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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Strangemonkey" data-source="post: 1904274" data-attributes="member: 6533">Point One: Diseases universally had an affect on New World history but the affect was varied according to where you were.  In the worst hit areas, the casualty rates that were mentioned elsewhere weren't so much a product of the disease itself as the society unravelling afterwards.  The NE United States had a casualty rate estimated at between 70-90% but a lot of that was post-plague starvation as the disease took out your best bread winners and left the rest to starve.  That pattern is one of the reasons, to the best of my knowledge, there's still a big debate over what the disease was.  The theory I've heard that I like best is that it was some combination of small-pox, which we know moved through the area again about a generation afterwards, and the flu, which in the Spanish flu epidemic of the early 20th created a similar pattern of extinction in 'primitive' cultures by taking out the otherwise healthy young men.  The biggest European plagues, on the other hand, were actually pretty good for the culture.  The Black Plague was awful for everyone on a moral and spiritual level, but actually represented a sort of economic windfal for a culture that a lot of scholars believe was at the limits of its sustainability.  Now the plagues of the Dark Ages weren't good for anybody and did serve as predicates for later invasions and migrations.Africa I don't know too much about, save the folllowing: diseases did cross the Indian Ocean and Sahara already.  There were no large empires to easily take out and run.  The nations that first came into contact with Africa had already had some contact with African economies, at least indirectly, through the Sahara caravan routes and were more interested in trade than conquest.  Africans also already knew about the horse and stirrup and had guns.Point 2.5: Syphillis.  There is some debate about this, but there is considerable evidence that Syphillis was an American disease that crossed over into the old world.  And caused no end of problems.  Not so useful militarily, however, since it follows armies rather than preceeding them.  Voltaire has a fantastically funny argument about how it was ok that Europe got syphillis out of the new world since it also got chocolate.Point 3: Guns, Germs, and Steel is the popular classic in this regard, but it's a lot more historical than bio-historical, to coin a term, I've seen cool articles on individual plagues, there are some fantastic ones on the plague that hit Athens during the Peloppenessian war a group of doctors had something similar hit in the American Mid-west and concluded that it was the flu accompanied by toxic shock syndrome and that the weird crowded conditions in Athens were the reason it developed that way and never got seen again, but I don't know what the big best book would be.There was a very cool book on the Spanish flu that pretty much serves as my gold standard for an awesome disease book on history.</blockquote>

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