European Reading Challenge #2

I read this history for the European Reading Challenge 2024.

Malaria: A Neglected Factor in the History of Greece and Rome - William Henry Samuel Jones (1876 - 1963)

Winner of the 1902 Nobel Prize as the scientist who first described how mosquitoes spread malaria, biologist Ronald Ross says in the introduction that he had always thought that historians did not take sufficiently into account the role of disease in history. So he collaborated with Jones, a classicist and historian, in supporting the claim that the decline of Greece in the 4^th century BCE was due in part to malaria.

In this short book, Jones asserts that malaria was introduced into Greece in the 5^th century BCE by soldiers, merchants or slaves coming from Asia and Africa, both hotbeds of malaria. He cites persuasive evidence for its prevalence because the Greek physicians of the day described symptoms associated with malaria (e.g. enlargement of the spleen, different periodicities of fevers). By the 4^th century, malaria had become prevalent enough, Jones goes out on a limb to claim, to account for sentimentalism in art, pessimism in philosophy, and decay in morals and ethics. Jones says malaria made the Greeks “weak and inefficient.”

As for Rome, Jones argues that malaria was endemic in the city by the 2^nd century BCE. He conjectures that it was introduced by Hannibal's Carthaginian mercenaries. The Roman physicians did not write much about the treatment of malaria so evidence of its prevalence in Rome and its harmful effects on individual Romans comes from non-medical writers such as poets, satirists, comedians, and men of letters. As for the effects on society, Jones says, “The terrible pictures of life in the first century A.D., as painted by Tacitus and Juvenal, show that Roman society was not only wicked but diseased. The extravagant cruelty, the wild desire for excitement, the absence of soberness and self-control, all point clearly to some physical defect.”

When this book was released in 1907, the response was mixed. Scholars granted the justness of the arguments for the high probability that malaria did in fact become endemic in ancient Greece and Rome. But scholars of the classics and malariology derided the claim that malaria was an important factor in the downfall of classical civilizations. Jones was derisively nicknamed Malaria Jones.

The criticism was so sharp and the nickname perhaps so hurtful that Jones dropped this topic and did not build on this book after its 1907 release. In 1908 he was appointed a Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge, and despite ill health in following years he did illustrious work administrating as Dean, Steward and Bursar, and President until his retirement in 1945. He must have demonstrated fine qualities as a leader to have been able to herd the cats that made up academic departments then (and now).

In Jones’ day the conception “interdisciplinary” did not really exist. It’s rather a pity that this early experiment in interdisciplinary studies – the humanities meets the biological sciences – derailed the career of an individual scholar and was not seminal in the study of interactions among economics, health sciences, sociology, and politics.

In our day, however, disease in history gets much scholarly attention (especially pandemics for some reason). And historians still cite Jones’ work and not just as an example of cringe-inducing scholarship from the benighted days of empire, social Darwinism, and racism.

This book is still easily found on the web, an example of lucid writing and logical argument that can be enjoyed by the lay hardcore reader.

Online: Librivox and Internet Archive