1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [204]
The three main counterarguments against the America-as-origin theory are, first, that Treponema pallidum may have existed in Europe before Columbus. Archaeologists have turned up a few medieval skeletons, most of them in Britain, carrying what look like the marks of syphilis. Although pre-1492 syphilitic skeletons exist in the Americas, even a few European exemplars would undermine the Columbus-as-Typhoid-Mary case. Indeed, some medical researchers propose that syphilis has always existed worldwide, but manifested itself differently in different places. Second, the 1495 outbreak may not have been the introduction of a new disease but the recognition of an old one, which until then had been confused with Hansen’s disease (or, as it was known, leprosy). Descriptions of syphilis during and after the 1494–95 epidemic and Hansen’s before it are surprisingly similar; both were “treated” with mercury. In 1490 the pope abolished all of the leprosaria in Europe, allowing hordes of sick people to return home. Could that humanitarian gesture also have unleashed a storm of syphilis? At least some researchers think it likely.
The third counterargument is psychological. In part, as Alfred Crosby admitted, he initially devoted attention to the possible American origin of syphilis “because I was uneasy about so many diseases crossing west over the Atlantic and none going east.” He thought there must be some sort of “epidemiological-geographical symmetry.” Other historians followed suit. Later Crosby realized that examining the evidence in the hope of redressing the infectious balance was a mistake. “They want pox in Europe to balance the scales for smallpox in Mexico,” Vine Deloria Jr. told me. “They’re all hoping to find there’s a real Montezuma’s Revenge.”
Yet even if syphilis did originate in the New World, the scales would not be balanced. Syphilis is fascinating, “like all things venereal,” Crosby wrote in 2003, “but it was not a history-maker” like smallpox. Treponema pallidum, awful as it was and is, did not help topple empires or push whole peoples to extinction. “There was little symmetry in the exchange of diseases between the Old and the New Worlds,” Crosby said, “and there are few factors as influential in the history of the last half millennium as that.”
APPENDIX D
Calendar Math
Dictionaries define the calendar almost as if it were a machine: “a system for fixing the beginning, length, and divisions of the civil year.” But in every society calendars are much more than that. People experience time as both linear and circular. On the one hand, it marches remorselessly from birth to death, a vector with fixed endpoints and a constant velocity. On the other hand, time is cyclical, with the wheel of the seasons endlessly spinning, and no clear end or beginning. Calendars are records of a culture’s attempt to weight and reconcile these different visions.
In early European societies, the end of the year was regarded as dangerous: a period when the calendar literally runs out of days, the landscape is blanketed by night and cold, and nobody can be truly certain that the heavens would usher in a new year. Embodying that mysterious time when the end of the calendar somehow looped round and rejoined itself at the beginning, Romans celebrated Saturnalia, an upside-down week when masters served their servants and slaves held the great offices of state. The Christian calendar bracketed the strange, perilous final days of the year on one end with the birth