Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Figure 1 The Danish States: Denmark, Norway, and Schleswig-Holstein in the eighteenth century
- Preface
- Figure 2 Denmark in the eighteenth century
- The Danish Revolution 1500–1800
- Introduction
- Part I Denmark, 1500–1750: A Country in an Ecological Crisis
- Part II The Ecological Revolution
- Part III The New Denmark
- 5 Landscape
- 6 Labour Burden and Social Structure
- 7 The Disease Pattern
- 8 Power
- Part IV The Driving Forces behind the Danish Revolution, 1500–1800
- Part V The Inheritance
- Appendix 1 Currency, Weights, and Measures
- Appendix 2 Reigns of Danish Kings and Queens
- Sources and Bibliography
- Index
7 - The Disease Pattern
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Figure 1 The Danish States: Denmark, Norway, and Schleswig-Holstein in the eighteenth century
- Preface
- Figure 2 Denmark in the eighteenth century
- The Danish Revolution 1500–1800
- Introduction
- Part I Denmark, 1500–1750: A Country in an Ecological Crisis
- Part II The Ecological Revolution
- Part III The New Denmark
- 5 Landscape
- 6 Labour Burden and Social Structure
- 7 The Disease Pattern
- 8 Power
- Part IV The Driving Forces behind the Danish Revolution, 1500–1800
- Part V The Inheritance
- Appendix 1 Currency, Weights, and Measures
- Appendix 2 Reigns of Danish Kings and Queens
- Sources and Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The ecological revolution influenced not only the landscape and the social structure but also the world that is only visible under a microscope, the infinite microworld of bacteria and parasites. Some of the diseases that had terrorized the population for centuries disappeared – plague was one of these. Others were forced back; malaria, for example, which by the year 1800 was on its way out of the disease pattern. On the other hand, tuberculosis emerged from relative obscurity and was ready to assume the role of great killer as soon as the last remaining competitor, smallpox, had been eliminated; after a long preliminary attempt, this was finally achieved just after 1800. The nineteenth century became the century of tuberculosis.
PLAGUE
Plague is caused by the bacillus Pasteurella pestis. Pasteurella pestis has its ecological basis far from human beings, both geographically and biologically, and comes into contact with them only in exceptional circumstances. A modus vivendi has never been established between human beings and the plague bacillus as it has with most of the other infectious diseases, AIDS being the latest and perhaps most important exception. This explains the violence with which plague attacks, and still attacks, when it goes astray amongst human beings, as occasionally happens, for example, in the western United States and in parts of the former Soviet Union.
The plague bacillus has its focus, or permanent base, amongst burrow-dwelling rodents such as squirrels and beavers.
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- Information
- The Danish Revolution, 1500–1800An Ecohistorical Interpretation, pp. 179 - 197Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994