text:
“Invisible Little Worms”
Athanasius Kircher’s Study of the Plague
By John Glassie
April 22, 2020

Living through the devastating Italian plague of 1656, the great polymath Athanasius Kircher turned his ever-enquiring mind to the then mysterious disease, becoming possibly the first to view infected blood through a microscope. While his subsequent theories of spontaneous generation and “universal sperm” were easily debunked, Kircher’s investigation can be seen as an important early step to understanding
contagion, and perhaps even the very first articulation of germ theory. John Glassie explores.

I
The plague arrived in Naples in the spring of 1656 — along with a transport of soldiers from Sardinia. At the worst point that summer, thousands were dying there each day. Desperate and frightened citizens flocked in huge numbers to the churches to pray. According to one subsequent account, people “of the highest quality”, as well as the “disheveled”, and presumably the infected, all joined these “confused processions” with the horrific result that “the streets and the stairs of the churches were filled with the dead”.1 By the time it was over in August, as many as one hundred and fifty thousand of the city’s inhabitants had died.
Rome had responded to the news from Naples by policing the seaports and inspecting people and animals at the gates of the city. But by June the disease nevertheless sneaked inside, in this case via a fisherman off the boats at Nettuno. The fisherman was staying at a rooming house in the slums of Trastevere, just across the Tiber from Rome proper, when he began to feel ill. He died just days later, with what were called “evil signs”.2 Possibly these were the infected black buboes or bubones, from which the term bubonic plague is derived, swelling out as big as eggs or apples from under the armpits and from the groin. There may have been boils and abscesses, black or red carbuncles over the entire body, infected and full of pus, or toward the end, a blackening of the skin from hemorrhage. Perhaps he’d lost his senses completely, been vomiting violently, or coughing up bloody sputum.
By order of Rome’s Congregation of Health, soldiers built a wooden barrier around the Trastevere district overnight, shutting in everyone who lived on its narrow streets. Great chains were dropped across the waterways to keep ships from sailing up the Tiber. The city gates were closed. But it was only a short time before more cases were reported, not only in Trastevere but in the Jewish ghetto and other parts of Rome.
The plague was said to exist as a fetid miasma, or corruption of the air from putrid vapors. People thought that epidemics could be occasioned in the first place by celestial activity, a conjunction of malignant Mars with hot and humid Jupiter, for example. Other forms of corrupt air — due to decaying corpses, food, excrement, excessive humidity, stagnant water, emissions from volcanoes or other openings in the earth — could supposedly somehow combine or join with this miasma and make things worse. The poison was believed to stick to fabrics and hair and to penetrate the body through pores in the skin.3
To counteract it, people scrubbed floors and walls with vinegar; burned rosemary, cypress, and juniper; and rubbed oils and essences on their skin. The wealthy left for the country if they could. Vagrants were sent to prison or conscripted to help the sick and scrub the streets of filth. When members of middle-class households were found to be sick, their houses were quarantined, with families boarded up inside. The vast majority of the ill were taken where their exhalations could do the least harm, to quarantined pesthouses, also called lazarettos, after the biblical story of Lazarus — though if you went in, the chances of dying, and staying dead, were high. “Here you are overwhelmed by intolerable smells”, wrote a visitor to a Bologna lazaretto some years earlier. “Here you cannot walk but among corpses. Here you feel naught but the constant horror of death.”4
In late June, schools, courts, markets, and businesses were closed. A general lockdown of the city was ordered for forty days. Doctors walked the quiet streets in seventeenth-century versions of hazmat suits; their beaklike masks were stuffed with herbs and spices. People found violating health regulations or quarantines were jailed, or in many instances put to death. One thirteen-year-old girl, who had run out into the street after a chicken, was hanged, apparently as a lesson to others.
Although the epidemic continued for more than a year, many of these tactics did help prevent the spread of the disease. The effects of the plague in Rome were much less devastating than in Naples — only about fifteen thousand people died. But living through it was frightening. One figure who did: the fairly eccentric, extremely prolific Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher.
From his established place at the Collegio Romano, the flagship institution of his order in Rome, this energetic polymath had thrown himself into the study of just about everything, authoring magnificent seat-cushion-size books on subjects ranging from magnetism to music. During normal times, Kircher often toured distinguished visitors through his museum at the Collegio, where he not only displayed curiosities from around the world (amassed with the help of Jesuit missionaries), but also demonstrated his own magic lanterns, speaking statues, and, as legend has it, a single “cat piano”.
During the summer and fall of 1656, as Kircher remembered it, the “altogether horrid and unrelenting carnage” of Naples was on everyone’s mind, and “each man, out of dread for the ever-looming image of death, was anxiously and solicitously seeking an antidote that would ensure recovery from so fierce an evil.” A melancholic, literary man, he was supposed to be particularly susceptible to the effects of the plague. And yet the prospect of death can sometimes translate into increased ambition, if not a greater desire for immortality. This was the kind of person who pursued his interest in geological matters by lowering himself down into the smoking crater of Mount Vesuvius. So maybe it wasn’t surprising that Kircher would decide to take on the greatest public health challenge of the early modern world.
“In this state of affairs,” he recalled, “amidst the horrible silence of the sad city and in the deepest recess of solitude (for the entrance of the Roman College had been closed), I attempted with sluggish though necessary toil to develop the ideas that I had previously begun to conceive concerning the origin of the plague.”5
During the course of this study, Kircher would become one of the very first people in history to use the microscope to study disease. Perhaps the very first. And he would apply his findings to an argument that was either ancient or brand new, or both, depending on how one looked at it, or the century from which one looked.
II
As his encyclopedic tome Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (The Great Art of Light and Shadow), published in 1645, makes clear, Kircher had been experimenting with lenses and optics for many years prior to Rome’s epidemic. At almost a thousand pages, the volume was meant to provide readers with all they could possibly want to know about light, color, vision, and related matters, and along with instructions for making sundials and projecting images with mirrors, it included a description of what he called a smicroscopus. (Among earlier mentions of the microscope in print, Galileo had written about the use of a telescope adjusted to see things close up. He’d made a gift of one to the experiment-minded members of the Academy of the Lynx-eyed in Rome, who in turn had published descriptions and images of magnified bees. The Linceans, as the members were called, may have been the source of Kircher’s device.)
Kircher’s microscope at that time was perhaps not much more than a short tube with a magnifying lens, or a combination of lenses, fitted inside. But he claimed in The Great Art of Light and Shadow to have seen “mites that suggested hairy bears”6 and minute organisms in cheese, vinegar, and milk. If the living forms that can be seen through a microscope are “so tiny that they are beyond the reach of the senses,” he wondered in later years, “how tiny can their little hearts be? How tiny must their little livers be, or their little stomachs, their cartilage and little nerves, their means of locomotion?”7
The polymath gave readers an update of sorts on his work with the microscope in 1658, in his subsequent book about the plague — Scrutinium Physico-Medicum Contagiosae Luis, Quae Pestis Dicitur.  (The English translation, A Physico-Medical Examination of the Contagious Pestilence Called the Plague, is often shortened to Examination of the Plague.)
It is “generally known that worms grow from foul corpses”, Kircher wrote in that volume. “But since the use of that remarkable discovery, the smicroscopus, or the so-called magnifying glass, it has been shown that everything putrid is filled with countless masses of small worms, which could not be seen with the naked eye and without lenses.”8
It’s important to say here that for many centuries, spontaneous generation was everyday doctrine. Most people simply assumed that small creatures such as flies, ants, and even frogs and snakes, grew from nonliving matter, preferably swampy or putrescent or excremental. Who could deny, for example, that maggots appeared on rotting meat? And plenty of the old authorities had agreed. Pliny held that insects originated from rotten milk and flesh, as well as from fruit, dew, and rain. Ovid, Plutarch, Virgil, and others believed that bees were born from the dung of bulls. Aristotle believed in spontaneous generation from living matter as well, contending that cabbages engendered caterpillars.9
Kircher explained that he’d performed an entire series of “experiments” related to this apparent phenomenon which he invited readers (with access to a similar instrument) to try. For example:
Take a piece of meat, and at night leave it exposed to the lunar moisture until the following day. Then examine it carefully with a microscope and you will find that all the prutridity drawn from the moon has been transformed into numberless little worms of different sizes, which in the absence of the microscope you will be unable to detect . . .
The same basic thing happens, he said, if you take a bowl of water sprinkled with dirt from the ground and expose it to the sun for a few days: “You will see . . . certain vesicles which are quickened into exceedingly minute worms”, which eventually become “a vast number of winged gnats.”
It also happens “if you cut a snake into little pieces, soak them in rain water, expose them for some days to the sun, bury them for a whole day and night in the earth, and then, when they are soft with putridity, examine them with a microscope” — except here what you see is the decaying mess swarming with little “snakes”.10
Based on these “incontrovertible experiments”, there was really no doubt in his mind about what he thought he knew: that tiny lower creatures grew from the decay of other living things. And it occurred to him that, at least as he and everyone else believed, the plague also arose from decay and putridity.
It was with this in mind that, on several occasions, Kircher examined the blood of plague sufferers under his microscope. “The putrid blood of those affected by fevers has fully convinced me”, he wrote. “I have found it, an hour or so after letting, so crowded with worms as to well nigh dumbfound me.” His assertion: “Plague is in general a living thing”.
The arguments in Examination of the Plague are hard to follow, but something called panspermia, or universal sperm, was certainly involved: Kircher believed that “seeds of a vegetative and sentient nature” are “scattered everywhere among the elemental bodies”, and that decomposing matter acted as a kind of fertilizer or necessary ingredient for the generation of new forms. In the case of the plague, he suggested that when the tiny semina, or seeds, or “corpuscles”, that emanate from all natural things become corrupted by putrescence, they become the minute carriers of the disease. “Corpuscles of this kind are commonly nonliving”, he explained, “but through the agency of ambient heat already tainted with a similar pollution, they are transformed into a brood of countless invisible little worms.”
According to Kircher, these “propagators of the plague” are “so small, so light, so subtle, that they elude any grasp of perception and can only be seen under the most powerful microscope.” Therefore, they “are easily forced out through all the passages and pores” of plague victims’ bodies and of the sick and “are moved by even the faintest breath of air, just like so many dust particles in the sun.” They are then “drawn through the breath and through the sweat pores of the body, from which later such fearful symptoms and effects result.”11
Over the next several years, Kircher took his theorizing to new levels; in his view, universal sperm was essentially the life force. But his beliefs, at least about spontaneous generation, were rather humiliatingly debunked in 1668 by a physician in the Medici court named Francesco Redi. In his Esperienze Intorno alla Generazione degl’Insetti (Experiments on the Generation of Insects), Redi describes one of the very first controlled experiments ever documented: “I put a snake, some fish, some eels of Arno, and a slice of milk-fed veal in four large, wide-mouthed flasks; having well closed and sealed them, I then filled the same number of flasks in the same way, only leaving these open.”12
Maggots soon began to appear on the flesh in the open containers, but not in the closed ones. He experimented with a number of variations, sometimes covering the flasks with “a fine Naples veil”, but no maggots or worms or anything at all ever appeared inside the covered containers. He also dutifully followed Kircher’s instructions for breeding bees in the dung of an ox, for breeding scorpions in dead scorpions, and for breeding flies in dead flies. He never had any luck. With no insects appearing in closed flasks, Redi was convinced that “no animal of any kind is ever bred in dead flesh unless there be a previous egg deposit.”13
That was really all it took to to disprove an age-old notion about the genesis of lower forms of life. Redi referred to Kircher somewhat patronizingly as “a man of worthy esteem”, but it had never occurred to Kircher to regulate his experiments this way — to put a lid, as it were, on his container. Just a few years later Redi published another set of findings; this time they exposed Kircher’s gullibility about the healing powers of something called the snakestone.
III
In 1932, C. Clifford Dobell, a leading biologist with a specialty in protozoology, described Examination of the Plague as “a farrago of nonsensical speculation by a man possessed of neither scientific acumen nor medical instinct”.14 But many others have credited Kircher with a major discovery. In the words of another twentieth-century medical authority, Kircher “was undoubtedly the first to state in explicit terms the doctrine of ‘contagium vivum’ as the cause of infectious disease”15 — in other words, that Kircher discovered microorganisms and was the first to propose the germ theory of contagion.
If that’s true, however, then his articulation of germ theory was predicated on notions no modern scientist would be caught dead advancing. Besides, the concept of universal seeds went back to the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras, and the idea that disease is living turns out to be both ancient and mystical. (Today, by the way, although bacteria — like the kind that cause the plague — are understood to be living organisms, viruses — like Covid-19 — are not considered to be “alive”.)
A lot of what Kircher wrote about disease came from Lucretius, the disciple of Epicurus from whom Pierre Gassendi got his modern-sounding ideas about atoms. In his epic poem, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), Lucretius wrote that “there are many seeds of things which support life, and on the other hand there must be many flying about which make for disease and death.” They can come “down through the sky like clouds and mists, or often they gather together and rise from the earth itself, when through dampness it has become putrescent.”16
Among other sources, Kircher also borrowed heavily from, but doesn’t cite, a sixteenth-century writer most famous for a verse treatise called Syphilis, or the French Disease. (Understandably, no one wanted to take the credit for syphilis, which reached epidemic proportions during his time — to Muslims, it was the disease of the Christians, to the English it was the French pox, to the French it was the Neapolitan disease, and to the Italians it was of Spanish origin.) The author, a physician from Verona named Fracastoro, worked out a theory of contagion involving transmission of “imperceptible particles”, infected and self-propagating, that he called seminaria, or “seedbeds”, sometimes translated as “germs”.17
What did Kircher actually see when he examined the blood of plague patients? He claimed his microscope made “everything appear a thousand times larger than it really is”, but he didn’t mean that literally. It’s not possible that he saw plague bacilli, which are one six-hundredth of a millimeter long. Even if he employed a form of compound microscope (which consists of a series of lenses), any organic specimen might have looked like a mass of tiny worms.
And yet most of Kircher’s readers had never looked through a microscope at all. Only one or two treatises on the subject had ever been published, and Examination of the Plague caused a kind of sensation within the network of scholars and philosophers known as the Republic of Letters. A doctor in Dresden compared Kircher’s brilliance to the shining of the sun. An anatomy professor in Jena informed Kircher that “the reputation of things Kircherian” had “spread through all of Europe”. In thanks for his copy of the book, a missionary in New Spain sent Kircher chocolate and peppers “that have the name of Chile”.18
Eventually, whether or not Examination of the Plague hit upon one of the core tenets of epidemiology, it did inspire a great deal of experimentation with the microscope, and it influenced thinking that in turn led to (actual?) discoveries about the way disease is spread. You might therefore say that the epidemic of 1656, itself, led to such discoveries, although the gains came at a monstrously heavy price.
One final note: Kircher’s eager readers may have been under the incorrect assumption that he had something to do with stemming the plague in Rome. And on the question of prevention and cure he did provide his considered opinion, but this one can’t be mistaken for an early expression of modern medical thought: he believed that, short of leaving the area, an amulet made of the flesh of a toad, or of dried toad powder, and worn over the heart, was probably the best antidote.19
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: John Glassie


text:
Petrarch’s Plague
Love, Death, and Friendship in a Time of Pandemic
By Paula Findlen
June 11, 2020

The Italian poet and scholar Francesco Petrarch lived through the most deadly pandemic in recorded history, the Black Death of the 14th century, which saw up to 200 million die from plague across Eurasia and North Africa. Through the unique record of letters and other writings Petrarch left us, Paula Findlen explores how he chronicled, commemorated, and mourned his many loved ones who succumbed, and what he might be able to teach us today.

What will we remember of this year of COVID-19 and how will we recall it? In 1374, during the final year of a long and interesting life, the Italian humanist and poet Francesco Petrarch observed that his society had lived with “this plague, without equal in all the centuries”, for over twenty-five years.1 His fortune and misfortune had been to outlast so many friends and family who perished before him, many of them from this devastating disease.
One of the most eloquent voices of his time, Petrarch spoke on behalf of an entire generation of plague survivors, following the pandemic of 1346–53 and its periodic return. He skillfully wielded his pen to express his society’s collective grief in the most personal and meaningful ways, acknowledging the effect of so much pain and loss. In the immediate aftermath of the particularly devastating year of 1348, when plague engulfed the Italian peninsula, his good friend Giovanni Boccaccio in his Decameron sketched an indelible portrait of young Florentines fleeing their plague-ridden city to wait out the storm by telling one hundred tales. For his part, Petrarch documented the experience of plague over several decades, probing its changing effects on his psyche. The Black Death sharpened his sense of the sweetness and fragility of life in the face of the endemic reality of disease that came in so many different forms. He had big questions and was in search of answers.
“The year of 1348 left us alone and helpless”, Petrarch declared at the very beginning of his Familiar Letters, his great project to share carefully selected versions of correspondence with friends.2 What was the meaning of life after so much death? Had it transformed him, or for that matter anyone, for the better? Could love and friendship survive plague? Petrarch’s questions allowed his readers to explore how they, too, felt about these things. He gave them permission to express such sentiments, indeed took up the burden, which was also his literary opportunity, to articulate the zeitgeist.
Petrarch was famously a self-professed wanderer who rarely stayed in one place very long. He alternated between periods of self-imposed isolation in the countryside and full immersion in the life of cities, even during the worst outbreaks of disease. This mobility made him an especially unique observer of how plague became a pandemic. At the end of November 1347, one month after Genoese ships brought plague to Messina, Petrarch was in Genoa. Disease spread rapidly by land and sea — through rats and fleas, though at the time it was believed to be a product of the corruption of the air. Petrarch’s awareness of the course of this pandemic comes through clearly in a letter written from Verona on April 7, 1348, when he refused the invitation of a Florentine relative to return to his native Tuscany, citing “the plague of this year which has trampled and destroyed the entire world, especially along the coast”.3
Returning several days later to Parma, still a plague-free zone, Petrarch learned that his relative the poet Franceschino degli Albizzi, on his way back from France, had died in the Ligurian port of Savona. Petrarch cursed the toll that “this pestilential year” was now exacting.4 He understood that the plague was spreading, yet perhaps this was the first time that the escalating mortality struck close to home. “I had not considered the possibility of his being about to die”.5 Plague now touched him personally.
As the year progressed, Petrarch felt increasingly surrounded by fear, sorrow, and terror. Death came suddenly and repeatedly. In June, a friend who came to dinner was dead by morning, followed by the rest of the family in a matter of days. In the poem “To Himself”, an effort to capture the strangeness of this experience, Petrarch imagined a future that would not understand how awful it had been to be alive in “a city full of funerals” and empty homes.6
Petrarch talked of retreating from the plague-infested cities with his closest friends. After bandits attacked two of them as they traveled from France into Italy, murdering one, nothing came of it. Perhaps the survivors recognized the folly of an idealistic plan that simply did not fit their dispersed circumstances. In July 1348, Petrarch’s most important patron, Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, died of plague, along with many members of this distinguished Roman family whom he served in Avignon. The poet was now out of a job, more restless and unmoored than ever.
Petrarch deeply mourned the “absence of friends”.7 Friendship was his joy and his sorrow. He compensated for this loss by writing eloquent letters to the living as well as rereading his favorite missives to the deceased, preparing the best ones for publication. In an era of almost instantaneous communication via email, phone, and social media, it is easy to forget how important correspondence was as a technology to bridge social distance. Letters, as Petrarch’s ancient Roman hero Cicero famously declared, made the absent present.8
The act of correspondence could also, of course, bring anguish. Petrarch worried about whether friends were still alive if they did not respond quickly. “Free me from these fears as soon as possible by a letter from you”, Petrarch encouraged one of his closest friends, nicknamed Socrates (the Flemish Benedictine monk and cantor Ludwig van Kempen), in September 1348.9 He fretted that “the contagiousness of the recurring plague as well as the unhealthy air” might precipitate another untimely death.10 Communication may not have been swift but it was nonetheless effective and, ultimately, reassuring.
At the end of this awful year, Petrarch predicted that anyone who escaped the first assault should prepare for the viciousness of plague’s return. This was an astute and ultimately accurate observation. During the following year, Petrarch continued to enumerate plague victims as well as the cumulative effects of quarantine and depopulation. He wrote a poem commemorating the tragic death of Laura, a woman he had known and loved in southern France, only to discover that the person to which he’d sent the poem, the Tuscan poet Sennuccio del Bene, later died of plague as well, making Petrarch wonder if his words bore the contagion. Another sonnet was required. The act of writing, which had initially been impossibly painful, began to elevate his spirits. Life had become cruel and death unrelenting but he compensated by taking pen in hand — the only useful weapon he had besides prayer and the one he preferred. Others advised flight and proposed temporary public health measures such as quarantine, but Petrarch seems to have felt that he might think and write his way through this pandemic.
Everywhere he traveled, Petrarch observed the absence of people in the cities, the fields that lay fallow in the countryside, the disquiet of this “afflicted and nearly deserted world”.11  By March 1349, he found himself in Padua. He was dining with the bishop one evening when two monks arrived with reports of a plague-ridden French monastery. The prior had shamefully fled and all but one of the thirty-five remaining monks were dead. This was how Petrarch discovered that his younger brother Gherardo, now celebrated for his courage and caring, was the sole survivor of this pestilential holocaust. The hermitage in Méounes-lès-Montrieux, which Petrarch visited in 1347 and wrote about in his work On Religious Leisure still exists today. He immediately wrote Gherardo to express fraternal pride in having a plague hero in the family.
In October 1350, Petrarch moved on to Florence and it was here that he first met Boccaccio. By this time the city was no longer the epicenter of the pandemic, but its effects were still tangible, like a raw wound, or more accurately a lanced yet still pustulating bubo, that had not yet healed. Boccaccio was in the midst of drafting the Decameron. Although there is no record of the two writers discussing how to write about plague, we do know that Boccaccio avidly consumed Petrarch’s poetry and prose, copying lengthy passages in his notebooks at many different moments throughout a long friendship that lasted until their deaths one year apart. It was Petrarch’s early plague writing that spurred Boccaccio to complete his own take on how 1348 became the year their world changed.
Around 1351, Petrarch began to memorialize those whom he loved and lost by inscribing his recollections of them on the pages of a much-treasured possession — his copy of Virgil’s works adorned with a beautiful frontispiece by the Sienese painter Simone Martini. He began this practice of commemoration by recording the death — from three years earlier, in 1348 — of his beloved Laura, the subject of so many of his poems. Petrarch resolved to use every ounce of his eloquence to make her eternally present in his poetry but also in his Virgil. On its flyleaf, he inscribed these unforgettable words: “I decided to write down the harsh memory of this painful loss, and I did so, I suppose, with a certain bitter sweetness, in the very place that so often passes before my eyes”. He did not want to forget the searing pain of this moment that awakened his soul and sharpened his consciousness of the passage of time. Boccaccio was among Petrarch’s friends who wondered if Laura ever existed outside of his poetic imagination, but he never questioned Petrarch’s determination to remember that year as transformative.
Among the other inscriptions in Petrarch’s Virgil — now held by the Ambrosian Library in Milan — is notice of the death of his twenty-four-year-old son Giovanni on July 10, 1361 in Milan, “in that publicly ruinous though unusual outbreak of plague, one that found and fell upon that city, which up to that point had been immune to such evils”. Spared the devastation of the first wave of plague, Milan — where Petrarch had been living since 1353 — became the focal point of a second pandemic in 1359–63. By 1361, Petrarch had left for Padua, but his son stubbornly chose to remain behind.
In 1361, following his son’s death, Petrarch once again took up his pen. He began his Letters of Old Age, as he called his second collection of correspondence, with a letter to a Florentine friend Francesco Nelli bemoaning the loss of his beloved friend Socrates in that year. Socrates had been the person who informed Petrarch of Laura’s passing, and Petrarch added a note in his copy of Virgil about this latest plague death to pierce his heart. In his Letters of Old Age, he wrote: “I had complained that the year 1348 of our era had deprived me of nearly every consolation in life because of my friends’ deaths. Now what shall I do in the sixty-first year of this century?”12 Petrarch observed that the second pandemic was worse, nearly emptying out Milan and many other cities. He was now determined to write in a different voice, no longer lamenting but actively combatting fortune’s adversity.
During this second pandemic, Petrarch launched a fierce critique of the role that astrologers played in explaining plague’s return and predicting its course. He considered their self-proclaimed truths to be largely accidental: “Why do you feign futile prophecies after the fact or call chance truths?”13 He chastised friends and patrons who revisited their horoscopes, considering them a false science predicated on the misuse of astronomical data.
As plague spread through the urban centres, a physician friend encouraged the poet to flee to the country air of Lake Maggiore, but Petrarch refused to succumb to terror. Remaining in cities, he began to spend the bulk of his time between Padua and Venice. When plague reached the Venetian Republic, friends renewed their entreaties, leading Petrarch to comment: “it has very often happened that a flight from death is a flight to death”.14 Boccaccio came to visit and decided not to tell him of their mutual friend Nelli’s demise, leaving Petrarch to discover his most recent loss when letters returned, unopened.
Plague returned to Florence with a vengeance in the summer of 1363. In this heightened atmosphere of renewed anxiety, Petrarch redoubled his criticisms of astrologers who deluded the living with predictions of when the latest pandemic would end. An anxious populace hung on their every word. “We do not know what is happening in the heavens”, he fumed in a letter to Boccaccio in September, “but impudently and rashly they profess to know”.15 A pandemic was a business opportunity for astrologers who peddled their words to “parched minds and thirsty ears”.16 Petrarch was hardly alone in pointing out that the astrologers’ conclusions had no basis in astronomical data or the spread of disease. They sold false hope and certainty in the marketplace. Petrarch longed for a more reasoned response to pandemic with better tools than the science of the stars.
What then of medicine? Petrarch was famously skeptical about physicians who claimed too much certainty and authority. He believed that physicians, like everyone else, needed to acknowledge their own ignorance as a first step towards knowing anything. Ignorance itself was “pestiferous” — a disease to be rooted out and eradicated even if there was no vaccine.17 While professing great respect for the art of healing, he had no patience with what he slyly dubbed “pestilential incompetence” in his Invectives against the Physician.18 Plague alone did not reveal medicine’s failure but it brought its limits into stark relief.
Petrarch befriended some of the most famous physicians of his age and stubbornly debated their advice regarding his own health as he aged. “When today I see young and healthy doctors falling ill and dying everywhere, what do you tell others to hope for?”19 Petrarch expressed this sentiment in a letter to the famous Paduan physician and inventor Giovanni Dondi upon hearing of the premature death of the Florentine physician Tommaso del Garbo in 1370. Del Garbo wrote one of the most important plague treatises of the fourteenth century, dedicated to preserving the health and well-being his fellow Florentines after his experience of the first pandemic. Ultimately, he succumbed to this disease.
In the end, physicians were as human as anyone else; their learning did not confer any greater immortality on them or their patients. Petrarch continued to live, following some but not all of the medical advice he received, especially for the discomforts of scabies, a skin ailment he described as quite the opposite of “a brief and fatal illness” such as plague — “I am afraid that it is a long and tiring one”.20 Although he did not believe that medicine had any special powers of salvation, he respected the combination of learning, experience, caring, and humility that were the hallmarks of the best medical practitioners. Like his brother Gherardo, who cared with faith rather than medicine, and unlike the astrologers, who manipulated data to fulfill their prognostications, good honest doctors were also his plague heroes.
Writing from Venice in December 1363, Petrarch noted some flattening of the curve where he was but did not think the plague had ended elsewhere. “Still it rages widely and horribly” he wrote.21 Offering a vivid portrait of a city unable to bury its dead or properly mourn, he observed the latest tragedy but no longer openly grieved. It seems he was learning to live with plague.
In 1366, Petrarch brought to conclusion his Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul, which included a dialogue about plague. “I dread the plague”, proclaims Fear, ventriloquizing the escalating anxiety about this “omnipresent danger”.22 Petrarch’s Reason pragmatically observed that fear of plague is “nothing but a fear of death”.23 In a moment of dark humor, he joked that it was better to die in so much good company during a pandemic than to die alone. As for the survivors, Petrarch could not resist pointing out how many of them were undeserving of their good fortune. The good perished while “this vermin, so hardy that no plague, not death itself can exterminate them”,24 endured. No one said plague meted out death with any justice.
A year later, in 1367, Petrarch returned to Verona — the place where he’d joyfully rediscovered Cicero’s lost letters in a monastic library in happier times, and where he’d heard of Laura’s death, so many years ago. The city had suffered greatly during the second pandemic but there were signs of revival underway. Nonetheless, he could not say in all honesty that Verona, or indeed any city that he knew, was as magnificent and prosperous as it had been before 1348. The medieval Italian communes were economic powerhouses whose business dealings traversed the entirety of Eurasia but this prosperity was imperiled. Once again, he found himself thinking about how his world had changed — and not only because of plague. War, politics, the decline of commerce, the sorry state of the church, earthquakes, bitterly cold winters, and general lawlessness were also to blame. He saw the late medieval economy contract, observing the rippling effects far beyond his own world. As he wrote in a letter reflecting on the twenty years since the 1348 outbreak, “I shall admit that I know not what is happening among the Indians and Chinese, but Egypt and Syria and all of Asia Minor show no more increase in wealth and no better lot than we do”.25
Petrarch knew that “plague” was a word of great antiquity, but he considered the experience of “a universal plague that was to empty the world” to be new and unheralded.26 He also understood that plague “really does not disappear anywhere”.27 It had been a twenty-year scourge. He composed this anniversary letter for one of his few remaining childhood friends, Guido Sette, who was archbishop of Genoa. By the time the courier reached Genoa, Sette was no longer alive to read his words. Once again, Petrarch’s pen seemed to foretell the end of another of life’s chapters.
In the spring and summer of 1371, plague returned to the Venetian Republic. Petrarch rebuffed further invitations to escape the maelstrom. He acknowledged how dangerous the cities had become again, in the “jaws of a plague, raging far and wide”, but he had found “a very pleasant, healthful place” from which he would not budge.28 By then Petrarch had retired to the house he built in the picturesque hill town of Arquà (today known as Arquà Petrarca, not far from the COVID-19 hotspot of the Veneto), just south of Padua. Even the impending approach of war did not deter his resolve to remain in the home where he spent his remaining years with family, writing letters to friends and perfecting his collection of poems, nominally in honor of Laura’s memory but also about the nature of time and mortality.
In this bucolic setting, Petrarch continued to receive unhappy news from plague-ridden Italy. Another childhood friend, the papal legate Philippe de Cabassoles, passed shortly after they exchanged letters reaffirming the power of their lengthy friendship. Petrarch once again recorded this loss in the pages of his Virgil. In October 1372, he wrote a letter to his physician friend Dondi consoling him on “sickness and deaths in your family”.29
Petrarch never explained what finally led him to acknowledge in 1373 that he had read his dear friend Boccaccio’s Decameron (completed twenty years earlier). He claimed that a copy mysteriously arrived at his doorstep, yet it seems impossible to believe that he had not known this work until then. Petrarch declared that he skimmed rather than imbibed the Decameron: “If I were to say I have read it, I would be lying, since it is very big, having been written for the common herd and in prose”.30 No one should believe this disingenuous dismissal of the defining book of his generation. It was a joke between two great writers.
Petrarch forgave the author’s moral lapses in the most salacious tales because he appreciated the seriousness of its message, about how human failings — greed, lust, arrogance, and the corruption of church and state — helped to incubate a pestilential world. He especially praised the book’s beginning, admiring the magnificent perfection of Boccaccio’s vivid description of Florence under siege during “that plague-ridden time”. Petrarch paid his friend the ultimate compliment by translating the final tale (regarding the patience and fortitude of a young peasant woman named Griselda married to an arrogant nobleman who tested her in every possible way) from Tuscan into Latin to make it more widely available to readers unfamiliar with the author’s native language. “I have told your story in my own words”.31 Yet in some sense, Petrarch had been doing this ever since 1348 by collecting his own plague tales, finding different ways to express the full spectrum of emotions that this disease evoked.
When plague returned in 1374 to Bologna (where Petrarch had studied in his youth), he encouraged his friend Pietro da Moglio to flee and join him in Arquà. The famous rhetoric professor declined, citing Petrarch himself as his inspiration to remain in place. In response, Petrarch observed:
“Many are fleeing, everyone is fearful, you are neither — splendid, magnificent! For what is more foolish than to fear what you cannot avoid by any strategy, and what you aggravate by fearing? What is more useless than to flee what will always confront you wherever you may flee?”32
Nonetheless, he wished for his friend’s companionship in the “wholesome air” of Arquà, without promising that it would remain a sanctuary.33 Echoing the predominant understanding of plague as an illness spread by the corruption of the elements that produced miasmas of disease, Petrarch remarked that air was “a treacherous, unstable element”.34
Petrarch died in July 1374, but not of plague, having finally succumbed to various ailments that tormented him in his final years. In his will he left 50 gold florins to his physician friend Dondi for the purchase of “a small finger-ring to be worn in my memory”,35 and 50 florins to Boccaccio “for a winter coat for his studies and night-time scholarly work”.36 Boccaccio would outlive his friend by little more than a year, passing away in December 1375, probably from heart and liver failure.
Petrarch’s writings — in both form and content — would go on to greatly influence fifteenth and sixteenth-century Italian literature, history, and philosophy, and the Italian Renaissance in general (indeed some have described him as the “father of the Renaissance” for articulating so eloquently why antiquity mattered for his own times). Today, in the midst of a pandemic, it is his engagement around the effects of plague which resonates most acutely, as may also have occurred during other disease-ridden periods since the fourteenth century, when readers rediscovered Petrarch’s plague letters, dialogue, and poetry. Revisiting Petrarch in these months has made me wonder how we will remember 2020, a year in which disease once again connects many different parts of the world. Our family and friends do indeed create a strangely personal landscape of pandemic but we also bear witness to the larger forces at work that created our moment. Who will write its story?
Fourteenth-century Italy was the first society to document in great detail the experience of a disease that transformed their world. By contrast, Thucydides’ description of the Athens plague in 430 BCE takes up only one chilling passage. Petrarch allows us to see not just what but also how people thought about disease. He astutely recognized the importance of having this public conversation, and through his dedication to recording his reflections, and eliciting them from others, he left a rich documentary record that we can still benefit from today. I find myself wondering about the nature of the record we’ll leave behind of this time. Our archives, though they’ll no doubt be extensive, are unlikely to capture how we interact and communicate with each other in private, on Zoom for example, the way that Petrarch’s letters managed to do.
Some things, of course, we do better today. In general, we resist disease better than people did in Petrarch’s time — the direct result of better diet, sanitary living conditions, modern hygiene and medical innovation. Nonetheless, the uneven experience of COVID-19 has exposed persistent vulnerabilities that we ignore at our peril. The cruelty of the disease has been to strike certain places, certain families, particular groups of friends and communities, and the medical profession caring for them especially hard. We need to learn how to handle this kind of sudden loss. We need to come to terms with its differential impact on all of us. And we should probably be prepared for more. Petrarch might observe that the premodern experience of disease has never entirely gone away.
So many people whom Petrarch knew well, who defined the inner fabric of his world, died in successive waves of plague. An awareness of human mortality was hardwired into his consciousness in a way that it is not for most living today — at least those privileged to enjoy relative health and prosperity, and a life free of all but the minimum of violence, which, of course, is not true for all. Petrarch used his considerable literary talents to capture the essence of this experience. His understanding of the value of love and friendship intensified because of plague, becoming richer and deeper because everything was so imperiled. The dead did not vanish as long as he kept them alive. In a far more personal and affecting way than his friend Boccaccio, he transformed the losses that plague inflicted indiscriminately on friends and family into works of art that still inspire. Had he lived through the AIDS crisis, Petrarch would have understood why a generation responded by making art, film, poetry, and novels as an expression of their pain and anger, and to ensure that the dead were not forgotten.
There is a moral resiliency to his message worth remembering as the first wave of COVID-19 subsides. Petrarch never once offered any reassurances that things would get better. Instead, he responded creatively and thoughtfully to unexpected challenges, assuming that they would end neither quickly nor easily. His words, echoing across a chasm of more than six hundred years, continue to seek an audience. Amidst our own anxieties about what the future might hold, his is a voice from the past, speaking to posterity, challenging us to be creative in our own response to a time of pandemic.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Paula Findlen

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Black America, 1895

By Dorothy Berry
February 24, 2021

During the summer of 1895, in a Brooklyn park, there was a cotton plantation complete with five hundred Black workers reenacting slavery. Dorothy Berry uncovers the bizarre and complex history of Black America, a theatrical production which revealed the conflicting possibilities of self-expression in a racist society.

Acres of white cotton and a hundred wooden cabins housing five hundred Black workers. Cotton is picked from the stalk and brought over to a humming cotton gin. Women on porches chat over chores, while keeping an eye on wandering children. The local preacher extols repentance to a backslider, and folks sing hymns in rare moments of leisure.
What sounds like a South Carolina plantation in 1845 is also, in this case, a New York City exposition in 1895. Black America, which took place between Brooklyn’s Third Avenue and Thirty-Seventh Street (then Ambrose Park), was a combination slavery cosplay, ethnographic exhibition, Black performance review, and all-around spectacle. Ticket holders were purchasing a full day’s worth of entertainment. For twenty-five cents (a dollar for box seats in the arena), attendees entered an Ambrose Park transformed, at a cost to the organizers of a stated $13,000 a week ($400,000 in today’s money).1 Before the performances, which changed weekly, visitors were free to walk around a recreation of the plantation life imagined in sentimental minstrel songs.
Over a hundred cabins were built to form the Renaissance Faire style village, which housed more than five hundred Black performers, who traveled north to playact slavery.2 Reviewers fixed on the Southern performers’ authenticity. Lou Parker, a hiring agent for the production, was reported to have “spent the greater part of the winter traveling through the South selecting the talent, and declares that for every one he engaged he rejected at least nine”.3 The Black performers themselves tempered this commitment to historical realism: living in cabins for the multi-week production, they added placards expressing their own identities, like “Pilgrims from Savannah”, “Four Little Atlanta Girls”, “The Eighth Ward Club of Philadelphia”, and “Home of the Tar Heelers”.
Beyond the cabins lay an ersatz cotton field, ingeniously manufactured from real cotton plant stalks, with cotton fluff loosely attached by wire, and a functioning cotton gin.4 One strains to imagine the complicated feelings of the formerly enslaved picking cotton for show. With a production of this scale, there may have been current share-croppers who found they were making better (and easier) money plucking cotton from faux plants. This live-action roleplay of plantation life created a dangerous form of cognitive dissonance. A built-in assumption of the Northern production was that Black people were moving toward a form of modern twentieth-century respectability (defined entirely in White terms). Yet the ease and leisure of the enslaved performance erased the cruelty and inhumanity of slavery.
This was a plantation of five hundred workers, with no whips, no overseers, no selling of mother from child, husband from wife. They were all dressed in new, matching outfits, “white straw hats [for] the men and the red bandannas [for] the women”.5 Reviewers praised the authenticity of this self-managed plantation, writing:
We see the negro as he is supposed to be in the South, and there are said to be none but Southern negroes employed in the exhibition. There is no burlesque in Black America. Everything that is seen represents part of the daily life of the Southern negro.6
Designed to show the folkloricized roots of American Blackness, the exposition’s setting — physically situating headline performances behind the plantation scene — played into the ethnographic racial science that educated White Northerners used to elide their racism. Much like the “ethnographic displays” of authentic Dahomean villages at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago two years earlier, which W. E. B. Du Bois countered in his curation of “The Exhibit of American Negroes” at the Exposition Universelle in Paris five years later, the plantation was presented as edutainment.
This perception of Black America as an educational production with entertainment value was repeated again and again by critics who gave praise like “it is a show for intelligent people rather than for the crowds who usually frequent open air and popular seaside resorts.“7 Reviewers assured potential audience members that this was nothing like the Blackface shows they were used to:
If there are still people who have stayed away from this entertainment under the impression that it was a sort of black minstrel show, they should correct that idea right away. No such music has been heard north of the old Mason and Dixon line before, and after this fortnight we shall have no chance to hear it again this side of Virginia.8
While there may have been singing on the faux plantation, the real show took place in the outdoor amphitheater that opened after visitors had a chance to explore Southern life in situ. The list of performances is too long to recount, and weekly changes in the line-up invited visitors to return again and again. There were jugglers, acrobats, equestrians, comedians, soloists, foot-races, Othellins, jockeys, skaters, cakewalks and mammoth choruses of hundreds.9 Although many Black performers in New York were, at this time, developing urban musical styles that reflected their experiences, these imported performers were deemed by the public to be truly Black and representative of a uniquely Southern authenticity.
Historians often present the gradual shift in African American popular performance — from the racial characterization of offensive Blackface minstrelsy archetypes to radical representations of Black authenticity in the Harlem Renaissance and later the Black Arts Movement — as linear progress, a straight-line evolution away from White-crafted stereotypes of rural chicken-stealers toward accurate reflections of Black life’s complexities. Straight lines make better study guides than historiographies. History is full of clashes, setbacks, and retreats.
The Black America extravaganza is a prime example of the conflicting possibilities of self-expression in a racist society. A mixture of minstrelsy, racial uplift theater, and ethnographic human zoo, this spectacle provides a unique glimpse into the state of plantation nostalgia and urban Black self-perception at the turn of the twentieth century. An ad in the Brooklyn Eagle captured the strange mix of scientific racism and racial uplift:
[Black America showcases] the Afro-American in all his phases from the simplicity of the Southern field hand to his evolution as the Northern aspirant for professional honors and his martial ambition as a soldier . . . 10
While the idea of plantation cosplay in Brooklyn might sound more like speculative fiction than a sound business decision, it was a logical progression for Nate Salsbury, the funder behind Black America.11 By 1895 he was already known as a successful producer and manager for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, a famous nostalgic overlay for American imperialism and oppression.12 In many ways, Black America would mirror those productions, transforming painful and brutal recent history into uplifting performances of American progress. Starring Annie Oakley and Chief Sitting Bull among other sharp-shooters and Native American performers, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West remains part of the popular imagination, popping up in period television dramas and living on in contemporary westerns. Black America has escaped popular memory perhaps due both to its smaller production run and inability to create lasting dramatic storylines. Wild West shows helped establish the classic settler colonial drama of “cowboys versus Indians”, but Black America presented something somewhat different — plantations without White antagonists, racial uplift without a whisper of who was keeping the race down to begin with.
While Nate Salsbury has traditionally been credited as the idea man behind Black America, Billy McClain, an Indianapolis native who designed and produced the exposition, was no stranger to large-scale reenactments either. McClain’s identity as a Northern, African American playwright, actor, and the producer of this strangely sentimental recreation of enslaved life is erased in the promotional broadsides listing “Mr. Nate Salsbury, Projector and Sole Director”, but McClain’s primary role is attested to by his contemporaries and generally accepted by scholars today.13 In the years preceding Black America, McClain worked on talent development, stage, and music direction for two enormous performances: The Battle of Vicksburg, a massive Civil War reenactment that took place on the beaches of Coney Island, and The South Before the War, a heavily nostalgic recreation of plantation life.14 His involvement in Black America was noted in the press, where he is credited at times as “amusement director and stage manager”,15 chorus leader and manager of the over five hundred performers,16 and “manager of the Black America exhibitions”.17 The brainchild of a Black playwright and production manager, with production and funding by one of the most successful popular entertainment figures of the day, Black America presented an uncanny mix of nostalgia for plantation life and celebration of Black creativity and citizenship.18
To consider Black America’s reception, we must first understand its appeal. Already a popular theme on the minstrel stage and in song-sheets purchased for home performance, this form of sentimental nostalgia (Blackface performers singing about heartache and maternal instincts) furthered abolition interests as well as commercial attempts to capitalize on the popularity of sentimental European song.19 Urbanites without personal experience of slavery’s atrocities related to musical themes of simple rural life, carefree living, and a caretaking Mammy. Songs like Black composer James Bland’s “Carry Me Back to Ol’ Virginny’” played on a plantation nostalgia onto which immigrants and newly urban migrants could transfer their own feelings of homesickness.20 Black America extrapolated this plantation nostalgia, adding in a mixture of pseudo-educational ethnographic racial display, recently popular at the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, and a racial-uplift staging designed to present a progressive model of African Americans, from enslaved plantation dwellers to proper cosmopolitan citizens.
These themes of nostalgia and progress surfaced in specific performance forms. The cakewalk was well known in the North, but audiences of Black America perceived it as something entirely different: the authentic cakewalk of Southern heritage. Developed originally by enslaved people as a satirical masquerade mocking the stilted promenades of their upper-class enslavers, the cakewalk shifted into a more stylized promenade competition dance, commonly added as an act to minstrel shows by both Black and White performers. The “‘Ole Virginny’ cakewalk [featured in Black America was] something quite different from the fancy cakewalks the people of the North ha[d] been in habit of seeing”, a performance difference chalked up by Northern viewers to a sign that they were witnessing the cakewalk in its original form.21
The choruses too were seen as uniquely Black in a Southern manner and therefore more Black than the local New York performers. “All doubts as to these being genuine Southern negroes instead of performers imported in East River ferryboats is dissipated by their singing of the plantation melodies”, wrote one viewer.22 Others commented on what they perceived as the uniquely Black vocal qualities of the hundred-plus person chorus:
. . . the volume of sound and the blending of the voices with that unique metallic quality of tone which charmed Dvorak and led him to write music especially for a choir of negroes combine to produce an effect entirely novel to one familiar only with American or German choruses.23
The praise given to the performances links to the earlier ethnographic framing of Black America. These were not skilled performers; they were authentic and organic Southern Blacks, imbued with creative skill from birth. Given the period and cited locales from which some of the performers came, we know that at least a portion of the singers and dancers in Black America were formally trained professionals, and can assume that others were informally trained in their own artistic communities. The presentation, however, attempted to add value to Black Americans in the Northern eye by showcasing the natural goods of not only talent but also of citizenship.
Regarding citizenship, Black America’s stage production ended with an almost unimaginable spectacle, an act called “Historical Pictures”. The chorus of hundreds gathered on the stage to sing patriotic songs as massive ten-foot by twenty-foot portraits were unfurled, one by one: John Brown, Frederick Douglass, William Tecumseh Sherman, Ulysses S. Grant, and Abraham Lincoln.24 All of the performances of the day, from the living plantation to the brass band of the historic Ninth U.S. Cavalry, culminated in this scene of patriotism and modernity, marking an end to the previous era and attempting to introduce Black America as something new.25
While we have descriptions from the press and the reminiscences of Vaudevillians, what is most mysterious and fascinating to imagine is the experience of Black American attendees to Black America. Earlier scholarship has been unclear on whether Black America was a Whites-only event,26 but there was at least one day when Black women and children were in attendance, as noted in the particularly florid and insensitive journalistic style of the early twentieth century :
Raphael cherubs done in chocolate were thick as blackberries at Ambrose park yesterday. Nate Salisbury [sic], the manager of “Black America,” had invited every colored mother having a baby under 2 years old to appear with her offspring and inspect the antics of the colored brethren from the South. The colored mothers went, and so did a considerable delegation of white parents, who took their own pickaninnies down to see the fun.27
We have the reporter’s interpretation of how those Black mothers felt about walking through a plantation with their children, then entering an arena to see buck dancing, cakewalks, and a recreation camp meeting, but we have nothing in their own voices. Black America is primarily available to us today in the mediated voices of professionals and exists mainly as a mystery. We know how several White Americans felt about it, but can only speculate as to how the Black Americans on stage and in the crowd experienced Black America in 1895.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: February 24, 2021

author: Dorothy Berr


text:
“The Mark of the Beast”
Georgian Britain’s Anti-Vaxxer Movement
By Erica X Eisen
April 28, 2021

Ox-faced children, elderly women sprouting horns, and cloven minds — all features attributed to Edward Jenner’s vaccine against smallpox. Introducing us to the original anti-vaxxers, Erica X Eisen explores the “vacca” in the first-ever vaccine: its bovine origins and the widespread worry that immunity came with beastly side effects.

The ox-faced boy who stared out from the opening page of Dr William Rowley’s pamphlet possessed strangely elongated eyes, one bloodshot and one healthy. His right cheek was reddish, while the entire left side of his face was so massively swollen that it knocked the contours of the boy’s healthy features off kilter. Several pages later, a portrait of the Mange Girl, a child of perhaps four years of age, looks out pitifully to readers, the skin from her cheek to her hip covered with clusters of painful-looking sores. The conditions of these children — and (supposedly) of thousands of others across Britain — were not, the accompanying literature warned, symptoms of any natural human ailment. Rather, they were the results of the recently developed smallpox vaccine, which Rowley said exposed recipients to “the diseases of beasts, filthy in their very nature and appearance, in the face, eyes, ears, with blindness and deafness, spreading their baneful influence over the whole body”.1
Rowley was a prominent figure in nineteenth-century England’s anti-vaccine movement, the earliest predecessor to today’s anti-vaxxers. Several years before Rowley published his vitriolic pamphlet, Edward Jenner’s discovery of a vaccine against smallpox had caused a public health revolution and birthed the field of immunology as a discipline — but it also came decades before germ theory was known to scientists. As a result, even those who embraced Jenner’s vaccine lacked the conceptual framework needed to understand precisely how it worked. This gap between evidence and explanation allowed doubts to suppurate and spread as clergy, members of parliament, workers, and even doctors voiced their opposition to the vaccine on religious, ethical, and scientific grounds. Jenner’s supporters saw it as their moral duty to advance the cause of a life-saving technology; their opponents felt an equally strong moral obligation to put a halt to vaccination at all costs. In the decades following Jenner’s discovery, this conflict would play out bitterly in newspapers, in artwork, and even in the streets as both sides battled for the body and soul of Britain.
Living as we do at a time when the sudden emergence of a new virus has drastically altered the normal patterns of life, it can be difficult to imagine an environment where epidemic disease was the norm. Prior to the advent of vaccination, smallpox was widespread, deadly, and all but untreatable given the state of medical knowledge at the time. Roughly one third of those who contracted smallpox did not survive; those who did often bore grim reminders of the disease for the rest of their lives.2 It could leave victims blind; it could reach down to their bones and render joints and limbs permanently deformed. And it left the vast majority of its victims’ faces scarred with the telltale pitted pockmarks, sometimes severely: historian Matthew L. Newsome Kerr estimates that “probably one-fourth to one-half of the population [of Britain] was visibly marked in some way by smallpox prior to 1800”.3
Folk wisdom, meanwhile, had long observed that those who worked closely with livestock possessed a strange resistance to the disease even as it ravaged the communities around them. Jenner, a country doctor, decided to put this idea to a formal test. In 1798, he lanced a sore on milkmaid Sarah Nelmes’ hand and injected the resultant lymph into the arm of his gardener’s son, James Phipps. A week later, Jenner exposed the boy to smallpox to see if he would get sick: as Jenner had hypothesized, the boy remained healthy. Just a year later, the first mass trials of the smallpox vaccine were already underway. (The preserved hide of Nelmes’ cow, Blossom, now resides in the library of St. George’s, a medical school in London.)
Jenner’s experiment had succeeded because the odd sores on Nelmes’ hand were symptoms of cowpox, a much less dangerous cousin of the smallpox virus that caused pustules on the hands but generally left its victims unharmed. The two pathogens were similar enough that exposure to cowpox effectively primed the body’s defenses against smallpox as well. Cowpox infections — and the immunity that came with them — were frequently transferred to dairy workers after they touched the udders of infected animals: indeed, the name Jenner chose for this therapy, vaccination, derives ultimately from the Latin word for cow (vacca). And crucially, as Jenner demonstrated, cowpox could also be transferred by lancing a human’s sores and injecting the fluid into another person — the so-called “arm to arm” method, which guaranteed a virtually inexhaustible supply of the vaccine even in urban areas far from the nearest dairy meadow.
But Jenner would not have been able to explain the workings of his discovery if asked: at the time, it was thought that smallpox was transmitted via poisoned air, or miasma, and the precise mechanisms of immune response were still unknown to science. As growing numbers of people embraced the vaccine, opposition began to coalesce. For these skeptics, the very notion of injecting a substance that ultimately derived from a diseased animal into a healthy human seemed not merely absurd but a serious peril to public health. Rowley’s scaremongering pamphlet warned that those who received the vaccine risked developing “evil, blotches, ulcers, and mortification”, among other “beastly” diseases.4 With the second edition of his pamphlet, a new illustration entered the menagerie of cowpox victims: Ann Davis, an elderly woman who upon receiving her dose had allegedly sprouted horns.
Others focused on the supposed cognitive effects of cowpox: Halket admitted that Rowley’s lurid accounts were perhaps far-fetched but nonetheless insisted that so-called “mental horns and cloven hoofs too frequently shoot out”, a metaphor for the “insurmountable stupidity [that] has been observed in some children from the time they were vaccinated, no symptom of which appeared prior to that time”.5 One of Jenner’s fiercest opponents, Benjamin Moseley, penned a tirade against the cowpox-derived vaccine in which he warned of its effects not only upon the body but also upon the mind:
Who knows, besides, what ideas may rise, in the course of time, from a brutal fever having excited its incongruous impressions on the brain?        Who knows, also, but that the human character may undergo strange mutations from quadrupedan sympathy; and that some modern Pasiphaë may rival the fables of old?6
Readers well versed in classics would have recognized this last line as a thinly veiled reference to bestiality: Pasiphaë, according to Greek myth, was the Cretan queen who gave birth to the Minotaur after having sex with a bull, driven to strange lust by a curse from Poseidon. Rowley plays with a similar innuendo in his pamphlet when he wonders whether receiving the vaccine could violate the biblical injunction against lying with an animal.7 Cowpox would go on to become tightly linked to syphilis (which in the past had often been referred to as “pox”) in the popular imagination, with rumors circulating that cattle contracted cowpox through contact with syphilitic milkmaids. These concerns were not allayed by the poor sanitation and medical standards that sometimes characterized the public vaccination hospitals created to serve Britain’s urban poor: at such places, the vaccines made available to patients often came not directly from cows but from the pustules of vaccinated children in the area, who may or may not have received a thorough medical check before being lanced for their “donation”. As a result, parents were not wholly unjustified in their fears that an injection meant to ward off one deadly disease might simply lead to their child being infected with another one.8
The satirist James Gillray channeled these popular anxieties about the monstrous aspects of the vaccine in his 1802 cartoon The Cow Pock—or—the Wonderful Effects of the New Inoculation! At the center, Jenner is seen delivering a rather vicious gouge to a woman’s arm with his lancet as all around her the previous vaccine recipients undergo horrible transformations: miniature cows erupt from boils and climb out of mouths, while women sprout horns and give birth to calves on the spot. That same year, Charles Williams published an anti-vaccine engraving in which doctors (all of whom have sprouted tails and horns) are arrayed before the maw of a cow-like monster covered in suppurating pustules. A £10,000 check protruding from a back pocket identifies one of these chimerical doctors as Jenner, who had received a cash reward from the government in recognition of his contributions to medicine. Only now he is transformed from medic into mercenary, shoveling babies with his colleagues into the beast’s gaping jaws and waiting for them to be excreted with horns. In the distance, anti-vaccine doctors bearing the weapons of truth approach to do battle with the creature and the doctors who feed it.9
Particularly in the early days, some objected to the vaccine on religious grounds, arguing that vaccination was a hubristic attempt to evade divine punishment. Similar arguments had been made surrounding the earlier technique of variolation, in which healthy people were deliberately exposed to the smallpox virus with the goal of bringing on a mild case of the disease that would nevertheless confer immunity. In 1721, when the Massachusetts Bay Colony was struck by a severe smallpox outbreak, Puritan leaders fiercely debated (and ultimately decided in favor of) the permissibility of variolation, which the preacher Cotton Mather argued had been put into humankind’s hands by God. A century later, theological debates about preventative medicine raged on: “The Small Pox is a visitation from God”, Rowley wrote, “but the Cow Pox is produced by presumptuous man: the former was what heaven ordained, the latter is, perhaps, a daring violation of our holy religion”.10 “Methuselah and his antediluvian contemporaries were not vaccinated which fully accounts for their coming to such a sudden and untimely end”, Halket noted caustically.11 “The Creator stamped on man the divine image, but Jenner placed on him the mark of the beast”.12 Cartoonists frequently depicted the cowpox-derived vaccine as a golden calf that would be the downfall of modern society at the hands of those who foolishly embraced its worship.
But while skepticism towards the vaccine was present from the beginning, the vitriol of the attacks against the cowpox method and its proponents would vastly expand in the mid-1800s, when parliament passed multiple laws making vaccination compulsory, providing free vaccination for the poor, and creating a system of punishments for those who failed to get the shot. These new measures made the question of vaccination impossible to ignore — and many saw such laws as an unacceptable abrogation of their personal liberties by the state.13 In popular writing, vaccines were compared to tattoos or brands (particularly owing to the scar left by the injection), and those who resisted getting them histrionically compared themselves to fugitive slaves. Across Britain, anti-vaccination societies organized mutual aid funds to defray the fines incurred by their members for refusing to vaccinate their children; if working-class vaccine objectors had their property seized as punishment, sympathizers would loudly protest at the auction, sometimes even assaulting the auctioneer. Contemporary newspapers described effigies of Jenner or public vaccine authorities being burned; in Leicester, a hotbed of resistance to the cowpox method, an anti-vaccine carnival drew as many as 100,000 demonstrators and prompted a parliamentary commission to review the vaccination laws.14
But proponents of using cowpox didn’t take all of this sitting down. As many were quick to point out, a number of the leading voices in the anti-vaccination movement had a major financial interest in stopping Jenner’s discovery from catching on. Indeed, both Moseley and Rowley had previously practiced variolation, which prior to Jenner had been considered the best way to prevent a serious case of smallpox. But the technique was riskier than vaccination — both to the patient and to those around them, who were likely to get infected by the convalescing patient. Once among the most common medical procedures in Britain, variolation was under serious threat from its new competitor even before parliament banned it completely in the mid-1800s.15 As such, when doctors like Moseley were penning screeds against the smallpox vaccine, they weren’t just trying to defend their readers — they were also trying to defend their stream of income.
Precisely this point was made by Isaac Cruikshank in an 1808 satirical print that depicts Jenner and his colleagues banishing variolators from the land. The latter group, hefting massive bloody knives over their shoulders, openly proclaim their desire to spread the disease further as they walk past the corpses of smallpox victims. At the far right of the cartoon, a milkmaid pipes up: “Surley [sic] the disorder of the cow is preferable to that of the ass.”
Jenner himself would make similar accusations when he decided to defend his ideas and his honor in print, pseudonymously publishing a rebuttal to Rowley, the cover of which was emblazoned with its own version of the ox-faced boy. Jenner’s words for those who attack the cowpox method in order to protect their own financial interests are scathing; nevertheless, he writes, “I trust that the good sense of the people of England will feel the injury, and know how to repel it as they ought”.16 Two hundred years later, however, attempts to discredit the safety and reliability of vaccination — whether against measles or against COVID  —  persist. The arguments made by today’s anti-vaxxers often echo those put forth by their nineteenth-century antecedents: claims of inefficacy, allegations of ghastly side effects, appeals to religion. Jenner seems likely to have assumed that the benefits of vaccination would be so self-evident that they would shut down all debate. That many continue to assail the safety and reliability of the method he pioneered, not only decades but centuries later, is something that, in all likelihood, the doctor never could have imagined.
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author: Erica X Eisen