Very Ancient Origin of Contagionism
by Peter Morrell

"Interestingly Fracastoro the physician-poet from Verona (who
christened Syphilis the French disease) had proposed a germ theory of
disease in 1546, one hundred years before Leeuwenhoek's ground
breaking discoveries under the microscope." [1]

Some conceptual errors seem to have crept into this account. The idea
of contagion entirely precedes the discovery of bacteria and is very
ancient. Of course, the germ theory was conceived many centuries
before germs were physically detected with microscopes. Scientists and
medics seem too eager to accept as gospel the most simplistic
'external teachings', while condemning our ancestors as befuddled old
fools who knew nothing. In fact, ancient peoples had a much more
subtle mentality and rather than being so easily bedazzled by the
simple, superficial glance that satisfies people today, they clearly
understood the deeper internal workings of things as a complex, living
reality.

"Rudimentary modern concepts such as bacteria, toxins, personal
cleanliness, and public sanitation were either unknown and largely
absent from the social database. Quarantines were common and had been
utilized for hundreds of years, but the scientific idea of contagion
was confused and interrelated with religion, piety, sin, and "God's
Justice." [2]

The germ theory first arose in very ancient times as a conception that
disease is passed around in some nebulous manner between and amongst
people. This attitude was most obvious for the clear contagions like
Plague and Leprosy [later Cholera] of which people were understandably
very fearful.

"Guy de Chauliac concerning...the Black Death: 'it was so
contagious...that even by looking at one another people caught
it.'..." [3]

Guy de Chauliac

This primitive form of 'contagionism' was found in all cultures and
was intrinsically a form of taboo, holding that even though an ill
person is primarily ill for their own inner, spiritual, God-driven
reasons, they should still be avoided because they carry, in some
mysterious way, the 'seeds' or 'vapours' of the disease, which can be
passed on to others. This was called the miasmata theory of ill-airs
and strange vapours that can pass among the populace. By no means an
unreasonable conception, it derived in an evidence-based manner,
mostly from observation and experience of epidemics, admittedly laced
with certain religious concepts. Whether a microscope later provided
confirmation for such a conception in the minds of men is, of course,
rather superfluous to the general validity of the conception itself,
which vastly predates the actual microscopes themselves.

The discovery of physical 'infective particles' need not be regarded
as confirmation of the ancient idea of contagion, but might be seen as
a separate idea altogether, one fundamentally different in modern
therapeutics compared to the more ancient idea of contagion that
preceded it. Thus, a rather subtle and spiritual conception became
displaced by a crude and materialistic one - a pattern that keeps
repeating itself down to modern times. The idea of contagion more
properly belongs to the magical worldview, a view that minutely
scrutinises phenomena and always looks for anomalies or non-
conformities in the world. A view holding that all non-conformities
contain pattern and meaning, have power and that this power can be
utilised or transmitted - being passed around through contact.

There are numerous examples of the power of an anomaly. The albino in
Africa is an anomaly who is revered as a god. The weapon that killed
someone is an anomaly. The place where the slaughter took place has
power and contagion. Prayers are intoned and flowers placed at the
site of an accident. Candles are lit for the dead. Churches are filled
with perfume. Holy water is sprinkled. Cathedrals are filled with
light and music. Ointment is rubbed into the sword as well as the
wound it caused. A rationale lies behind all such actions. A pervasive
and profound notion of resonance abounds in the magical worldview and
lies at the heart of this whole matter of contagion. Write it all off
as superstitious nonsense if you like, but this sense of resonance
touches everything, interconnecting them in an unseen web of links
between events, people, places, concepts, objects, practices. Nothing
happens without a [spiritual] cause and everything affects everything
else. What if ought has medicine truly gained from science? And what
has it lost?

Even in fame and celebrity, the idea of contagion persists. John
Lennon's piano or Mercedes must have some special power. A guitar once
owned by Eric Clapton. The bedroom where Marilyn Monroe died. The
baseball that won a whole series. Erroll Flynn's jockstrap. These are
all examples of objects deemed to be suffused with some invisible and
special power. They are unusual to the degree that they possessed
special power once and so mysteriously must still contain a fading
vestige of it. They are anomalies. A superstitious mode of thinking,
that we all innately possess, contends that they still possess this
power and will always possess it, and that we can annoint ourselves
with it somehow and so sanctify our lives. Getting close to the rich
and famous is thus as alluring a pursuit as ever.

Similarly, the sick person is a type of non-conformity - a deviation
from normality - and represents a puzzle to the magical mind - a
puzzle capable of solution. The sick person has a power that can
affect others. This was well known to ancient and medieval people.
Plague and leprosy were especially feared not only as great killers,
but of being passed on to people coming into close contact with the
sufferer, such as neighbours and members of the same family.

"With few exceptions the contemporary sources, medical and lay, that
discuss the various outbreaks of pestilential disease in the later
Middle Ages reveal a strong belief in the extremely contagious nature
of the 'pest'..." [4]

Malaria, Typhus and Cholera were associated with damp or foul places.
Leprosy and Syphilis were deemed to be basically sexual in origin, and
thus a whiff of wickedness surrounded anyone contracting them.
Deviantised in this way by their condition, they had to be isolated
from everyone else.

"Beliefs of this kind continued to play a major role throughout the
Middle Ages and into the 16th and 17th centuries, with disease being
associated with the work of Satan and with demonic possession. Plagues
and pestilences were believed to be visitations from God, to punish or
try sinful people. Protestants long continued to see disease as the
finger of Providence." [5]

Lepers and syphilitics were shunned because of the 'negative
emanations' that were deemed to hang around them. Only 'bad' people
could contract such diseases. This was not a form of contagion
strictly like the bacteria doctrine. It was primarily the view that as
special non-conformities these sick persons possessed some special and
transmissible negative power or subtle energy. It was not conceived of
as an infective particle. Such is almost a crude and more modern
degradation of the original theory of contagion.

"Cholera most often affected those persons who lived dissolute,
alcoholic, drug related, sexually excessive, and filth ridden lives;
cholera's victims were simply being punished by God. It was the
consequence of sin and "was the inevitable and inescapable judgment"
of the Divine Power. "Cholera was a scourge not of mankind but of the
sinner." And, it was a known and seemingly irrefutable fact that
cholera was most commonly found in those areas of the world least
populated by Christians." [6]

In the ancient [pagan] and in the Christian view that power was
conceived as bad and could transmit to another person the same
sickness. In other words, close proximity to such a person could
induce the same sickness in others. It could not induce sickness
universally, but only in sinners, in 'unprotected' persons and those
who are wicked or corrupted in a similar way to the sufferer. The old
idea of contagion did not contend that the illness was spread
universally amongst all people or that it was transmitted regardless
by some physically detectable particle. These are entirely modern
amendations based upon the bacteria doctrine. Only those deigned by
God to succumb could succumb.

"In ancient civilizations, disease was routinely interpreted as the
consequence of sin, crime, or moral fault, as precipitated by evil
spirits, or as the work of black magic. Disease was thus personalized
and given a moral or religious meaning." [7].

Any moral or religious sense of meaning about illness in the life of
the individual has been entirely eclipsed from view since the bacteria
doctrine displaced prior theories.

One urgent aspect of ancient contagion was how to obtain and confer
protection from sickness. This was a special power exercised by kings
and leaders and by clerics and physicians. Holy water and special
amulets such as religious relics, were used to confer spiritual
protection. This protection bestowed upon a person the ability to work
with the sick without any fear of contagion. Such persons were revered
as very special. Their manifest ability to resist contagion was
abundant confirmation of their spiritual purity. The folk tradition in
most countries is packed with examples of this theme of purity and
contagion.

Several problems exist with the modern bacteria doctrine. One is that
infection is not universal and nor is the disease cured by removal of
the germ. There is also the problem of why someone gets ill and why
others don't. These are partially explained by immunology, but the
suspicion persists in many quarters that some more subtle form of
contagion must still operate. And then there are the inner personal
reasons behind an ill person. Who cares about those any more?
Narrative medicine touches upon some of them; some have been
provisionally adopted by psychology; the rest go begging wherever they
can find a home, mostly among the holistic therapies.

It is also invalid to contend, as many medical historians do,
inebriated as they too often are by the hallucinatory wine of modern
science, that the idea of contagion was the bacteria doctrine in a
simpler form waiting to become somehow completed, modernised or
rendered more sophisticated by the germ theory. As I said, they are
very different ideas and although they both share many concepts like
contagion, transmission, infectivity, susceptibility, protection,
immunity and isolation, quarantine, etc, it is just not true that the
old theory was 'waiting' for the discovery of infective particles that
confirmed and completed the older idea. The older idea was solid and
dependable in its own right, comprising part of a very different
conceptual worldview, and was not really in need of any completion.
And they are as different today as chalk and cheese.

It is also clear that the idea of contagion served a very different
purpose in ancient times than the idea of bacteria in the germ theory.
Contagion, purity and impurity are all aspects of the idea of
resonance between objects, persons and events within a magical or
religious conception of the world. Cures can be induced by subtle
means using resonance, sympathy and the natural power in cognate
objects. The doctrine of signatures was also thoroughly imbued with
this very idea of resonance and healing was as much a form of
contagion as the illness itself. He caught the illness and must now
catch the cure. Powdered rhino horn and lion's tooth are magical
medicines because of the place they come from and their functions in
the lives of the animals. A very different type of rationale from
chemistry!

Disease as contagionism in the ancient world is, therefore, merely one
example of a more generalised belief in contagion, sympathy, analogy
[good and bad] and what we might call a 'spiritual resonance' between
people, places, things and events. It is instructive to contemplate
the relevance of such notions to medicine today. To some extent these
old ideas will never go away - they queue patiently at the back door -
and must eventually be re-admitted into mainstream medicine. They are
integral aspects of the way patients [human beings] integrate illness
into their own life experience and how they conceptualise the world we
live in to be. Science blunders on heedless of these subtle realities,
but they are real and lasting aspects of pathology too long ignored.
Just as pesticides will never destroy malarial mosquitoes, so it seems
just as bizarre - and as futile - that medicine should continue to
commit itself to an assault upon the world of bacteria. Conceptually,
there is an error in such a policy.

Sources:

[1] BMJ letter, Bernadette Purcell, Germ theory predates discovery of
microbes, 9 March 2001
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/322/7284/498#EL4

[2] Illnesses in the 1800's 19th Century Responses By G. William
Beardslee, Causation: Sin, Contagion, Miasma, Injustice, Ethnicity,
and Race?
http://www.thackerworld.com/USHistory/ushist07.htm

[3] Amundsen, Darrel W, Medicine, Society, and Faith in the Ancient
and Medieval Worlds, Johns Hopkins University Press. Baltimore, 1996,
295

[4] Amundsen, 289

[5] 'Disease' by Roy Porter, in Hutchinson Family Encyclopoedia:
http://ebooks.whsmithonline.co.uk/encyclopedia/52/F0000152.htm

[6] Illnesses in the 1800's 19th Century Responses By G. William
Beardslee, Causation: Sin, Contagion, Miasma, Injustice, Ethnicity,
and Race?
http://www.thackerworld.com/USHistory/ushist07.htm

[7] 'Disease' by Roy Porter, in Hutchinson Family Encyclopoedia:
http://ebooks.whsmithonline.co.uk/encyclopedia/52/F0000152.htm

The Disease Detectives, Bernadette Purcell, BMJ 2001; 322: 498 [24
February]
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/322/7284/498

http://www.homeoint.org/morrell/otherarticles/contagionism.htm