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!