Columbian Exchange III. Diseases

If the exchange of plants and animals between the Old and the New World, resulting from the oceanic voyages started in 1492, was of mutual benefit, there is no question that the exchange of diseases was almost one-directional and devastating for Native Americans.

We are painfully aware of the consequences of a viral infection. Europeans brought with them a series of deadly virus and bacteria like measles, smallpox, influenza, cholera, mumps, typhus, malaria and whooping cough, just to name some.

Transmission electron micrograph of smallpox virions (commons.wikimedia.org)

As Dobyns says “Before the invasion of peoples of the New World by pathogens that evolved among inhabitants of the Old World, Native Americans lived in a relatively disease-free environment.” In other words, they were immunologically defenseless. Estimates suggest that in the first century after Columbus’ voyage, the Native American population dropped down to 5–20% of the original inhabitants.

Witness to this massive loss of life was the Spanish Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún, author of the Florentine Codex, a 16th-century ethnographic research study in Meso-America entitled La historia universal de las cosas de Nueva España (Universal History of the Things of New Spain). He learned the Aztec language and transcribed history and customs as told him by the Aztec elders.

“But before the Spaniards had risen against us, first there came to be prevalent a great sickness, a plague. It was in Tepeilhuitl that it originated, that there spread over the people a great destruction of men. Some it indeed covered [with pustules]; they were spread everywhere, on one’s face, on one’s head, on one’s breast, etc. There was indeed perishing; many indeed died of it. No longer could they walk; they only lay in their abodes, in their beds. No longer could they move, no longer could they bestir themselves, no longer could they raise themselves, no longer could they stretch themselves out face down, no longer could they stretch themselves out on their backs.” (Book XII, translation by Anderson and Dibble).

Image of smallpox disease form the Florentine Codex (commons.wikimedia.org)

Although still under discussion, it seems that the Europeans brought back from America venereal syphilis, a disease that in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries was frequently fatal and with much more severe symptoms than nowadays (Nunn and Qian, 2010). While not decimating the population, it was still a disease which caused remarkable social disruption. [Silvana Munzi]