Читать книгу Modern Epidemics - Salvador Macip - Страница 28

Some theories hold that an infection might have been the cause of the founding of the Anglican Church. Henry VIII was having problems fathering children with Catherine of Aragon, possibly because he’d had syphilis some years earlier. Since Catholic doctrine wouldn’t permit his divorce, he decided to create a new church with its own rules, including one that said that marriage didn’t have to be for life. So, a bacterium could have been responsible for the changes in sixteenth-century European morality which led to puritanism.

The French tried to construct a canal in Panama in 1880, but a yellow fever epidemic thwarted the project for almost twenty years. In the end, it was finally achieved by the United States in 1913 once the yellow fever was under control. The same disease had killed 10 per cent of the inhabitants of New York at the beginning of the eighteenth century. In 1802, the French army in Haiti lost a good number of its men, including the general, to yellow fever, which made it easier for the slaves to win the island’s independence.

Microbes have fortuitously played a part in many historic decisions. For example, the army of Charles VIII of France had to discontinue its occupation of Naples at the end of the fifteenth century because of a syphilis epidemic, which was more severe in those days than the form of the disease that has survived until the present day. Other diseases like typhus have determined the results of entire wars, for instance when the defeat of the French army prevented Napoleon from conquering the whole of Europe. In fact, it’s believed that, in most wars until the middle of the twentieth century, more people died because of infections than as a direct result of combat.