Professor Myron Echenberg

PHOTO: OWEN EGAN

Following twentieth century plagues

BRONWYN CHESTER | He already had a somewhat unusual specialization in the field of African studies: history professor Myron Echenberg studies French West African history and writes about it in English, making him a relatively rare bird in a field where South Africa steals most of the attention.

Then, 10 years ago, after completing his book on the Tirailleurs Sénégalais, the history of Senegalese conscripts in the French Army, 1857-1960 Ð for which he won the 1992 African Studies Association Herskovits prize Ð he began to turn his attention to an even more specialized subject he encountered while studying the Senegalese: bubonic plague.

Yes, you read correctly. And, no, contrary to popular Western thought, the bubonic plague did not see its last days in 18th century Europe. In fact, says Echenberg, the flea-carried disease lives on in wild mammalian populations in such places as the mountains of California, occasionally infecting unsuspecting humans who touch an infected, usually dead, animal, and are bitten by the disease-carrying fleas living in its fur.

But that's not the subject of Echenberg's research. Rather, he's been studying "The Black Death in Senegal: 1914 Ð 1945," the title of one book in progress, and "Cities of the Plague: 1894 Ð 1900," a second book in progress which examines the urban impact of the third bubonic plague (the first was London, 1665, the second, Marseilles, 1729).

Echenberg lights up as he speaks of his second book venture, to be a popular history book ready for the year 2000 (as opposed to the Senegal story which will be scholarly). "It ought to be of great general interest," he says from his office high in the Stephen Leacock Building, an African calabash decorating one bookshelf, explaining that it will touch on "our obsession with the bubonic plague and the possibility of its return."

If few of us have heard of the "Third Pandemic," it may well be due to what Echenberg terms the "hubris in Western medicine" at the turn of the century; thanks to the work in immunology by Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, people had come to believe that all disease may be controlled by vaccinations.

"That doesn't work for bubonic plague," says Echenberg, adding that it wasn't until the invention of penicillin in 1945 that the disease could be treated. There was a reluctance to talk about the plague, because it showed all too clearly the limitations of medicine. Furthermore, he says, cities admitting to having the disease risked incurring high costs for quarantining the affected ship and population, not to mention bad publicity. San Francisco, for instance, says Echenberg, which lost roughly 50 lives, admitted only three years after the fact that the city had, indeed, been infected.

Nowhere were the limitations of medicine more acutely felt than in India where, once the disease spread out from Bombay, it took the lives of 13 million over a 20-year period. Yet other cities, affected by the plague as it toured the world via a British ship that left Hong Kong in 1894, fared much better. It is this difference in effect and in the social and political reaction to the disease which most interests Echenberg in his examination of 12 of the 36 cities affected, and he purposely chose the cities in order to have representation from the four continents, the colonial and post-colonial eras and from a variety of religions.

"The disease becomes a lens through which to compare these societies 100 years ago."

In San Francisco, for instance, the disease brought into clear focus the anti-Chinese racism of that society. The Chinese, the group most affected, were accused of "bringing in the disease," and authorities wanted to quarantine Chinatown and forcibly vaccinate those wanting to leave, while the whites affected were not treated in the same manner. However, the Chinese defended themselves in court using the 13th amendment (can't discriminate on grounds of race) and won.

Glasgow suffered 30 deaths, but used the disease to demonstrate the value of good sanitation and housing, heralding the fact that relatively few lives were lost and the disease did not spread. But, points out Echenberg, no one knows for sure why the disease hit some places hard and not others.

"The plague coincided with the modernization of cities, so it was used to say that money invested in public health measures was well spent. But you can't pinpoint why some cities fared better," he said, citing factors such as the climate and crowding.

But all sorts of physicians, sanitation advocates and healers would claim that they had prevented the disease in their community, says Echenberg. A traditional healer in Senegal, for instance, where the plague is still within living memory, told the historian that "we didn't have it here because I helped prevent it," which is much like what Western physicians or public health authorities at the turn of the century would say, says Echenberg.

Do we have lessons to learn from the reactions to plague of our urban forebears? Echenberg says reactions today to such pandemics as AIDS resonate with the range of reactions expressed at the turn of the century: blaming the victim and the "NIMBY" (not in my backyard) syndrome as well as acts exemplifying the best in human compassion. And, while he believes that we, unlike our turn of the century counterparts, think we have the right to good health, he feels that "the AIDS pandemic has alerted us to our vulnerability."

Concerning another zoonotic (crossing from one mammalian species to another) illness, mad cow disease, or Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, Echenberg expresses confidence in our meat inspection system, though he says he would avoid British mixed meat products, like sausages, and disagrees with herbivores, like cows, being fed meat. (Diseased sheep in cattle feed causes mad cow disease).

Concerning his own crossover from African studies to being an African specialist and a social historian of health and disease, Echenberg says, "The present influences the past. The times we live in make us question things about the past that we didn't before."