Global Health in a Semi-Globalized World: History of Infectious Diseases in the Medieval Period (2021)
The field of infectious disease history has been transformed in the past decade in large part because of fortuitous developments in several fields, most importantly genetics. The medieval period (ca. 500 to ca. 1500) has proved particularly important for these developments, not simply because it is now the earliest period from which whole genomes of several bacterial and viral pathogens have been retrieved, but also because the narratives that can be constructed about disease emergence and dissemination are most robust for this period. This essay briefly surveys the transformative work in molecular biology that has allowed reconstruction of the evolutionary histories of the main pathogens that have afflicted humankind. Then, using the example of plague, it shows why the evolutionary narratives of genetics yield information valuable to historians, and gives examples of the ways historical work has been transformed by combining the evidence from genetics with documentary evidence. The complementarity of material and cultural sources is especially fruitful for work employing the perspectives of global history. The essay concludes by arguing that infectious disease history from the pre-modern period can also be used to model the phenomena of emerging diseases in our own day, of which COVID-19 is only the most recent example. Hence, the urgency of bringing new methods of exploring disease history immediately into classrooms and public forums.
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