Julie Chibbaro

Since my first book was about those first attempts at colonizing America, and my second is an exploration of the theme of epidemics and carriers, I decided that today would be fun to put those ideas together.

Let’s see where typhoid fit in with the first colonies that actually succeeded in settling North America.

Jamestown, the first real English settlement, was founded by a group of wealthy gentlemen (like in my novel, Redemption, the baron himself seeks to found a colony). The Jamestown colony settled on a peninsula that protected them from the Native peoples, but also was plagued with mosquitoes and stagnant water.

Did these men have any skills needed to pioneer a wild, overgrown land that they knew nothing about?

Unfortunately not.

What the new colony needed was farmers, metalsmiths, craftsmen who could provide the labor. But nobody thought of that when they started out from England. The ship, including Captain Smith himself, was full of guys who really just wanted to find gold and silver. And their wives and children.

Over the next 15 years, from 1607 to 1624, nearly 6,000 settlers died of typhoid fever alone.

Read more:

Global security/typhoid in colonies

U.S. history/typhoid in colonies

A large majority of the world is trying to avoid the spread of disease. We work hard not to contaminate or harm each other, to cure each other, to save lives. But there are pockets of history where that was not so.

Most people know about the famous Dr. Mengele, or the ‘Angel of Death,’ one of Hitler’s doctors who used human experiments to supplement his research on heredity, focusing especially on young twins.

Less known are human experiments done at exactly the same time, in the 1930s and 40s, halfway across the earth. In Japanese-occupied Manchuria, the Japanese set up a camp they called Unit 731 (or "Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kuantung Army”), where they used humans to develop and test chemical and biological weapons. One of these weapons was typhoid fever, which they added to the water of a small town and killed not only many in the community, but, accidentally, many Japanese soldiers.



Among the diseases they gave to their human subjects were: cholera, bubonic plague, dysentery, and anthrax, sometimes cutting open their live victims to see what a disease does to a person. They dropped these diseases in ponds and streams, or dropped plague-infested fleas from planes.

These experiments weren’t stopped until the end of WWII, when the Japanese blew up the Unit 731 HQ, and killed the remaining victims.

In answer to Amy’s question of last week, the term “plague” generally refers to bubonic plague, though earlier, before epidemics were specified into diseases, they were often referred under the umbrella of “plague.”

Pestilence: c.1300, from O.Fr. pestilence, from L. pestilentia "plague," noun of action from pestilentem (nom. pestilens) "infected, unwholesome, noxious," from pestis "deadly disease, plague."

Plague (n.) late 14c., "affliction, calamity, evil, scourge," . . . Specifically in reference to "bubonic plague" from c.1600.

You’ve all heard about it: Athens vs. the Persians, Athens vs. Sparta, the Peloponnesian War, the expansion of Athens into Italy, those godlike Greek bodies in battle. The push into different countries, the desire to take over the world.


Statue Of A Victorious Youth by Andrew Schmidt
So what happened? Why aren’t we speaking Greek today?

Around 420 B.C., Athens fell. Was it the wrath of Zeus who decided to eradicate a civilization? Did other countries get so peeved that they decided to wage a world war against the Greeks and wipe them out?

Nope, it was much smaller than that. The thing that took down the Athenians was a bug.

Anthrax? That sounds dangerous enough to wipe out a civilization, right? It wasn’t that.

Smallpox? That also ends with x, and did kill over 2 million American Indians, right? It wasn’t that.

According to DNA analysis of teeth from an ancient Greek burial pit, the cause of the Fall of Athens was typhoid fever.

It seems typhoid fever has been around since the beginning of mankind, and in this blog, I aim to explore this and other epidemics. I’ll choose different aspects to focus on, and if anyone has a particular epidemic they’d like to know more about, just comment and let me know. I’m always looking for a good story!

I live in a nice town, mountains behind me, river in front of me, open grassy parks, not too many people, long days home alone in front of my nice computer. The only mess I see is the one I make in my kitchen (and bathroom, etc.)

Yesterday, I went to the Big City where millions upon millions of people all live stacked together in tall buildings, their effluvia pouring down, or out, or through the very air, and I realized: I've become a germophobe. I know I'm probably making up the very word, since my spell check told me so, but that's what it feels like Germ Oh! Phobe.


Squashed rat in street

This has been a long time coming.

I left NYC in 1996 to go live in the most beautiful city on earth, Prague (not the cleanest, but you just had to look up at the architecture to ignore that). In 2000, we moved to Montreal, not such a big city, and not too dirty (couldn't see much dirt under all the snow). I tried to move back to NY in 2003, and again in 2007, but couldn't take the rats in the subway, the spit on the sidewalk, the poop in the street (the worst poop I have living upstate is goose poop, long and green, but mostly just half-digested grass).

Where's my sense of cool? Have I become a fuddy duddy, not wanting to touch the yuckys?

The point has become especially clear since I had my little one, who, when we come to the city, is often face-to-face with the sleeping drug addicts who release long strings of drool at her feet.

Have I always been this bad? I grew up in the city, and don't remember being so very aware of every single roach that resides there, though I do remember being quite scared of them. Maybe I've always been a secret germophobe. Am I the only one? Does it bother no one else?

No wonder I wrote a book about Typhoid Mary.

In 2007, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, though I've probably had it since 2004. Fibro what, you ask? Well, no one seems to know what causes this disease, not in any concrete medical terms. It's about as mysterious as the Bermuda Triangle, or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and apparently about as solvable. Symptoms -- overall body aches, kinda like a stiff neck in your whole body. Brain fog. Sensitivity to touch -- even my hair hurts when it's bad. Some days are better than others. Some days I have to spend in bed.

Recently, I went to a new doctor who asked me how I worked with all this pain, which was a eureka moment for me. No one ever asked me that before. In fact, my disease was something I mostly tried to ignore, just as most people go through their day with a stiff neck -- irritated, unable to really move, but coping just the same.

But his question made me realize something that I hadn't understood or admitted to myself in all these years: I am, because of this disease, largely disabled, and I haven't figured my life out around that fact. It's a first step I haven't allowed myself to take. I spend much of my time berating myself for being in too much pain to write, when really, what I need to do is figure out HOW to write, how to LIVE with a disability. Wow.

Why has it taken me so long to admit this, to understand it? Because all my life I've been strong and daring, taking great risks both physically and with my career, and I've always had my own strength to rely on. Now, these past few years, the pain has been getting worse, limiting my life greatly, until I can't even garden. These limits, frankly, suck. That's why I haven't admitted to them.

What, I wonder, will change if I am able to say to myself: Work within these new limits. Do what you can. Give yourself a break and allow yourself to take care of you. Will I experience a new order? Will a calm take over the storm of being disabled?

The admission is a first step -- I will see what comes of it.

Sometimes, food just feels good. Eating fills me up, not just physically, but emotionally as well. I was a fat kid, so I know this mental element of eating goes way back for me.

But I can't seem to remember people being so very fat back then. We were plump, rotund, stout. But obese? I can't really remember that being a problem.

What has changed? How can I write about it? I keep thinking I want to write about being a fat girl, and how that ruined my life, maybe as a way to reach other fat girls, so that together we can figure this out. What's going on? Why couldn't I control myself, and why can't we, men and women, boys and girls, control ourselves now?

We're so incredibly unhappy being fat, yet we can't stop eating. It's like we're crazy, like we're punching ourselves in the head saying 'oww, oww' but we still keep doing it. Of course, eating feels better than punching, yet we're doing that much damage to our bodies.

I keep thinking it's a question of caring about longevity. When you're fat, you don't really care about living a long time, so those warnings about health issues don't matter much. You don't look good, you don't feel good, maybe death isn't such a bad option. At least that's how I felt. Actually, death seemed very far away, and avoiding it seemed as easy as avoiding aliens from outer space.

Maybe the answer is to find happiness in things other than food. I think I started to lose weight when I found ways to act on my dreams, if that doesn't sound too cheesy. When I get stuck, when I'm waiting for someone else to do something, that's when I focus on food. Engaged in life, in activities that I love, I tend to forget about it.

So maybe that's the girl I can write about. Why does she eat? Why can't she stop? What can she remove or add to her life that will change her focus? What would she be like if her dreams came true?

Just thinking aloud here. As usual.

Me and Sami pigging out on pudding at the diner. Am I setting her up?

I spend a lot of time thinking. That's my job. Sometimes it's directed -- I think through a plot or story idea I might be considering -- and sometimes it's not -- I'm simply contemplating the shapes of people's lives, cause and effect, how folks are formed, what makes someone mean and another person kind.

In all this pondering, I recently came to a revelation. I believe, having lived forty something years (and the elders among us can dispute this), that my strongest emotions, those that made me wildest with grief or most ecstatic with joy, were ones I had as a teenager or young adult. Lots of things have happened to me as an adult (I would say I became an adult after about the age of 25), the death of my mother and sister, the marriage to the man of my dreams, the birth of my child, but those were all things I somehow instinctively knew how to process. Things that happened in my youth, sexual abuse, parental violence, the divorce of my parents (twice), the radical change in my body from girl to girl with breasts, my first love, these were all things I wasn't equipped to handle.

Because I didn't have the tools to understand what was going on around me, or happening inside me, my emotions tended to be extreme and extraordinary. I think, in a way, I'm still processing the emotions I had as a young person. The events of that time will forever shape me. That is why I keep returning to young people in my books, writing from their perspective. Because, in a way, I think if I can figure it out, even a little piece of the puzzle, the truth of hormones, the savageness of young love, maybe, just maybe I can help one reader through what to me are the strongest emotions they will ever have in their lives.

Surviving sisters in glasses.

I've decided to change the name of my blog. Not just the name, but the subject, as well. Not just the subject, but the limitations, too. This blog is going to be about anything I want. It's going to be about the history of glasses-wearing, about Dorothy Parker and the truth in her poem, "Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses." I want to explore the present tense, and weird things from the past. I want to write about my 4-year-old girlchild, and her version of the pledge of allegiance, which they've taught her in school, and which goes, "One nation, in the visible . . . ." I want to remember and forget here, and I hope I can figure out how to upload pictures to make the journey more pleasant.

Today we have a guest blogger, Laura Zam. Laura is an award-winning writer and performer who has created five one-person plays. She has performed at the Woolly Mammoth Theater, Theater J, The Kennedy Center, and The National Theatre, among others. Using humor, Laura is currently working on a book about the aftermath of sexual abuse. She teaches creative people how to empower themselves and make a living doing what they love. Her website is www.laurazam.com

LAURA ZAM:


I have a hobby!

This is great because I’ve never had a hobby before. Historically, during my free time⎯in between job commitments⎯I’ve worked on my writing projects. To the outside eye, my writing probably appeared to be a hobby (it certainly looked that way to the IRS). But that was not the case, not to me. See, I was trying to make a career out of this. According to my dictionary, a hobby is “an activity done regularly in one's leisure time for pleasure.” No, writing was not done for pleasure. Writing was done so I could move ahead and seriously realize my dream life. This was not a hobby at all.

I am happy to report that my career has picked up. No longer am I carving out free time for my writing projects; I’m now doing them full-time. This means writing is my job. And like all jobs, it’s work. Don’t get me wrong. Writing has always been creative and fun, but like all work, it has also been part of a larger context of professional goals. And now, especially, writing is filled with deadlines and circumscribed by discipline: I basically work a 9 to 5 schedule. By the weekend, I definitely need a break.

You want to know a secret? A big advantage of doing a job that you love is that you get time off from it too! I’m talking about glorious Saturday and Sunday. No, wait, there’s all that cleaning to be done ⎯of house, clothes, car, and in-box. Begrudgingly, I’ve given Saturday over to that. That leaves Sundays when I absolutely must recharge. In the past, I’ve found a variety of lazy Sunday activities that don’t involve a computer or complicated sentences: long walks, going to the zoo with my hubby, brunching with friends. But everything changed last weekend when I discovered a hobby⎯multimedia collage!

Keep in mind what I said above: that a hobby is done purely for pleasure⎯ meaning only for one’s self. I mention this again because I have absolutely no talent when it comes to the visual arts. And that’s great.

See, what I’ve discovered in having a creative outlet with no aspirations attached⎯no expectations, no perfectionism, no skillful knowledge, no nothing⎯ is that this activity has a freedom that writing will never have for me. Might this alternative artistic play be necessary? Maybe it’s a way to strengthen connection to one’s muse, just like when couples go on vacation (leaving their ordinarily stressful lives together) so they can bond with each other anew. Yes, multimedia collage might just be a way for me to continuously rediscover my creativity lover.

I hope so because it’s fun, and I even made it functional, putting my collages in a book that also includes my goals and action steps for the year (OK, I can’t get too far away from my aspirations – so sue me).

If you’re looking for a fun way to reignite your creative spark, try an art form at which you suck. And if you find one that uses glitter glue, even better.

I'm not sure how other people do it, like those writers who churn out trilogies as if they wrote them on the bus to work, but for me, novel writing, or any other kind of writing for that matter, doesn't come easy. I'm a bleeder, a writer who takes forever to understand her own text enough to know what comes next. For me, writing is a process of gathering -- not just gathering ideas, but a quiet gathering of the senses. To be able to visualize something that is real, true, honest, I have to wait. Wait until all the details come, and all in the right order. Oh, sure, I can slap something down on paper easily enough, but it just ain't so good. Not until I've done my gathering do I feel that channel, that vein of gold that I know is working.

Sometimes it takes time to know what my instinct is telling me.

I wonder if other writers or artists or musicians have this sense of gathering. I think it's like being ready for something -- you need to make a big move in your life, quit a job, leave a spouse, start down a new road -- you wait for that gathering, of energy, of spirit and power. Then, when the time is right, you do it. That's how I write.

So, my question is, how do those other guys and gals do it, the ones who churn out trilogies on the bus?