88

The Structures o f Everyday Life

the next. Plague occurred in Amsterdam every year from 1622 to 1628 (the toll: 35,000 dead). It struck Paris in 1612, 1619, 1631, 1638, 1662, 1668 (the last).188 It should be noted that after 1612 in Paris the sick were forcibly removed from their homes and transferred to the Hpital Saint-Louis and to the maison de Sant in the faubourg Saint-Marcel.189 Plague struck London five times between 1593 and 1664-5, claiming, it is said, a total of 156,463 victims. Everything improved in the eighteenth century. Yet the plague of 1720 in Toulon and Marseilles was extremely virulent. According to one historian, a good half of the population of Marseilles succumbed190 The streets were full of half-rotted bodies, gnawed by dogs 1 9 1 The cycle o f diseases Diseases appear and alternately establish themselves or retreat. Some die out. This happened in the case of leprosy, which may well have been conquered in Europe in the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries by draconian isolation measures. (Today, strangely enough, lepers at large never spread infection.) It was also true of cholera, which disappeared from Europe during the nineteenth century; of smallpox, which seems to have been eliminated for good during recent years; and it may be true of tuberculosis and syphilis, which are now in retreat before the miracle of antibiotics. One cannot, however, make any definite claims for the future, because syphilis is said to be reappearing today with some virulence. This had also been true of plague: after a long absence between the eighth and the fourteenth century, it broke out violently as the Black Death in 1348, ushering in a new plague cycle which did not die out until the eighteenth century.19 2 In fact these virulent attacks and retreats might have originated from the fact that humanity had lived behind barriers for so long, dispersed, as it were, on different planets, so that the exchange of contagious germs between one group and another led to catastrophic surprise attacks, depending on the extent to which each had its own habits, resistance or weakness in relation to the patho genic agent concerned. This is demonstrated with amazing clarity in a recent book by William H. MacNeill.193 Ever since man escaped from his primitive brutishness and came to dominate all other living creatures, he has exerted over them the macroparasitism of the predator. But he is at the same time constantly attacked and besieged by minute organisms - germs, bacilli and viruses - and is thus a prey to microparasitism. Is this mighty struggle at some deep level the essential history of mankind? It is perpetuated by linked chains of living beings: the pathogen which may, under certain circumstances survive independently, usually passes from one living organism to another. Man, who is one, but not the only target of this continual bombardment, adapts himself, secretes anti bodies and may arrive at an acceptable equilibrium with these foreign creatures that live with him. But the process of adaptation and immunity takes time. If some pathogen escapes from its biological niche and is unleashed on a hitherto