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Tracing the History of a Plague - Part One

© Adelle Vancil Tilton

Five Hundred years before Christ, the Greek writer Thucydides wrote of a mysterious plague that struck the city of Athens during the Peloponnesian War. In this three part series, using a technique called retrodiagnosis, I'll explore the background, symptoms and finally the solution to this literary and medical mystery. Why in a public health issues column? Because this is the first true example of both bioterrorism and of epidemiology - a topic that this column will be dedicated to for some time. Understanding the present and the future is much easier if you understand the past.

Throughout history, mankind has been fascinated with natural disasters, and the plagues that sweep across continents, devastating everything in their path have become a theme carried through in even our earliest literature. The Bible describes the plagues that befell Egypt during the time of Moses, and writers of the classical period in Greece continued that theme in many of their works. Their descriptions give readers today, as they did in the past, an insight into the seriousness of these mysterious illnesses that changed the course of human history.

Thucydides, in his Histories (431 B.C.), spends no less than eight chapters describing in minute detail the effects of The Plague of Athens. While he had many reasons for writing about this subject, perhaps the most compelling was that he was a victim of the plague himself. He is especially fascinated by the fact that the physicians of the day were unable to check the spread of disease, and in descriptions of the effects of the plague on society and on the individual victims.

The descriptions of the suffering of victims as recorded by Thucydies, rival those of modern epidemiologists when they record symptoms in their reports today. His descriptions are often so detailed that readers are able to experience the terror that ensued when the word plague was even mentioned in the countryside. His careful powers of observation give us some of the first recorded descriptions of the physical and emotional effects of a pandemic illness, and even provide detailed treatment notes regarding the actions taken to care for the victims. In fact, Thucydies gives us a very good example of the spread of a plague and traces the origins of the Athenian plague to Ethiopia.

If Hippocrates is the father of modern medicine, then perhaps his contemporary, Thucydides, should be considered the father of epidemiology. It is through is writings that we see one of the first examples of the scientific method applied to the search the medical truths, rather than depending on the mythology of his era to explain the causes of a plague that devastated his home and indeed his life.

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