Abstract
This chapter begins and ends with the now famous debate over contagionism and anticontagionism, sparked by Erwin Ackerknecht in 1948. It extends that debate into the early twentieth century with a zoonotic disease—plague—and focuses on social history instead of a history of ideas. It explores controversies over plague in India from its first incursions in Mumbai between 1896 and 1902, arguing that Europe’s historical past of the Black Death to London’s plague of 1665 formed the template to understand plague of the Third Pandemic as a highly contagious, person-to-person pandemic with quarantine as the cornerstone of its prevention. This distant historical past caused British bureaucrats to resist new scientific evidence on plague transmission then being discovered in the Indian subcontinent. On the other hand, indigenous populations from intellectuals, activists, and newspaper editors such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak to communities of urban workers and villagers rapidly changed their minds about plague transmission as seen in village and urban resolutions, mass demonstrations, and riots that condemned ruthless and useless quarantine measures that employed humiliating strip-inspections in public places and military searches for plague victims. This chapter hypothesises that the sharp rise and fall in plague protest and social violence at the turn of the nineteenth century rested on a mismatch between colonial plague policies and the evolving scientific knowledge of plague. The violence did not arise from Indians’ refusal to accept the latest science, their supposed fatalism, or ignorance as initially pictured in the international press and proclaimed by colonial officials. Rather, it hinged on these officials’ inability to dislodge historic images of plague as a highly contagious disease. Until 1902, intrusive and destructive quarantine measures continued to be imposed, despite findings of Western and Eastern science alike that plague in India was a disease spread principally by rats. These years coincided with the most frequent, largest, and most violent plague protests anywhere across the globe.
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Notes
- 1.
Erwin H. Ackerknecht, ‘Anticontagionism between 1821 and 1867: The Fielding H. Garrison Lecture’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 22 (1948): 562–593. On Ackerknecht’s conclusions, see among other places, J. N. Hays, The Burdens of Disease: Epidemics and Human Response in Western History (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998), p. 137; Peter Baldwin, Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 28–35, 488–489, 491–492; Martina King and Thomas Rütten, ‘Introduction’. In Rütten and King (eds.), Contagion and Contagious Diseases: Medicine and Literature 1880–1933, pp. 1–16 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013); Andrew R. Aisenberg, Contagion: Disease, Government, and the ‘Social Question’ in Nineteenth-Century France (Sanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 5, 186; Roger Cotter, ‘Anticontagionism and History’s Medical Record’. In P. Wright and A. Treacher (eds.), The Problem of Medical Knowledge: Examining the Social Construction of Medicine, pp. 87–108 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1982); Mark Harrison, Medicine in an Age of Commerce and Empire: Britain and its Tropical Colonies 1660–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 1, 253. For a critique and substantial bibliography on this debate, see David S. Barnes, ‘Cargo, “Infection,” and the Logic of Quarantine in the Nineteenth-Century’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 88 (2014): 75–101, especially pp. 75–80.
- 2.
Virchow argued: ‘Medicine is a social science … anthropology in its widest sense, whose greatest task is to build up on a physiological foundation … Politics is nothing but medicine on a large scale. The ‘ultimate aim’ of medicine, ‘is eminently social’; cited in George Rosen, A History of Public Health (New York: MD Publications, 1958), p. 13.
- 3.
Margaret Pelling, Cholera, Fever and English Medicine 1825–1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 1–18.
- 4.
Also, see Pelling’s return to aspects of the contagionist-anticontagionist debate: Margaret Pelling, ‘The Meaning of Contagion: Reproduction, Medicine and Metaphor’. In Alison Bashford and Claire Hooker (eds.), Contagion: Historical and Cultural Studies, pp. 15–38 (London: Routledge, 2001). Here, Pelling maintains that ‘the polarities of contagion and miasm, contagionist and anticontagionist … continues to prove irresistible’, pointing to Baldwin (Contagion and the State). Yet for venereal diseases in the nineteenth century, Baldwin was at odds with Ackerknecht, claiming that his dichotomy ‘liberal versus Conservative equals voluntary versus regulatory do not pair up (pp. 487–488). According to Barnes (‘Cargo’), Baldwin is ‘one of several historians … to consign Ackerknecht’s thesis to the dustbin of historiography (p. 78).
- 5.
For Baldwin’s exhaustive analysis, Contagion, the actors were states and not social movements. Collective protest and its effects on change are scarcely mentioned.
- 6.
Graham Twigg, Bubonic Plague: A Much Misunderstood Disease (Ascot: Derwent Press, 2013), pp. 9 and 69, based on L. Fabian Hirst’s figures calculated in 1938 (The Conquest of Plague: A Study of the Evolution of Epidemiology, Oxford university Press: Oxford, 1953), puts it at 95%, as does Ira Klein (‘Urban Development and Death: Bombay City, 1870–1914’ Modern Asian Studies 20 (1986), p. 744) and others (Samuel Cohn, Jr., The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 13). Since the 1930s, however, the proportion of plague deaths in the Indian subcontinent has fallen significantly. Using data from Plague Manual: Epidemiology, Distribution, Surveillance and Control (Geneva: WHO, 1999), table 1, pp. 18–25, I have recalculated these proportions. However, given the overwhelming preponderance of plague deaths of the ‘third pandemic’ that occurred before 1938, the overall decline in the India subcontinent’s proportion is only around 1%. For the arrival of plague in Hong Kong, I use 1893, when the first cases were reported, rather than the canonical date of 1894, when Alexandre Yersin arrived in Hong Kong.
- 7.
This goes against the arguments of Sir Richard J. Evans (‘Epidemics and Revolutions: Cholera in Nineteenth-Century Europe’. In Terence Ranger and Paul Slack (eds.) Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence, pp. 149–173, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1992), and of Baldwin (Contagion), who follows Evans: ‘By imposing measures that were unrelenting in their insistence that contagion should be fought first and foremost with cordons, quarantines and sequestration … Popular unrest, riot and rebellion were the Fruit.’ But I know of no cholera mobs to have attacked cordons and only a few, principally in Italy after 1866, to have attacked quarantines; see: Samuel Cohn, Jr., Epidemics: Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), chapter 9.
- 8.
For this history, see: Cohn, Epidemics, chapters 7–10. For the historiography on cholera riots, see: ibid., pp. 180–182.
- 9.
Such incidents in cholera riots not only characterised the first European wave of the disease in 1831–1837, but endured into the late nineteenth century in Russia as at Saratov in 1892 (Morning Call [San Francisco] 15 July 1892, front page; and La Presse [Paris], 20 July 1892) and even into the twentieth century in Italy, as at Gioia del Colle and Massafra (both in Puglia) in 1911 (Times Dispatch [Richmond, Virginia], 10 September 1911, front page; and Nicola Simonetti, and Mimma Sangiorgi, Il colera in Puglia dal 1831 ai giorni nostri (Fasano, Brindisi: Schena, 2003), p. 189.
- 10.
Cohn, Epidemics, pp. 293–295.
- 11.
Ibid., chapters 14–16; and for the Julai riot in Bombay: Prashant Kidambi, The Making of an Indian Metropolis: Colonial Governance and Public Culture in Bombay, 1890–1920 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), chapter 5.
- 12.
New York Times, 28 May 1900; Ira Klein, ‘Plague, Policy and Popular Unrest in British India’, Modern Asian Studies 22 (1988): 723–755. ‘The majority of the people believed that doctors were the chief men who spread the plague, and this some believed they did for their own living and maintenance’; ibid., p. 749. Also, see: Ian Catanach, ‘Fatalism? Indian Responses to Plague and Other Crises’, Asian Profile 12 (1984): 183–192, suggests that rumours of well poisoning with Indian plague was similar to blaming the Jews during the Black Death (p. 190).
- 13.
As with Mumbai mill workers attacking an Isolation hospital plague on Arthur Road on October 10, 1896, but even here the protest became one against quarantine and isolation; Cohn, Epidemics, p. 327.
- 14.
Cohn, Epidemics, pp. 207–222, 227–230, 254–261.
- 15.
In places, such riots continued into the 1920s in the Soviet Union, and during the seventh cholera wave in Naples, Torre del Greco, and Bari in 1973, Peru and Venezuela in the 1990s, and Zimbabwe, and Haiti in the twenty-first century; ibid., pp. 208 and 228–229.
- 16.
See, for instance: Kalakankar’s Hindustan, British Library, India Office Records and Private Papers (hereafter BL), Selections from the Vernacular Newspapers published in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh: L/R/5/77, week ending 1 May 1900, no. 12, which explained the violence at Kanpur as sparked by the ‘most foolish and mischievous rumours’, circulated ‘among the ignorant masses’, concluding that ‘India is a land of superstitions and false beliefs’; ‘the fault of the riots … was king Mob [which] is impervious to reason.’
- 17.
Cited in David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 232; and BL, Report of Native Papers Published by the Bombay Presidency, L/R/5/152, week ending 3 July 1897, no. 29, Dnyán Prakásh.
- 18.
L/R/5/152, week ending 13 March 1897, no. 16, Indian Spectator.
- 19.
Cohn, Epidemics, p. 338.
- 20.
BL, Bombay Presidency, L/R/5/151, week ending 17 June 1897, no. 17; and Cohn, Epidemics, p. 331.
- 21.
L/R/5/152, week ending 16 April 1898, no. 23, Mahrátta.
- 22.
Ibid. By the time the scientific community had been convinced that the flea was the essential vector in plague transmission with Glen Liston’s experiments published in 1910, the riots and plague protests had disappeared in the subcontinent.
- 23.
L/R/5/152, week ending 14 May 1898, no. 24, Phoenix.
- 24.
Ibid., week ending 21 May 1898, no. 54, Phoenix.
- 25.
Ibid., week ending 16 July 1898, no. 12, Bombay Samáchár.
- 26.
See: Cohn, Epidemics, pp. 339–340.
- 27.
L/R/5/156, week ending 1 June 1901, no. 32, Kál; Wai’s Moda Vritta claimed: ‘Hundreds of instances can be cited showing plague regulations, however severe, are absolutely inefficient against the disease and are only a fruitful source of trouble both to Government and the people’; ibid., no. 35, Moda Vritta.
- 28.
Below are just a few examples from the Punjab, the North-Western Provinces, and Bengal; many more could be cited: L/R/5/188, week ending, 8 July, no. 13, Tribune (Lahore); L/R/5/77, week ending 3 April 1900, no. 9, Hindustani; week ending 17 April 1900, no. 25, Tihfa-i-Hind (Bijnor); L/R/5/79, week ending 18 April 1903, no. 19, Hindosthan (Kalakankar). Also, see: Cohn, Epidemics, pp. 339–340.
- 29.
An editorial in the Indian Spectator on October 20, 1901, anticipated the international plague reports and massive experimentation and accumulation of data that began five years later. On these later voluminous plague-commission reports, see: Cohn, The Black Death Transformed, pp. 26–33.
- 30.
L/R/5/156, week ending 26 October 1901, Indian Spectator.
- 31.
BL, North-Western Provinces, L/R/5/80, week ending 16 May 1902, no. 11.
- 32.
On these reports, see: Cohn, The Black Death Transformed, pp. 26–33.
- 33.
L/R/5/77, week ending 17 April 1900, no. 24, Indian Daily Telegraph.
- 34.
See: Mexican Herald, 23 August 1900, p. 2; South Australian Register (Adelaide), p. 25 August 1900, p. 7; and Bunbury Herald (Western Australia), 25 August 1900, p. 3.
- 35.
Cohn, Epidemics, pp. 334–337.
- 36.
Charles Creighton, History of Epidemics in Britain, 2nd edition, ed. by D. E. C. Eversely, E. A. Underwood and L. Ovenall, I: A.D. 664–1666 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1894; London, 1965), pp. 168.
- 37.
L/R/5/156 1901, no. 26. Sudharak, 17 June.
- 38.
See, for instance: William Coleman, Yellow Fever in the North: The Methods of Early Epidemiology Wisconsin Publications in the History of Science and Medicine, number 6. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987): ‘The very notion of disease transmission by means of a nonvertebrate vector did not enter the mainstream of medical and epidemiological thought until the 1890s, primarily through Theobald Smith’s starling demonstration that Texas cattle fever was caused by a tick-borne protozoan’ (p. 12).
- 39.
See: Cohn, Epidemics, p. 372 (Section 505 of the Criminal Procedure).
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Cohn, S. (2021). Plague in India: Contagion, Quarantine, and the Transmission of Scientific Knowledge. In: Lynteris, C. (eds) Plague Image and Imagination from Medieval to Modern Times. Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72304-0_7
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