces to the story of

Exodus in the Bible. The disasters delivered by God to the Egyptians
were punishing blows. According to the text, the blows were meant
to achieve an end: to get the Egyptians to free the Hebrews from
slavery. The fifth plague in Exodus was livestock illness (the Hebrew
is dever, meaning, like the Greek loimos, “pestilence”). That this ca-
tastrophe became not just pestilence but a plague reveals how much
we need to recognize the divine intent behind the pestilence as well
as the dire outcome.
Early Hebrew philosophy contributed to the understanding of
epidemic disease in a different manner from that of the Greeks, and
profoundly. Ancient Hebrew writing might seem to have pioneered
the concept of plague as a divine blow, but Mesopotamian texts, al-
ready ancient by the time the Five Books of Moses were written
down, had long before attributed disease to the work of demons. Re-
shaping disease around contamination was Hebrew philosophy’s last-
ing contribution to how we see epidemics.
As with Hippocratic philosophy, Hebrew thinking was jarringly
different from the traditional suspicions about possession or en-
chantment by dark spirits. Malaise (spiritual and therefore physical)
was now the result of the specific work of a single, all-powerful God
rather than various demons. But more important, malady resulted
from the imprudent mingling of the pure with the impure. The
Greeks also explained ailments as the intentional work of Apollo or
other gods in response to human behavior rather than the unknow-
able whims of fickle demons and spirits. Where the Hebrews’ way of
thinking differed was that by focusing on contamination or pollu-
tion, judgments about disease became empirical.
By 500 BC, warnings against contamination passed along through
oral tradition had been collected into what became the biblical book
of Leviticus. There, the connections are made clear: crossing from
fair to foul taints the spirit, and spiritual pollution fouls the physical
body. Leviticus 7:19 reads: “The flesh that touches any contaminated
thing may not be eaten.” To the Hebrews, pestilence wasn’t a sign of
16 D RE A D
the mystifying fickleness of the spirit world but a divine work by a

wrathful God insistent that humans do right. “If you behave casually
with me and refuse to heed me, then I shall lay a further blow upon
you. I will send a pestilence among you and you will be delivered
into the hand of your enemy” (Lev. 26:21–26). Pestilence could be
visited as punishment just as easily on the community as it could on
the individual. In II Samuel (24:10–15), King David is given a
choice of three punishments because of his pridefulness: seven years
of famine for his people, three months fleeing from his enemies, or
three days of plague in the land. Depending on the translation,
David either chooses pestilence or merely chooses not to have to flee
his enemies—but in all versions, God sends the plague. David sur-
vives, but 77,000 people die. The Hebrews thereby linked pestilen-
tial disaster to transgression and emphasized collective responsibility
and shared fate. In so far as disease outbreaks come to be distin-
guished from other disasters, this biblical scenario, like the visitation
inflicted on the Achaean host in The Iliad, offered an early example
of disease as punishment.
The conjunction of ritual, right behavior, avoidance of divine
wrath, and health is nowhere clearer than in the laws of the kashrut,
detailed rules for eating and cooking that appear in chapter 11 of
Leviticus and that are still followed by some observant Jews. Desig-
nating spiritually unclean and clean animals, the kashrut essentially
divided the natural world based on contamination. Eating any ani-
mal that does not both have a cleft hoof and chew its cud is strictly
forbidden. About twenty species of birds are unclean, among them
those that famously serve as metaphors of evil in Western culture:
vultures, kites, and ravens. Lizards and snakes are prohibited, too.
The Levitical laws on spiritual unease made three things clear
that are important to understanding how people have come to see
disease: spiritual taint has physical manifestations, it can arise without
human awareness, and it can be redressed through the individual’s ef-
forts. If a person was struck by an ailment that was the consequence of
contamination, it could, according to the Levitical law, be cured.

Leviticus probably spends more words on a manifestation of spiritual
unease, tzara’as, than on any other. Tzara’at referred to a set of three
possible physical signs of a particular spiritual malaise. The three le-
sions were s’eit, sapachat, and baheret—each a different type of discol-
ored skin. Tzara’at was described as visual evidence that the sufferer
had committed one of a set of spiritual offenses: robbery, slander, false
oaths, sexual misconduct, bloodshed, or selfishness. Some rabbis have
suggested tzara’at represented God’s punishment for a particular set of
deeds, those revealing a failure to share the feelings or recognize the
needs of others.
The biblical text gives complex instructions for how a priest
might determine if a skin lesion was indeed evidence of tzara’at and
how to handle a contaminated person. There is, famously, the com-
mand (Lev. 13:46) that the metzora, the contaminated person, dwell
“outside the camp”—that he be ostracized, kept from association
with the spiritually sound. And there are instructions as to how, after
a suitable period of isolation whose tribulations will remind the met-
zora of the seriousness of falling off the spiritual wagon, the priests
can purify him and return him to the circle of society.
Such were the ancient foundations of the modern concept of epi-
demic disease. Physical ailments, even if inseparable from spiritual
malaise, emerged from the realm of mystery and enchantment and
came to have causes that were accessible to the properly informed per-
son. A person could avoid spiritual taint through scrupulous, self-
aware control of his or her interactions with nature—in other words,
humans could thrive in a universe whose underlying logic was observ-
able in physical signs. The logic could be answered with rules, laws,
limits, or codes. The instinctive human dread of chaos or the un-
known could be redirected into specific fears that misbehavior, con-
tamination, or transgression of well-defined limits would bring harm.
k
18 DREAD
At some point, the word “epidemic” appeared in Latin (epidemia) as

a way to designate a disease outbreak. “Epidemic” was carried into
Middle French (ypidimie) and eventually appeared in English, mak-
ing its premiere in 1472, when Sir John Paston wrote that many of
the English soldiers who went to fight in Brittany died of the “flluxe
or other ipedemye.” The progression in thought and naming was
primarily a result of the tremendous outbreak of disease caused by
Y. pestis—plague, to us—that produced astonishing and still unpar-
alleled carnage in Europe between 1347 and 1351.
By the fourteenth century, physical disease was distinct from
mental or behavioral aberrations. Diagnostic capabilities were good
enough by then that physicians could be sure that these repeated
visitations were manifestations of the same disease. To the survivors
of those plague outbreaks, a sudden and widespread occurrence of a
physical ailment wasn’t a metaphor; it had quite concrete meaning.
Exactly when the term “epidemic” came to be applied to the plague
outbreaks isn’t known, but it is clear enough that by Paston’s day,
everyone would have known exactly what he meant by “the flux or
other epidemics.”
The thinking about epidemics in that day could not be disentan-
gled from the inchoate dread of death or randomness that had influ-
enced the ancients, and the occurrences of plague in the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries, beginning with the first wave of the Black
Death, in 1347, were still surrounded by mystery. Yet a fixed set of
ideas emerged from them: disease was an identifiable, physical thing.
Big outbreaks of disease had a recognizable progression in time, with
a beginning, a middle, and an end. Ailments that came and went in
the population (outbreak diseases, we would say today) were distin-
guishable from those that seemed to be around all the time, like con-
sumption, “dropsie,” “rising in the guts,” or death in childbirth.
By about 1600, with plague outbreaks still a frequent occurrence
in Western Europe, the defining story of the modern epidemic took
full shape. By then, an epidemic was presumed to have a physical
cause, not to be the meddlesome work of evil spirits or the sudden

anger of a god (although the anger of the Christian God was still an
important part of the story for some people). By the seventeenth
century, bodily illness had become distinct from mental or spiritual
maladies. Epidemics were illnesses of humans, verifiably different
from animal diseases. An epidemic of common physical disorder was
distinct in its origins from other events bringing widespread unhap-
piness, like flood or drought. And it was assumed that, eventually,
the epidemic would end.
Chapter 2
PLAGUE:
BIRTH OF THE MODEL EPIDEMIC
There have been as many plagues as wars in his-

tory; yet always plagues and wars take people
equally by surprise.
—Albert Camus, T HE P LAGUE
P lague in fourteenth-century Europe has long been the model for

the epidemic. Even as humankind accumulates knowledge about
coping with disastrous epidemics and becomes more self-assured
about defying nature, we return to the antique memory of the Black
Death. When illness threatens society, envisaging an epidemic in the
form of the Black Death allows us to discharge many fears.
So it was that in the late summer of 1982, media stories reminded
Americans of a link between AIDS and homosexuality with blunt
and brutally insensitive headlines announcing the “gay plague.” That
unforgettable epithet announced our society’s anxieties while com-
menting on American sexual politics. Pundits who spoke of the new
plague as divine punishment for homosexual intercourse explicitly
evoked apocalyptic scenarios.
When alarmist media used the word “plague” about AIDS, they
clearly alluded to the Black Death. So does anyone who uses “plague”
21
22 DREAD
today. The Black Death was the greatest disease outbreak in Western
history. Most historians agree that it killed at least a quarter, possibly
more, of the population of Europe between 1347 and 1351—perhaps
25 million people. The Black Death was the archetypal epidemic.
Aside from being an efficient killer, plague was a cataclysm on
which people piled meanings: treachery, foreignness, sanctity and
faithlessness, dying for one’s religion, obeying (or rebelling against)
authority, and, of course, the fecklessness of nature. It acquired more
layers of metaphor over time, none of which is exactly about epi-
demics, or even disease. We like to think that we see epidemic disease
objectively today—rationally, and with a science-infused awareness.
But it’s debatable whether we have significantly revised our thinking
since the first year of the Black Death.
In the 1980s AIDS seemed, literally, fabulous; it was reported as
if it were a tale from Aesop or the Brothers Grimm. Hardly anyone
questioned that the new disease was imbued with a moral. It was
called a plague. Whenever we refer to something as a “plague,” we
mean that it is subtler than we can detect, bigger than we can imag-
ine, a battle that we ought to be fighting but are not, or one that we
are fighting but do not know it. Sometimes we mean that a threat is
afoot that is capable of destroying our civilization. Or we simply sig-
nal that people ought to take things more seriously. Plague was not
only significant historically as a shaping force in European civic life.
It remains important in the lasting effects it has had on speech and
action in the public realm.
During the plague era in Europe, which lasted from that first dev-
astating outbreak in the mid-1300s until about 1700 (later in some
parts of the continent), the template by which we interpret facts
about disease outbreaks as validating our preconceived fears was
forged. At the same time, public health as we know it today became
a mainstay of the capacity of the state to guide the lives of its citizens.
k
PLAGUE: BIRTH OF THE MODEL EPIDEMIC 23
Plague is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. The bacterium infects

rodents (rats and ground squirrels, mostly) and lagomorphs (rabbits
and hares), as well as other small mammals. It enters these animals by
the bite of a flea—most commonly, Xenopsylla cheopis, the Oriental
rat flea (the species was discovered in Egypt in 1903; its name comes
from Cheops, the pharaoh believed to have built the Great Pyramid
at Giza).
If there are plague bacteria in an animal’s bloodstream, a flea will
suck them up into its stomach during feeding, after which the bacte-
ria reproduce within the flea’s digestive tract. When the flea jumps
to a new animal to feed, it is unable to take in blood because the
multiplying Y. pestis bacteria clog its feeding tube; it bites frantically,
and eventually it regurgitates bacteria into the animal’s bloodstream,
thereby transmitting the plague organism. When rats or other hosts
are unavailable, hungry fleas bite humans who happen to live around
rodents and their fleas.*
For the most part, humans contract plague only through the bite
of fleas that carry the bacterium. This was true even during the spread
of the Black Death in medieval Europe. Once infected, humans rarely
transmit the plague bacillus to other humans.** In the days before an-
tibiotic treatment, most people who contracted plague died of it.***
Isolated plague cases continue to occur every year, mostly through
*The human flea, Pulex irritans, can carry plague, but it seems to do so only as
a result of the sorts of ecological disturbances that bring humans into contact
with rat fleas. In outbreaks it is Xenopsylla cheopis that spreads plague to humans.
**In general, human-to-human transmission happens only with a pulmonary
form called pneumonic plague, in which lung infection allows the bacilli to be
spread through the air to other humans via respiratory droplets.
***With the pneumonic form and another highly virulent form called sep-
ticemic (in which bacteria circulating in the bloodstream infect and grow in
internal organs), most or all human cases died of the disease; the famous
bubonic form, in which the bacteria produce swollen lymph glands, or
“buboes,” killed at least 50 percent, sometimes 80 percent, of victims.
24 DREAD
contact with wild rodents, but they are easily treated with common
antibiotics. Continuous chains of transmission from person to person,
or rat to person to rat to person, are rare. Substantial outbreaks occur
today only in crowded conditions under unusual circumstances. For
instance, an unusually forceful earthquake in September 1993 report-
edly destroyed a million homes and led to a plague outbreak centered
in the Indian state of Sura that resulted in several hundred cases.
A plague epidemic is not simply an illness gone out of control: it
is a natural event, one that involves many changes in the environ-
ment and whose effects resonate throughout ecosystems. A sudden
outbreak of any serious disease among humans is rare. It happens
only when the circumstances are aligned just so, when an improba-
ble conjunction of climate, diet, human social arrangements, animal
and insect population dynamics, and the natural movements of
germs happens to occur. In effect, an epidemic is a kind of compli-
cated accident.
THE COMING OF PLAGUE TO EUROPE
The Justinian Plague, whose first wave swept through the Mediter-
ranean trading ports in the years 541–544, struck a region that was
largely still under the sway of the Byzantine Empire (the pandemic
was named after Emperor Justinian, who reigned from 529 to 565).
The sixth-century historian Procopius reported its symptoms, fever
and buboes in the groin and armpit followed by delirium and death
within days. Plague returned beginning in the 570s and reached
Rome in 589 (it was lifted the following year, according to legend,
when Pope Gregory had a vision of the archangel Michael looming
over the tomb of Hadrian). Subsequent salients poked as far inland
as Lyon and Tours and recurred, occasionally, for two centuries. The
last outbreaks occurred in the 760s.
Thereafter, no chronicler mentioned plague in Europe for almost
six hundred years. When plague returned to Western Europe, it came
from central Asia, passing through Constantinople, then the Sicilian

port of Messina in 1347. It was able to spread through a society with
newly populous cities interconnected by trade.
The reach of plague in the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries
had been constrained by the long duration of overland journeys. The
incubation period of pneumonic plague (the only form that would al-
low for flea-free, person-to-person transmission) is very short, some-
times as little as a day, and the pneumonic form is so fatal that few
plague-sick travelers on a journey of any length would have lived to
infect business contacts or acquaintances in a new port of call. Over-
land commerce in the early Middle Ages did not involve the move-
ment of masses of rats, as trade later would (especially once seagoing
commerce in the Mediterranean connected with large caravans com-
ing through the Near East). If animals accompanying caravans were
infected with Y. pestis, they would likely have died before arrival, so
the outbreak could not move very fast.
Europe in the mid-fourteenth century was dramatically different
from what it had been in the 700s. Increased crop yields during the
thirteenth century allowed for an expansion of rat populations,
which would have increased the potential for animal outbreaks of
plague. And the social changes that came with the waning of feudal-
ism in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries added to the climate
changes to exert effects on humans, rats, and fleas that bumped the
region out of quiescence. Some twentieth-century authors claim that
the European plague epidemic began in China in 1330–1340; others
put the origin in central Asia—roughly in the area north and west of
India, today’s Afghanistan-Turkmenistan-Uzbekistan region. Proba-
bly, plague had occurred in the central Asian high plains in the form
of seasonal outbreaks for centuries before the fourteenth, flaring up
when wild rodents that were carriers of the bacillus emerged from
their burrows at the end of each rainy season. Nosopsylla fasciatus, the
Northern rat flea, and other fleas that could live on rats both in the
wild and in human habitations would have moved plague from its
26 DREAD
usual countryside cycle into the towns. The local rats of Asian trad-
ing centers would have carried plague-transmitting fleas to the ro-
dents that moved with the caravans. The expansion of trade after the
Crusades, linking Europe and central Asia via the Near East, created
a virtual flea bridge.
In particular, trade routes linking commercial centers provided a
network by which rats could migrate long distances and intermix
with local animal populations. By the 1300s, European ports like
Marseilles, Genoa, Naples, and Messina were well connected to
central Asia via trading centers in the Near East, such as Smyrna,
Constantinople (now Istanbul), and Kaffa (Feodosiya). The peri-
patetic rat population aboard Mediterranean and Black Sea trading
ships would have come in contact with animals on central Asian
caravans and picked up fleas from feral Asian rodents. Wild rodents
in the high country leading up to the Himalayas were especially im-
portant, because plague might have circulated at high levels among
wild mammals there.
Once in densely populated Europe, plague moved fairly quickly
from town to town. It was probably the closeness of settlements,
rather than the now-higher density of populations within Europe’s
fourteenth-century cities, that set the stage for the fast expansion of
plague after 1347. When human settlements were isolated but not
too far apart, the number of rats per human would have been high in
rural dorps or isolated households. The rat-flea-human-flea-rat cycle
would have spread the plague bacillus rapidly within such locales,
creating sudden explosions of human plague in the countryside. Fre-
quent travel between the no-longer-isolated rural settlements and
the now-larger cities in turn helped spread plague from villages
where plague was expanding rapidly but where there were few hu-
mans for it to infect to the cities, where it could spread widely
among both rats and humans.
Plague’s spread across the land in the 1340s was fast, but outbreaks
extended erratically. After appearing in Sicily in 1347, plague had af-
fected both Barcelona and Rome by May 1348 and Paris by June of
that year—but Strasbourg, only about 250 miles from Paris, was not
stricken until eight months later, in February 1349. Plague broke out
in Mainz in August 1349 but not until 1350 in Rotterdam (only 212
miles away, and itself a seaport). In each place, the outbreak lasted for
a year or less, although in some northern climates plague vanished for
the winter but returned with warmer weather. The wave of outbreaks
moved roughly clockwise along the seacoasts, from the Mediterra-
nean northward, and from the coasts inland, then gradually eastward:
the regions that are now Italy, southern France, and Spain were af-
fected in 1348; northern France, England, southern Germany, and
Austria in 1349; northern Germany and Scotland in 1350; Poland
and the Baltic area in 1351; Moscow and environs in 1352. By the
time it was over the population was drastically reduced almost every-
where in Europe: by the mid-1400s, after a century of plague, popula-
tion had fallen by two-thirds. There were food shortages for want of
labor to bring in the harvest.
Yet in its day the question of the Black Death’s point of origin was
not urgent. On the whole, fourteenth- and fifteenth-century chroni-
clers, prelates, and officials were more concerned with how plague
spread and what could be done about it. In particular, European au-
thors writing during or shortly after the first wave of plague wondered
whether it was the work of God or Satan. “This is an example of the
wonderful deeds and power of God,” wrote ibn Khatimah in Andalu-
sia, Spain. In Ireland, John Clyn of the Friars Minor felt the world to
be “placed within the grasp of the Evil One.” The communicability
of plague was unquestioned in its own time, although the particular
mode of communication—be it contagion, intemperate air, poisoned
water, or astrological influence—was a matter of disagreement.
Pinpointing cause is a more modern concern. As plague is spread
by the bite of a flea that has been feeding on an infected rat, it is the
bacillus-transmitting flea bite that we now think of as plague’s
cause. Similarly, we say that tuberculosis is caused and spread by an
28 D RE A D
airborne bacterium, carried in a droplet of sputum from a cough. We

no longer wonder about devilry or divine works. Today it is risk we
seek to uncover and predict. And by predicting, we engage in an il-
lusion that we curtail our risk. In the fourteenth century, devilry,
rather than risk, was the threat posed by outbreaks of plague.
DISEASE AND FEARS OF CONSPIRACY
To a medieval Christian, physical illness was indistinguishable from

spiritual failing, and spiritual failing was the work of malign forces.
The disbeliever invited the devil in. Therefore, the punishment em-
bodied in illness might be a just desert for a failure of faith. Although
the reason any individual merited the scourging wreaked by physical
illness might not be self-evident, it was assumed that sickness was an
expression of divine punishment for ill faith. Not yet obliged to look
for causes of disease in the physical world, as we do today, Christians
of the fourteenth century could see spiritual malaise behind any aber-
ration of the body. Since physical illness was spiritual, and spiritual
malaise was a flame that had to be tamped down lest it ignite a blaze
of faithlessness, it was a duty of medieval Christians to prevent ill-
ness’s spread. (It wasn’t until much later, when physical and spiritual
welfare were seen as separate, that people would decide that illness
has a definable, earthly, and observable cause.)
Controlling disease, or at least curtailing the movements of spir-
itual distempers, required that medieval Christians act collectively.
Community action taken to control the spread of plague would be-
come public health as we know it today. At its beginnings, the mo-
tives for communal action were both practical and spiritual. An
emotional tide of dread, propelled by anxiety about devilry, led
people to monitor physical illness as evidence of spiritual malaise.
Along with constructive actions aimed at preventing the spread of
ill faith by interrupting the advance of physical disease, such anxi-
eties about devilry led to gruesome exterminations, particularly of
Jews. The fourteenth-century Jew hunt that occurred at the height

of the Black Death prefigured the Holocaust of the twentieth cen-
tury and crudely illustrated how self-protection from real physical
threats and dread of spiritual contamination were often knitted to-
gether in the attempt to understand plague.
For centuries before plague, fears that the bedeviled might con-
spire to undermine Christian society led to the exclusion of the
leper—who might be anyone who was suspected, by reason of appear-
ance or behavior, of spiritual taint. Medieval Christians interpreted
very strictly the injunction in Leviticus 13:45–46 against consorting
with lepers. “Being impure,” the biblical text reads, the leper “shall
dwell apart; his dwelling shall be outside the camp.”
According to historian Sheldon Watts, when medieval Euro-
peans followed the instructions of the Levitical text to ostracize lep-
ers, they misidentified the disease in question. The spiritual affliction
with which chapter 13 of Leviticus is entirely concerned, tzara’at,
was not modern-day Hansen’s disease (a bacterial illness).* The im-
plication in Leviticus of barring the afflicted metzora from full partic-
ipation in society was not that a physical illness made its sufferers
unfit to be part of society. It was that the individual was expected to
undertake spiritual reform. But medieval Christians, reading the
*When the book of Leviticus was translated into Greek, lingua franca in much
of the Mediterranean basin in the third century BC, the word lepra, meaning
“scaliness,” was used to denote tzara’at. By rendering the spiritual term tzara’at
with a word that merely described the outward manifestation, the translators
lost the essential meaning of moral malaise. The translation error was perpetu-
ated about six centuries later, circa AD 400, when St. Jerome compiled the
Latin Vulgate. Although Jerome rejected the Septuagint, the Greek translation
of the Old Testament, instead translating directly from the Hebrew into Latin,
he simply accepted the Greek word lepra for tzara’at and adopted it into his
Latin translation of Leviticus. When Hansen’s disease became common in Eu-
rope, several hundred years after Jerome, it took on the name lepre in Old
French and Middle English (lèpre in modern French, leprosy in English).
30 D RE A D
Latin version of Leviticus, thought that they were called upon to ex-
ile people with the disease “leprosy,” i.e., Hansen’s disease.
By misapplying Leviticus’s injunction about moral taint to a
physical condition, medieval Christians essentially created the leper.
Something essential was lost in translation. After the Council of
Lyon of 583, lepers were forbidden to associate with healthy people,
and laws regulating interactions with lepers were established. By the
twelfth century or so, a long list of characteristics could cause a per-
son to be labeled a leper—from various skin disorders to behavior
that signaled trouble to policy makers or the church. Unlike tzara’at,
medieval leprosy was not redressed by a period of segregation and
contemplation. Leprosy was permanent.
Lazarettos, hostels for lepers, existed in Europe from the seventh
or eighth century, but it wasn’t until the Third Lateran Council, in
1179, that all lepers were required to wear identifying insignia and
towns had to maintain lazarettos to house and feed them. Once a
specific prescription for dealing with lepers was in place, a Christian
could demonstrate his moral uprightness by giving succor to the
leper. In this way, lepers were useful to the operation of Christian so-
ciety: they were scorned but cared for, and they served as a touch-
stone by which the faithful could reassure themselves of their piety.
In medieval society, people who were disdained because they had
a disfiguring disease (or were merely imagined to represent a threat)
could exist only by living apart. In this regard, the ostracizing of the
leper foreshadowed the epidemic in the modern imagination. We no
longer banish the carriers of spiritual taint, identifying them by disfig-
urement or skin ailments. But we do identify suspicious people by skin
color, national origin, or sexual practice today as potentially infec-
tious. Certainly, that was the point of proposals early in the U.S.
AIDS outbreak to tattoo homosexual men and the reason for the drop
in patronage at Chinese restaurants in U.S. cities when the severe
adult respiratory syndrome (SARS) was spreading in Asia. We do not
refer to them as such, but lepers still exist in the modern imagination.
PLAGUE AND VIOLENCE TOWARD JEWS
In medieval Europe, lepers and Jews were linked in the fearful minds
of many Christians. Jews, as unbelievers, were inherently “leprous.”
By 1215, Jews as well as lepers were ordered to wear clothing to indi-
cate their status, so that Christians who were pure could avoid inad-
vertent contamination.
Like lepers, Jews might be bedeviled. But Jews were not fallen
Christians, as lepers were. Nor were Jews heretics, who might seduce
believers away from the “true faith” with an alternative vision of
worship or different manner of obedience to God’s will. Jews were
suspect, but they were also valuable. Jews lent money, which made
them the object of envy, scorn, and resentment. Jews prepared food
differently—which might have contributed to accusations that they
poisoned Christian food and drink, used human blood in rituals, or
desecrated the Host. Jews were also disproportionately represented
among physicians in medieval society. It might have been easy to
imagine that physicians knew how to tinker with food and drink.
Doctors in those days, recommending powders and poultices, must
frequently have poisoned their patients inadvertently, even though
their sincere intentions were to cure. Physicians were well paid and
well dressed, too, which must have added resentment to suspicions
cast on Jewish doctors. In a society fearful of the devil’s enchant-
ments, Jews were the cause of distress.
By the fourteenth century, fear of diabolical conspiracy largely
had shifted from lepers to Jews. In 1320, the Pastoureaux, peasant
youth and children rising up against the authority of the crown in
France, targeted Jews, whom they saw as protégés of the monarchy.
The French king demanded that Jews be protected. Yet the Pas-
toureaux, along with local helpers, are said to have slaughtered
every Jew in southern France.
In the wake of the Pastoureaux rebellion, King Philip V of France
visited Poitou in the Aquitaine in 1321, where he was told that wells
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
ausgedehnte Land, das hinter diesen Orten lag, wurde von den
damaligen chinesischen Geographen mit dem unbestimmten Namen
Si-yu (die Westregion) bezeichnet und soll nach ihnen in 36
verschiedene Königreiche geteilt gewesen sein. Man erzählt, daß
von China zwei Wege nach dieser Gegend führten. «Der über Lau-
lan, welcher längs des Flusses Po (des unteren Tarim?) auf der
Nordseite des südlichen Gebirges (des Altyn Ustun Tagh?) hinläuft
und westwärts nach Sa-sche (Yarkand) führt, ist der südliche Weg.
Der, welcher über den Palast des Häuptlings in Keu-tse (im
Ouigourreiche? 1890 Li von Lau-lan) führt und den Fluß Po in der
Richtung des nördlichen Gebirges (Tien Shan) bis nach Su-leh
(Kaschgar) begleitet, ist der nördliche Weg.»
188. Die Karawane auf dem Eise des Lu-tschuentsa-Baches. (S. 17.)
189. Sanddünen in der mittelsten Gobi. (S. 22.)
190. Terrasse nördlich von der Oase vom 1. Februar. (S. 22.)
191. Tränkung der Kamele am Brunnen im Lager Nr. 138. (S. 22.)
„Das Wassersystem des Tarimbeckens wird mit folgenden

Worten beschrieben: «Der Fluß (Chotan-darja?) strömt nach
Norden, bis er sich mit einem Flusse vom Tsung-ling (Zwiebelkette in
Sarikol) vereinigt, und fließt dann nach Osten in den Pu-schang-hai
(den Schilfsee), der auch der Salzsumpf genannt wird. Dieser liegt
über 300 Li von dem Yü-Tore und dem Sperrtore Yang-kuan und ist
300 Li lang und breit. Das Wasser ist stationär und nimmt weder im
Winter noch im Sommer ab oder zu. Der Fluß soll sodann unter der
Erde weiterfließen und bei Tseih-shih wieder zutage treten, von wo
an er den Gelben Fluß Chinas bildet.»
„Das Folgende ist ein Auszug des Berichtes, den wir in dem
Tsien-Han-shu über die politischen Verhältnisse zwischen China und
Lau-lan während des ersten Jahrhunderts vor Christi Geburt finden.
„Kaiser Wu-ti, heißt es, wünschte, mit Ta-wan und den
umliegenden Ländern Verbindung zu unterhalten, und schickte
wiederholt Gesandte dorthin. Der Weg derselben ging über Lau-lan,
aber die Einwohner von Lau-lan beunruhigten im Verein mit dem Ku-
tse-Volke die Reise der Beamten und griffen Wang-Kuei, einen der
Gesandten, an und raubten ihn aus. Doch nicht genug damit, die
Bewohner von Lau-lan machten sich den Chinesen auch dadurch
verhaßt, daß sie den Heun-nu (Hunnen) als Spione dienten und
diesen wiederholt bei der Ausplünderung chinesischer Reisender
halfen. Dergleichen konnte nicht geduldet werden. Daher rüstete
Wu-ti eine Expedition gegen den feindlich gesinnten Staat aus. Chao
Po-nu wurde mit einem Heere von 10000 Mann ausgesandt, um das
Ku-tse-Volk zu strafen, während der Gesandte Wang-Kuei, der
wiederholt unter den Übergriffen der Lau-laner gelitten hatte, Befehl
erhielt, Chao Po-nu als Unterfeldherr zu begleiten. An der Spitze von
700 Mann leichter Kavallerie vorrückend, nahm dieser den König
von Lau-lan gefangen, eroberte Ku-tse und jagte, auf das Ansehen
seines Kriegsheeres vertrauend, auch den Staaten, die Vasallen von
Wu-sun und Ta-wan waren, Respekt ein. Die Lau-laner unterwarfen
sich bald und schickten Tribut an Kaiser Wu-ti. Doch ihre
Unterwerfung erboste ihre Bundesgenossen, die Hunnen, und es
dauerte gar nicht lange, so wurden sie von diesen angegriffen.
Daher schickte der König von Lau-lan, um seine beiden mächtigen
Nachbarn zu besänftigen, einen seiner Söhne als Geisel zu den
Hunnen und einen zweiten dem Kaiser von China. So endete die
erste Episode der Beziehungen zwischen China und dem
Königreiche von Lau-lan.
„Aber noch mehr Unruhen standen Lau-lan bevor. Kaiser Wu-ti
mußte aus irgendeinem Grunde noch eine Strafexpedition gegen Ta-
wan und die Hunnen schicken. Die Hunnen fanden das chinesische
Heer so furchtbar, daß sie es für das Klügste hielten, jeden direkten
Zusammenstoß mit ihm zu vermeiden, was sie aber nicht hinderte, in
Lau-lan, dessen Bewohner noch immer mit ihnen im Bunde standen,
Truppen in Hinterhalte zu legen. Diese Truppen beunruhigten Wu-tis
Armee unaufhörlich. Die Chinesen kamen bald dahinter, daß die
Lau-laner im geheimen Bundesgenossen der Hunnen waren, und
infolgedessen wurde General Jen-wan ausgesandt, um sie zu
züchtigen. Jen-wan drang bis an das Stadttor vor, welches ihm
geöffnet wurde, und machte dem König Vorwürfe über seine
Verräterei. Der König antwortete entschuldigend: «Wenn ein kleiner
Staat zwischen zwei großen Reichen liegt, zwingt ihn die
Notwendigkeit, mit beiden im Bunde zu stehen, sonst hat er nie
Frieden; jetzt aber wünsche ich, mein Königreich den Grenzen des
chinesischen Reiches einzuverleiben.» Diesen Worten vertrauend,
setzte ihn der Kaiser wieder auf den Thron und beauftragte ihn, ein
wachsames Auge auf die Bewegungen der Hunnen zu haben.
„Der König starb im Jahre 92 v. Chr. Eine Thronfolgefrage
entstand. Man wird sich erinnern, daß einer der Söhne des
verstorbenen Königs sich als Geisel am chinesischen Hofe befand.
Nun schickten die Lau-laner eine Petition an den Kaiser, er möge
ihnen den als Geisel gesandten Prinzen wiederschicken, damit
dieser den ledigen Thron besteige. Der Prinz hatte sich jedoch nicht
der Gunst des Kaisers erfreut; er war tatsächlich die ganze Zeit, die
er in China weilte, im Palaste des Seidenwurmhauses in einer
seinem Range entsprechenden Haft gefangen gehalten worden.
Daher fand die Petition bei Wu-ti kein williges Ohr, sondern er gab
die diplomatische Antwort: «Ich liebe den Prinzen, meinen Gast,
sehr und bin nicht gesonnen, ihn von meiner Seite zu lassen.» Der
Kaiser schlug dann den Bittstellern vor, sie sollten den nächsten
Sohn des toten Königs mit der Königswürde bekleiden.
„Das taten die Lau-laner auch. Aber der neue König regierte nur
kurze Zeit, und als er starb, wurde die Nachfolgerfrage wieder
brennend. Diesmal dachten die Hunnen, die, wie wir wissen, auch
einen Lau-lan-Prinzen als Geisel an ihrem Hofe hatten, daß dies
eine passende Gelegenheit sei, ihren verlorenen Einfluß auf diesen
Staat wiederzuerlangen. Deshalb schickten sie den Prinzen zurück
und setzten ihn auf den Thron. Dieser gelungene Handstreich
beunruhigte die Chinesen, die ihren Einfluß durch Bestechungen
und Intrigen wiederzugewinnen suchten. Sie machten keinen
direkten Versuch, den Schützling der Hunnen zu entthronen,
schickten aber an ihn einen Gesandten, der ihn aufforderte, dem
chinesischen Hofe einen Besuch abzustatten, wo ihm, wie der
Gesandte sagte, der Kaiser reiche Geschenke machen würde. Der
Kaiser und der Gesandte konnten jedoch nicht ahnen, daß sie hier
auch mit der Verschlagenheit einer Frau zu rechnen hatten. Die
Stiefmutter des Königs war dort und riet ihm, indem sie sagte: “«Dein
königlicher Vorgänger sandte zwei Söhne als Geiseln nach China;
keiner von ihnen ist je zurückgekehrt; ist es da billig, daß du gehen
sollst?» Daher verabschiedete der König den Gesandten mit dem
Bescheid, daß «die Angelegenheiten des Reiches ihn, da er den
Thron erst eben bestiegen habe, noch derartig in Anspruch nähmen,
daß er den chinesischen Hof nicht eher als in zwei Jahren besuchen
könne».
„Obgleich das Verhältnis zwischen dem neuen König und dem
Kaiser ohne Zweifel gespannt war, war es noch nicht zu offenen
Feindseligkeiten zwischen ihnen gekommen. Nun aber kam das
Ereignis, welches der Unabhängigkeit des Staates Lau-lan ein Ende
machen sollte. Am Ostrande von Lau-lan, wo dieses Land an China
grenzte, scheint eine Örtlichkeit, der Peh-lung-Wall genannt, gelegen
zu haben. Dieser Platz lag auf der großen Heerstraße von China
über Lau-lan nach den westlichen Ländern; er litt an Dürre und hatte
keine Weiden. Die Lau-laner wurden oft von den Chinesen
aufgefordert, Führer, Wasser und Proviant nach diesem Platze zu
schicken, wenn durchreisende Beamte dessen bedurften. Hierbei
wurden die Ortseinwohner oft von chinesischen Soldaten brutal
behandelt. Dadurch entstanden Reibungen; aber die Lage wurde
noch verschlimmert durch die Hunnen, welche die Lau-laner immer
im geheimen gegen die Chinesen aufhetzten. Schließlich
beschlossen die Lau-laner, alle freundschaftlichen Beziehungen zu
Wu-ti abzubrechen, und ermordeten einige seiner Gesandten, als
diese durch das Gebiet von Lau-lan reisten. Diese Verräterei wurde
dem chinesischen Hofe durch Hui Tu-chi, den jüngeren Bruder des
Königs, hinterbracht, welcher, nachdem er sich unter die Oberhoheit
des Han-Kaisers gestellt hatte, mit dem Plane umging, seinen
älteren Bruder vom Throne zu stoßen. Infolgedessen wurde im Jahre
77 v. Chr. der chinesische General Fu-keae-tsu ausgeschickt, um
dem König das Leben zu nehmen. Fu-keae-tsu wählte sich
schleunigst einige Begleiter aus und begab sich nach Lau-lan. Er
hatte vorher das Gerücht verbreiten lassen, daß er beauftragt sei, zu
freundschaftlichen Untersuchungen nach einem Nachbarstaate zu
reisen, und daß er dem König Geschenke zu überbringen habe. Fu-
keae-tsu wurde bei seiner Ankunft von dem König, der nichts Böses
ahnte, zu einem großartigen Feste eingeladen. Als der König
betrunken war, gab Fu seinen Begleitern ein Zeichen, und nun
wurde der König von hinten erstochen. Sein Kopf wurde vom Leibe
getrennt und über dem Nordtore der Stadt aufgehängt. Zur
Belohnung für seinen Verrat wurde Hui Tu-chi an Stelle seines
Bruders zum König eingesetzt und das Königreich unter dem neuen
Namen Shen-Shen, auf den der Lehnsbrief ausgefertigt wurde,
wiederhergestellt. Damit dem Ansehen des neuen Regenten nichts
mangeln sollte, erhielt er eine Dame des kaiserlichen Hofes zur
Gemahlin, und als Hui Tu-chi die chinesische Hauptstadt verließ, um
sich in sein Reich zu begeben, wurden ihm beim Abschied reiche
Ehrenbezeigungen erwiesen. Auf diese Weise gelangte er auf den
Thron. Doch er fühlte sich in seiner neuen Stellung nicht sicher. Weil
er ein chinesischer Schützling war, betrachtete ihn das Volk, über
welches er herrschen sollte, mit Mißtrauen. Außerdem hatte der tote
König einen Sohn hinterlassen, und Hui Tu-chi lebte in beständiger
Furcht, von diesem ermordet zu werden. Daher forderte Hui Tu-chi
den Kaiser auf, in Lau-lan eine Militärkolonie zu errichten, und zwar
in der Stadt E-tun, wo das Land, wie er sagte, «reich war und guten
Ertrag gab». Dies geschah, und der Kaiser schickte einen
Reiterobersten mit 40 Mann nach E-tun, um «die Felder zu bestellen
und das Volk zu beruhigen». So gelang es dem großen Han-
Monarchen, seine Macht über das Land Lau-lan oder Shen-shen zu
erstrecken.
„Um die Zeit, als diese Chroniken geschrieben wurden, was
wahrscheinlich um Christi Geburt herum geschah, zählte, wie uns
berichtet wird, das Königreich Shen-shen 1570 Familien, was neben
2912 Mann geübten Truppen eine Bevölkerung von 14100 Personen
ausmachte.
„Hinsichtlich der physischen Charakterzüge des Landes sagt das
Tsien-Han-shu (von Herrn A. Wylie ins Englische übersetzt):
„«Das Land ist sandig und salzig, und es gibt dort wenig
angebaute Felder. In betreff des Getreides und der
Ackerbauerzeugnisse ist die Gegend auf die benachbarten Reiche
angewiesen. Das Land bringt Nephrit, Binsen in Menge, Tamarisken,
Elaecocca vernicia und weißes Gras hervor. Die Bevölkerung treibt
ihr Vieh überall auf die Weide, wo es genügend Wasser und Gras
finden kann. Die Leute besitzen Esel, Pferde und Kamele. Sie
können für Kriegsbedarf dieselbe Art Waffen anfertigen wie die Leute
in Tso-kiang.»
„Soweit gehen also die in dem Tsien-Han-shu enthaltenen
Nachrichten. Hören wir, was Fa-Heen von Lau-lan sagt, durch
welches Land er im fünften Jahrhundert n. Chr. reiste, als er sich von
China nach Indien begab, um sich die heiligen Bücher des
Buddhismus zu verschaffen. Die englische Übersetzung ist von Dr.
J. Legge.
„«Nachdem sie 17 Tage gereist waren, welche Entfernung wir auf
etwa 1500 Li (von Tun-huang) schätzen können, erreichten die
Pilger das Königreich Shen-shen, ein kupiertes, hügeliges Land mit
magerem, unfruchtbarem Boden. Die Kleidungsstücke der
gewöhnlichen Leute sind einfach und gleichen den in unserem
Lande Han gewebten; einige tragen Filz und andere Serge oder
härene Stoffe. Der König gehorchte unserem Gesetze, und in dem
Königreiche gibt es wohl mehr als 4000 Mönche, die alle das
Hinayana (das kleine Erlösungsmittel) studieren. Die breiteren
Schichten der Bevölkerung dieses und anderer Königreiche in dieser
Gegend, wie auch die Sramanen (Mönche) leben alle auf indische
Weise, diese jedoch strenger, jene etwas freier. Hier hielten sich die
Pilger ungefähr einen Monat auf und setzten dann ihre Reise fort,
worauf sie ein fünfzehntägiger Marsch nach Nordwesten nach dem
Lande Wu-e führte. Hier gab es über 4000 Mönche, die alle das
Hinayana studierten.»“
„Hsian-Tsang (629–645 n. Chr.) passierte zweihundert Jahre
nach Fa-Heen auf der Rückreise von Indien Lau-lan, aber seine
Nachrichten von dem Lande sind außerordentlich dürftig. Wir
erfahren nur, daß er, nachdem er die mit Mauern umgebene, aber
verlassene Stadt Tsche-mo-to-na oder Nimo verlassen hatte, 1000 Li
in nordöstlicher Richtung reiste und Na-po-po erreichte, welches
dasselbe ist wie Lau-lan.“
Aus diesen von Macartney zusammengestellten Angaben
ersehen wir, daß Lôu-lan seinerzeit eine gewisse Bedeutung hatte.
Wahrscheinlich würde man durch fortgesetzte Ausgrabungen noch
reichere Funde machen können als die, von denen ich kurz berichtet
habe.
Sechstes Kapitel.
Ein Nivellement durch die
Lopwüste.
A m 10. März frühmorgens wurde es im Lager unruhig; wir wollten

von unserer festen Operationsbasis aufbrechen und die stille
Stadt wieder ihrer tausendjährigen Ruhe überlassen. Wird je wieder
ein abendländischer Pilger in den Mauern von Lôu-lan zu Gaste
sein?
Drei Eissäcke wurden den Kamelen geopfert, die kauen durften,
soviel sie wollten; die Last war auf jeden Fall zu schwer. Die
eingeheimste Ernte an Schnitzereien und anderen Dingen wurde zu
Packen gebunden und das Gepäck geordnet. Die Karawane sollte
hier in zwei Partien geteilt werden. Ich wollte südwärts gehen, um
ein Präzisionsnivellement durch die Wüste nach dem Kara-koschun
auszuführen. Als Begleiter hatte ich Schagdur, Kutschuk, Chodai
Kullu und Chodai Värdi ausersehen. Wir brauchten nur vier Kamele,
eines für das Gepäck und drei für Eis (Abb. 216). Ich nahm nur das
Unentbehrlichste an Proviant und Kleidern, Instrumente, alles zum
Nivellieren Nötige, die halbe Jurte und das halbe Bett mit; die Leute
konnten unter freiem Himmel schlafen. Die Frühlingswärme war
bereits so stark, daß der Ofen überflüssig war. Der Proviant wog
nicht viel. Das Wenige, was noch an Reis und Brot da war, wurde in
für acht Tage berechnete Rationen geteilt.
Der übrige Teil der Karawane, Faisullah, Li Loje und Mollah,
sechs Kamele, drei Pferde, die drei Hunde und das ganze schwerere
Gepäck nebst Eis und Proviant für vier Tage sollten allein
weiterziehen.
Faisullah, der im vorigen Jahre die Wüstendurchquerung von
Altimisch-bulak an mitgemacht hatte, mußte nach Kum-tschappgan,
wo wir uns wieder treffen wollten, hinfinden können. Er hatte Befehl,
sich direkt dorthin zu begeben und dort auf unsere Ankunft zu
warten. Der Sicherheit halber erhielt er gründlichen Unterricht, wie er
sich vom Kompaß nach Südwesten führen lassen müsse. Ich war
von Faisullahs Klugheit und Vorsicht überzeugt, hielt es aber doch
für besser, alle Kartenblätter von dieser Reise, die Manuskripte und
Stäbe aus Lôu-lan, meine Notizbücher und die
Beobachtungsjournale selbst mitzunehmen. Obgleich Faisullah, wie
wir noch hören werden, ein höchst unerwartetes Abenteuer hatte,
wären die kostbaren Papiere bei ihm doch sicherer gewesen als bei
mir, wie sich noch zeigen wird!
Während die beiden Karawanen beladen wurden, brach ich auf.
Faisullah und seine beiden Kameraden halfen Chodai Värdi, der
Befehl hatte, uns mit unseren vier Kamelen nachzukommen und sich
am Abend bereitzuhalten, das Lager aufzuschlagen.
Zum Ausgangspunkte des Nivellements wählte ich den Platz an
der Basis des Turmes, wo meine Jurte gestanden hatte. Hier wurde
die 4 Meter hohe Nivellierlatte zum ersten Male aufgerichtet. Sie
wurde stets auf eine Platte gestellt, um nicht einzusinken, wenn sie
halb umgedreht wurde. Schagdur handhabte sie während der
ganzen Wanderung auf mustergültige Weise. Das Fernrohr wurde
100 Meter südlich von ihr aufgestellt, und ich machte meine erste
Ablesung, worauf Schagdur am Fernrohr vorbeiging und die Latte
zum zweiten Male 100 Meter südlich davon aufstellte — und so
weiter, Tag für Tag, bis an den Kara-koschun, wohin wir 81½
Kilometer hatten!
Der Abstand zwischen Fernrohr und Stange wurde von Kutschuk
und Chodai Kullu mit einem 50 Meter langen Bandmaße gemessen,
das also jedesmal zweimal auf der Erde abrollte. Das Fernrohr mit
seinem Stativ wurde beim Weitergehen von Kutschuk getragen. Ich
selbst hatte die Ablesungen, Kompaßpeilungen, Marschroute und
Aufzeichnungen über den Charakter des Terrains zu machen.
Bevor die Leute an diese für sie neue Arbeit gewöhnt waren,
kamen wir nur langsam weiter; aber nicht lange dauerte es, so ging
alles seinen regelrechten Gang, und es gab keine unnötigen
Verzögerungen mehr.
In dieser Richtung, von Lôu-lan nach Süden, war es sehr deutlich
zu merken, daß wir die Uferlinie des früheren Sees passierten. Die
toten Bäume, Sträucher und Schilfstoppeln hörten mit einem Schlag
auf, und nun waren wir auf ödem, graugelbem Lehmboden ohne alle
Vegetation, wo wir uns ohne Zweifel auf einem alten Seeboden
befanden.
Einundneunzigmal waren die Stange und das Fernrohr
vorgerückt, bevor wir es, nach einem Marsche von 9140 Meter, an
der Zeit hielten zu lagern. Es fing an dämmerig zu werden. Aber
Chodai Värdi mit den vier Kamelen war nicht zu erblicken. Wir
spähten von Hügeln und Kegeln nach ihm aus, doch der Mann war
spurlos verschwunden. Hatte er sich verirrt? Hatte er mich
mißverstanden und Faisullah begleitet oder war er bei den Ruinen
geblieben?
An einem Punkte, wo wieder dürres Holz auftrat, zündeten wir
auf einem Hügel ein großes Signalfeuer an. Schagdur begab sich
trotz der Dunkelheit auf die Suche. Ich war in größter Unruhe. Wenn
Chodai Värdi sich verirrt hatte, war er verloren. Er war noch nie in
der Gegend gewesen und hatte keine Ahnung, wohin er gehen
mußte, um nach dem Kara-koschun zu gelangen. Und fanden wir ihn
nicht wieder, so würde natürlich auch unsere Lage — ohne Wasser
und ohne Nahrung — kritisch sein; es war bis an den See noch so
weit, daß unsere Kräfte schwerlich so weit reichen konnten, und
nach der isolierten Quelle zurückzukehren, wäre ebenso verzweifelt
gewesen. Doch am meisten von allem quälte mich der Gedanke:
sollten alle Resultate einer viermonatigen Wanderung nur durch die
Dummheit eines Dieners verlorengehen?
Wir zerbrachen uns den Kopf und lauschten und stapelten alles,
was Holz hieß, auf das Feuer, das hoch und wild in der sonst
undurchdringlichen Dunkelheit flammte. Kein Laut war zu hören. Die
Wüste lag so tot und öde da, als gehörte sie nicht einem von
Menschen bewohnten Planeten an. Statt uns nach der
anstrengenden Arbeit und Fußwanderung des Tages an Wasser
laben können, hielt uns nun diese unheimliche, düstere Unruhe
gepackt. Es bedurfte jetzt nur noch eines Nebelsturmes — dann
wäre alles verloren gewesen!
So schlimm sollte es nicht werden. Im nächtlichen Dunkel
ertönten tappende Schritte: Chodai Värdi kam mit den Kamelen
wohlbehalten an! Ich war froh, nichts eingebüßt zu haben, so daß ich
ganz vergaß, ihm seine wohlverdiente Schelte zukommen zu lassen.
Er erklärte, daß er durch die Form der Lehmterrassen gezwungen
worden sei, sich zu weit nach rechts zu halten, und nachher weder
uns noch eine Spur habe wiederfinden können. Als er abends im
Südwesten ein Feuer gesehen habe, sei ihm endlich klar geworden,
daß er sich auf Irrwegen befinde — dies war nämlich Faisullahs
Feuer. Er sei also umgekehrt und habe schon aus sehr weiter Ferne
unser Feuer erblickt, auf das er nun losgesteuert sei. Es war wirklich
ein Wunder, daß keines der Kamele sich beim Überschreiten dieser
unzähligen, finsteren, gähnenden Gräben in der Dunkelheit die
Beine gebrochen hatte.
In aller Eile wurde das Lager aufgeschlagen und der Kessel auf
das Feuer gesetzt. Schagdur war und blieb fort, und Chodai Kullu
wurde mit der Flinte ausgeschickt, um einige Signalschüsse
abzufeuern. Daß er weit ging, konnte man hören, da die Schüsse
allmählich immer schwächer wurden und schließlich in der Ferne
erstarben. Doch er kam unverrichteter Sache wieder, und wir gingen
zur Ruhe.
Daß dieses Abenteuer noch so ablief, war eine Fügung der
Vorsehung; aber daß ein Mensch wie Chodai Värdi, der sonst stets
gesunden Verstand gezeigt, so unglaublich dumm sein konnte, ist
unerklärlich. Er war 12 Stunden kreuz und quer in der Wüste
umhergeirrt, während wir nur 9,1 Kilometer zurückgelegt hatten. Vom
Lager konnte man sogar noch den Lehmturm von Lôu-lan sehen.
Um Schagdur hatte ich nicht Angst. Ich kannte ihn zur Genüge, um
zu wissen, daß er sich allein nach dem Kara-koschun durchschlagen
würde. Er hatte stets einen Kompaß bei sich und wußte auf meinen
Karten gut Bescheid.
Am folgenden Morgen erwachte ich bei einem vollen Sturm, der
dicke Sandwolken durch die Rinne trieb, in der wir lagerten; sie
zogen in ihr dahin wie Wasser in seinem Bette, und der Sand feilte
die Seiten der Lehmterrassen. Die öde Landschaft sah in dieser
neuen Beleuchtung, die der des gestrigen Feuers so unähnlich war,
geradezu schauerlich fremd aus. Nivellieren war ganz unmöglich; wir
mußten liegenbleiben. Schagdur fand sich nicht ein; er hatte in dem
heimtückischen Sturme offenbar unsere Spur verloren.
Am Vormittag hielt ich mich meistens bei den Kamelen auf. Ich
saß bei ihnen, streichelte ihnen den Kopf und klopfte ihnen den
Rücken. Wenn sie nur geahnt hätten, wie ich sie schätzte, wie
dankbar ich ihnen für die Dienste war, die sie mir geleistet hatten,
und wie leid es mir tat, daß ich sie einem Führer anvertraut hatte,
der sie nutzlos gequält und ihre empfindlichen Fußschwielen
unnötigerweise in der harten Lehmwüste angestrengt hatte. Ruhig,
zufrieden und würdig wie immer lagen sie da und glaubten wohl, es
sei notwendig gewesen, 40 Kilometer in der Wüste umherzuirren.
Ohne Rücksicht auf die Folgen ließ ich ihnen einen Sack Kamisch
und einen Sack Eis geben. Doch welch ein Lohn wartete ihrer
später! Alle, außer einem, starben in Tibet.
Mein Erstaunen war grenzenlos, als um die Mittagszeit Schagdur
mit leichten, elastischen Schritten aus dem Staubnebel auftauchte!
Der prächtige Junge, der einen ganzen Stamm von Muselmännern
aufwiegt, war, seit er uns am vorigen Abend um 5 Uhr verlassen
hatte, unausgesetzt auf den Beinen gewesen. In der Nacht hatte er
Faisullahs Feuer gesehen und war dorthingeeilt. Ich hatte nämlich
Faisullah befohlen, das Feuer bis spät in die Nacht zu unterhalten,
nur um der Kuriosität halber feststellen zu können, ob es bei uns auf
20 Kilometer Abstand sichtbar wäre. Von Faisullah hatte Schagdur
einen kleinen Vorrat Reis und Eis erhalten, denn, als sich jetzt der
Sturm erhob, hatten sie gefürchtet, daß er uns nicht wiederfinden
würde.
Er wollte es versuchen. Glücklicherweise hatte er auf dem
Hinwege die Kompaßpeilungen aufgezeichnet. Ein paarmal hatte er
die Spur von Chodai Värdis Kamelen gesehen, sie dann aber wieder
verloren.
Daß er uns fand, war ein Meisterstück sondergleichen. Nur ein
Burjat, der sein Leben unter freiem Himmel in der Wildnis
zugebracht hat und dazu Kosak ist, bringt derartiges fertig. Denn
man muß bedenken, daß die Lager 20 Kilometer voneinander
entfernt lagen, der Boden eben wie eine Wasserfläche war und man
im Nebelsturme höchstens 50 Meter weit vor sich sehen konnte und
alle Spuren zugeweht waren. Wenn ein Mensch solche Beweise von
Tüchtigkeit, Klugheit und Treue gibt, kann man ihm alles anvertrauen
— und das tat ich später auch ein paarmal.
Es machte uns freilich einen Strich durch die Rechnung, daß wir
einen ganzen Tag verloren, doch was tat das, da der Himmel mir den
schweren Verlust, der mir drohte, erspart hatte? Wir versuchten
unseren Weg fortzusetzen, aber es ging nicht. Wenn der Wind 11
Meter in der Sekunde macht, schwankt die Stange und kann
abbrechen, und das Fernrohr zittert auf seinem Stativ. Wir mußten
uns gedulden und noch eine Nacht auf diesem wüsten Platze
zubringen.
Am 12. März war ein herrlicher Tag, und wir begannen früh,
arbeiteten bis Sonnenuntergang und hielten nur um 1 Uhr zehn
Minuten Rast zur Ablesung der meteorologischen Instrumente. Jetzt
führte Chodai Kullu die Kamele, mußte aber ganz in unserer Nähe
bleiben. Der Weg ging nach Südsüdosten. Die Winderosionsfurchen
ziehen sich nach Südwesten, und wir mußten über die zwischen
ihnen liegenden Rücken hinüber. Für uns Fußgänger ging es wohl
an, aber für die Kamele war es sehr ermüdend. Sie mußten in weiten
Umwegen geführt werden, während wir mit den Instrumenten in
geraden Linien vorrückten.
Abwechslung bietet sich dem Auge nicht mehr, aber das kann
man in einer Wüste auch nicht verlangen. Ein Unterschied gegen die
westlichere Linie des vorigen Jahres war, daß wir hier weniger, ja
fast gar keinen Sand hatten. In den Rinnen ist der Boden oft mit
einer fußdicken Schicht von feinem Staub bedeckt, in den man
einsinkt wie in Wasser. Meistens haben wir jedoch harten
Lehmboden, und bald schmerzen uns von dem ewigen Springen die
Füße.
Gegen Sonnenuntergang mußte Chodai Kullu vorausgehen und
das Lager aufschlagen, so daß alles fertig war, als wir mit der
Tagesarbeit aufhörten. Der Fixpunkt, wo die Arbeit unterbrochen und
am folgenden Morgen wiederaufgenommen werden muß, wird so
gewählt, daß irgendwelche Verrückung während der Nacht
ausgeschlossen ist.
Mit wachsendem Interesse rechnete ich abends aus, was die
Zahlenreihen zu sagen hatten. Heute zeigten sie mir, daß wir auf
11201 Meter 2,466 Meter gefallen waren. Ich würde diese
ermüdende, die Geduld auf die Probe stellende Arbeit nicht
ausgehalten haben, wenn ich nicht eine wichtige Entdeckung
erwartet hätte. Die nivellierte Linie sollte das entscheidende Urteil
über das Lop-nor-Problem fällen. Ihr Profil würde zeigen, ob es
möglich oder unmöglich war, daß im nördlichen Teile der Wüste Lop
ein See gelegen hat.
Frühauf und gleich an die Arbeit, ist jetzt morgens die Losung.
Der Boden wurde heute günstiger. Die Jardang folgen nicht mehr
so dicht aufeinander und sind niedriger, wir brauchen nicht soviel zu
klettern. Aber Schneckenschalen sind allgemein, manchmal ist der
Boden von ihnen ganz weißgetüpfelt. Kleine Höcker auf der
Oberfläche abgerechnet, ist der Boden so eben wie ein Fußboden.
War diese Gegend für das Auge trostlos und einförmig, so war
sie für das Nivellement um so bequemer. Keine Hindernisse stellten
sich uns in den Weg; wir gingen in gerader Linie, rasch und ohne
Unterbrechung. Wenn das Fernrohr mit der Wasserwage eingestellt
ist und ich es um den Horizont führe, liegt dieser überall in genau
demselben Abstande von den horizontalen Fäden des
Fadenkreuzes.
Fünf Scharen Enten streichen gen Norden. Kutschuk vermutete
witzig, daß unsere Entsatzexpedition unter Tokta Ahun sie vom
Nordufer des Kara-koschun vertrieben habe. Wahrscheinlich ist, daß
die Enten sich im Winter an diesem See und im Sommer am
Bagrasch-köll aufhalten. Eine Eintagsfliege machte eine Runde um
uns und verschwand wie ein funkelnder Smaragd in südlicher
Richtung.
Während dieses Tages stiegen wir 2,763 Meter und befanden
uns 0,11 Meter höher als im Ausgangspunkte in Lôu-lan. Wir waren
mit anderen Worten auf 32 Kilometer Wegstrecke 11 Zentimeter
gestiegen! Schon in diesem Lager hatte ich also den Schlüssel des
Lop-nor-Problems gefunden. Die beiden ersten Tage waren wir
gefallen, den dritten gestiegen; wir hatten also eine deutliche
Depression überschritten, und diese ist es, die das ehemalige Bett
des Lop-nor repräsentiert. Das Resultat der Arbeit der folgenden
Tage würde auf diesen Schluß nicht mehr einwirken. Wir waren
durch ein Becken gegangen, gleichviel in welchem Niveau sich der
Kara-koschun im Verhältnis zum Ausgangspunkte befinden mochte;
und daß dieses Becken einst Wasser enthalten hatte, wurde durch
die Schneckenschalen und viele andere bereits erwähnte Umstände
bewiesen.
Mit dem Schlage 7 Uhr ertönte ein pfeifendes Brausen im
Nordosten, und ein paar Minuten später fuhr der schwarze Sturm mit
ungezügelter Wut über den Boden, der ihm nicht das geringste
Hindernis in den Weg stellte. Die Sonne war in außergewöhnlicher
Weise in dichten Wolken untergegangen, und der Tag war drückend
schwül gewesen. Alle notwendigen Vorsichtsmaßregeln wurden
getroffen, der Fixpunkt festgeschlossen, die Jurte gründlich
festgemacht, die Feuer ausgelöscht und, nachdem die Kamele mit
den Köpfen auf die vom Winde abgewandte Seite gebracht worden
waren, bereitete sich jeder auf das, was kommen sollte, vor; es
wurde still im Lager, und nur der Sturm heulte um uns herum. Der
Flugsand drang durch das Zelttuch; draußen war es stockfinster, und
keine Sterne waren zu sehen.
Jeden Abend um 9 Uhr stellte Schagdur das Kochthermometer,
das ich stets selbst ablas. Als er von meiner Jurte nach seinem
Schlafplatze neben der Küchengeschirr enthaltenden Kiste
zurückkehren wollte, fand er sich, trotzdem es nur 15 Schritte waren,
nicht zurecht und verirrte sich. Eine halbe Stunde später hörte ich
schwaches Rufen aus einer ganz anderen Richtung. Ich rief aus
vollem Halse, und Schagdur fand sich so nach der Jurte zurück. Er
war die ganze Zeit gekrochen, denn Stehen war unmöglich, und
pechfinster war es auf allen Seiten. Nur auf folgende Weise konnte
er seinen Platz finden; ich hielt eine kleine Spalte im Zelttuche offen,
und den Blick auf diese gerichtet, kroch er rückwärts, bis er bei der
Kiste anlangte. Wer nie einen solchen Sturm erlebt hat, kann sich
keinen Begriff davon machen. Man wird verdreht und will nur gehen,
immerzu gehen, weiß aber nicht, wohin der Weg führt; der Ortssinn
scheint gelähmt zu sein, man geht im Kreise, glaubt aber in gerader
Linie zu gehen. Es ist eine Art Wüstensturmkrankheit, die näher mit
der Platzkrankheit als mit See- und Bergkrankheit verwandt ist; sie
schlägt sich auf das Gehirn. Wäre Chodai Värdi von solch einem
Sturme überfallen worden, so wäre er verloren gewesen.
Am folgenden Morgen waren die Folgen des schwarzen Sturmes
deutlich erkennbar. Um meine Jurte hatte der Sand eine Ringdüne
gebildet, und auch hinter den Köpfen der Kamele hatten sich große
Sandhaufen gebildet. Sobald sich ein Hindernis im Wege des
Flugsandes erhebt, entstehen Dünen; sonst treibt er nach Westen.
Glücklicherweise hörte der Sturm um 11 Uhr auf, und wir konnten
nach Süden weiterziehen.
Die Wüste ist trostlos einförmig; der Boden besteht aus einem
Gemenge, das die Eingeborenen „Schor“ nennen. Sand, Staub, Kalk
und Salz, alles erstarrt und zu einer ziegelharten Masse
zusammengebacken. Das Salz ist manchmal in dünnen Schollen
abgesondert. Als das Wasser verschwunden war, scheint diese
Masse sich durch Austrocknen ausgedehnt zu haben, denn sie ist zu
unzähligen, nach allen möglichen Richtungen laufenden Wülsten
aufgesprungen; die Höhe dieser beträgt manchmal 75 Zentimeter.
Hier gibt es absolut keine Spur von vegetativem oder animalem
Leben, nicht einmal eine Schneckenschale. Es ist offenbar der
Boden eines Salzsees, und wir wissen auch, daß die Chinesen den
Lop-nor in alten Zeiten den „Salzsee“ genannt haben. Auch der
Kara-koschun hat abgeschnürte Teile, deren Wasser salzig ist, und
im Süden dieses Sees sieht der früher überschwemmte Boden
genau so aus wie hier — am südlichen Ufergebiete des alten Lop-
nor.
192. Lager mitten in der Sandwüste. (S. 22.)

193. Brunnen, in der letzten Oase gegraben. (S. 23.)
Die Steigung fährt fort, obgleich nur mit 0,644 Meter auf 11250
Meter. In dem heutigen Lager befanden wir uns also um 0,754 Meter
über dem Ausgangpunkte. Dies schien des Guten zuviel zu werden;
der Kara-koschun konnte doch nicht höher liegen als Lôu-lan! Alle
meine Gedanken und Grübeleien drehten sich um diese interessante
Nivellierungslinie. Die folgenden Tage, deren Verlauf ich mit
Spannung entgegensah, würden zeigen, ob wir nicht eine flache
Protuberanz oder Wasserscheide zwischen dem früheren und dem
jetzigen Seebecken zu passieren hatten.
15. März. Schor, den ganzen Tag Schor, tödlich einförmig! Kein
Gegenstand, auf den man das Fernrohr richten könnte, nichts, was
lockt, als die Sehnsucht, aus dieser langweiligen Wüste
herauszukommen!
Das Wetter jedoch war herrlich, und um 1 Uhr stieg die
Temperatur nur auf +11 Grad. Aber unsere Lage war insofern

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Dread How Fear and Fantasy Have

Fueled Epidemics from the Black Death

The Good Doctor s Guide to Colds and Flu Updated

Death, Burial, and the Afterlife: Dublin Death Studies

The Book of Minds How to Understand Ourselves and Other

Myths and Memories of the Black Death Dodds

Black Death Kenny Abdo

Fear of a Black Republic Haiti and the Birth of Black

Billy the Barbarian 1 The Heights of Dread An Isekai

Billy the Barbarian 1 The Heights of Dread An Isekai

Copyright © 2009 by Philip Alcabes

Hardcover first published in the United States by PublicAffairs™,

All rights reserved.

Designed by Trish Wilkinson

The Library of Congress catalogued the hardcover as follows:

Introduction to the Paperback Edition vii

Introduction The Origins of Dread 1

Chapter 1 The Sense of an Epidemic 7

Chapter 2 Plague: Birth of the Model Epidemic 21

Chapter 3 Cholera, Poverty, and the Politicized Epidemic 53

Chapter 4 Germs, Science, and the Stranger 83

Chapter 5 The Conquest of Contagion 119

Chapter 6 Postmodern Epidemics 143

Chapter 7 Managing the Imagined Epidemic 181

Epilogue The Risk-Free Life 215

A half-year after the hardcover publication of Dread, sleeves

viii INTRODUCTION TO THE PA PERBACK EDITION

INTRODUCTION TO THE PA PERBACK EDITION ix

x INTRODUCTION TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

INTRODUCTION TO THE PA PERBACK EDITION xi

cial authority to restrict liberties in the name of staving off epi-

xii INTRODUCTION TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

INTRODUCTION TO THE PA PERBACK EDITION xiii

xiv INTRODUCTION TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

THE ORIGINS OF DREAD

Death in it self is nothing; but we fear

E pidemics fascinate us. Look at all the ways we offer accounts of

epidemics, including Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, Camus’s The

THE ORIGINS OF DREAD 3

ties associated with motor-vehicle crashes. American teens and

the hospital where he was in isolation, and made the subject of a

THE ORIGINS OF DREAD 5

Epidemics often start with an outbreak of disease, but not always—

THE SENSE OF AN EPIDEMIC

And which of the gods was it that set them on to

S even years after an autumn 2001 epidemic of anthrax closed

The Axis of Evil, so-called nonstate actors like Al Qaeda, out-

THE SENSE OF AN EPIDEMIC 9

Harvard’s School of Public Health featured estimable researchers

twenty-two cases in the eastern United States in a two-month period

Pleurisies, peri-pneumonias, ardent fevers, and whatever diseases

THE SENSE OF AN EPIDEMIC 11

Hippocrates is celebrated by modern physicians as the father of

forth, and therefore were prone to establish themselves in certain

THE SENSE OF AN EPIDEMIC 13

Making an explicit connection between disease and pestilence,

Thucydides’ observation effectively hammers home the intensity of

THE SENSE OF AN EPIDEMIC 15

The connection between plague and epidemics traces to the story of

the mystifying fickleness of the spirit world but a divine work by a

THE SENSE OF AN EPIDEMIC 17

contamination, it could, according to the Levitical law, be cured.

At some point, the word “epidemic” appeared in Latin (epidemia) as