Were the endemic diseases just less severe?
In: Other
Europe had much more abundant cities, which means alot more people were closer together
Naturally, cities lead to many more diseases, but it also means your body is better equipped for them
Native Americans didn’t have nearly as many people packed together, so they weren’t as prepared as the Europeans when encountering new diseases
They did. Native Americans of modern US didn’t have many diseases, living off the land and generally pretty healthily (since land was pretty good/habitable). That’s why their immune system was weaker as well.
But in South America, exotic diseases in rainforests and swamps, various ticks and mosquitoes and such did mess with Europeans quite a bit – malaria, yellow fever, and dengue fever and so on.
Having large cities leads to diseases evolving. Something like Smallpox in a small isolated community would result in either everyone dying or developing antibodies to it pretty quickly. It works different in a large city though. There are people moving to the city fast enough for it to have a constant supply of new people to infect.
European settlers brought these diseases that developed in their major cities. Native Americans had no real equivalent. The largest settlement was maybe 10% as large as London, and it was an outlier.
I highly recommend CGPGrey’s YouTube video on exactly this question [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk)
The very very short version is that plagues need plentiful domesticated animals and highly densely populated cities to jump species and also have enough human fodder to spread to without burning out by killing everyone, and the New World did not have those things together in plenty.
This is kind of a myth.
There is [a whole section of the /r/askhistorians FAQ](https://np.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/nativeamerican#wiki_disease_in_the_americas) on Disease in the Americas.
The simple answer is that both parts of your question aren’t entirely right. The Europeans did bring diseases to North America, but it wasn’t the diseases *alone* which caused so much devastation in the North American native population. It was the new diseases on top of violence, starvation, being driven from their lands and homes, and generally not having access to the resources they needed to maintain a healthy population. If it was just the new diseases the Native American populations probably would have bounced back and been fine – it was all those things on top of each other that caused population problems.
Kind of like the difference between being sick (say with a cold) and being able to take a few days off, curl up in bed, with someone to provide you with food and generally care for you, with being sick when stuck outside without shelter, with no food and limited water, and possibly being chased by someone who wants to kill you for existing. You’re going to have a much harder time getting better.
Similarly there absolutely were diseases in the Native American populations that caused serious problems for the European colonists, and some were brought back to Europe and caused devastation there. Tuberculosis has been the most deadly infectious disease to humans pretty consistently for centuries, and it was introduced to Europe from North America. Syphilis is also a major infectious disease that was spread from North America to Europe by European colonists.
There were plenty of European colonies that suffered very high fatality rates due to diseases – some collapsing completely. There were just always more people from Europe willing to come over (or to be brought over by force).
The Americas didn’t have that many endemic infectious diseases. There just wasn’t the factors that led to their development, the Old World was full of dense cities, connected by long trade routes, the domestication of animals took a hold of the Old World and many infectious originally came from this relationship (zoonotic diseases), and there just were more people for diseases to thrive and adapt. Meanwhile the New World was fairly disconnected, animal husbandry was a lot less common than in the Old World and the population was much smaller.
Syphilis is thought to have existed in pre-contact America. And there’s some studies that show tuberculosis was also present due to seal hunting. But overall, the conditions to develop infectious diseases capable of causing epidemics weren’t there.
Europe attaches to Asian and Africa, and these three continents passed around a lot more communicable disease that the two America continents did. Keep in mind that the reason descendants of the three continents are immune to so much is because they are the descendants of those who survived long enough to have kids. That’s why Bubonic Plague is no longer a thing, we’re all immune to it.
Besides that, a whole lot of the tribes westerners encountered were very isolated, and isolation means you don’t pass around a lot of disease, so your offspring don’t inherit your immunity.
However (there is always a However), there is syphilis, which appears to have come to Europe by way of the Spanish who conquered the Aztecs. Old joke about Americans and Europeans (white) who go to Mexico and get diarrhea. They call it Montezuma’s Revenge. Well, the real revenge was syphilis. This disease was well established with the Aztecs, who were a very large tribe who conquered a lot of other tribes before the Spanish conquered them.
wasn’t the mid Atlantic area ( in US ) an endemic malarial swamp ?
There are a lot of theories here, several of which are sound.
Europe, Asia, and Africa simply had a lot more people, so more diseases. The people they did have, generally more cities with more density, and then vast trade networks that spread diseases around. The animals those people raised and interacted with tended to have more diseases that could jump to humans and were more serious (notably from cattle).
To some degree it was dumb luck. There are a bunch of diseases which killed a lot of people in childhood in Europe, but then left you mostly immune until old age or your whole life. The problem is that when those diseases hit populations with no immunity, even into the mid 1800s when governments were really trying to avoid the spread, they would hit a village of people and kill 60-80% of everyone, all the potential caregivers would get sick at the same time as everyone else and then that was it. Those diseases could have been different, or it could have just been bad luck if North American bison or alpacas or something carried some very serious disease for people and it spread to Europe. When we talk about these things, it is mostly odds. More people, in more cities, more trade, more exposure to animals that can carry human diseases (cattle, rats, birds) all increase the chances of those diseases. But it could have gone the other way.
Europe probably had a sea between the cities and the diseases, meaning whoever got infected of malaria or dengue would probably be cured or dead before reaching their home. Americans had their homes right there next to the sources of infection.
Latest Answers