Our history is like ropes spliced together as we go along. There was a time it was fashionable to hold Spain as the culprit for all the miseries or mass extinctions of native cultures in the New World. At present there is a controversy going on among the Mexican academics as to what caused the mass deaths. A revisionist view that it was caused by rats and not by the Spaniards is causing a stir. It owes partly to the finding of a first-had account of a report that was wrongly filed in the archives. Dr. Francisco Hernandez, a physician to the Spanish king who witnessed the epidemic of 1576 and conducted autopsies, describes a fever that caused heavy bleeding, similar to the hemorrhagic Ebola virus. It raced through the Indian population, killing four out of five people infected, often within a day or two.
"Blood flowed from the ears and in many cases blood truly gushed from the nose," he wrote. "Of those with recurring disease, almost none was saved."
Harvard-trained epidemiologist Dr. Rodolfo Acuna-Soto, a microbiology professor at Mexico's National Autonomous University, had Hernandez' work translated from the original Latin in 2000. He followed up with research into outbreaks in Mexico's isolated central highlands, where indigenous rats may have spread the disease through urine and droppings.
Acuna-Soto's theory — which has been published in several scientific journals, including Emerging Infectious Diseases and the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene — runs counter to the belief that most of Mexico's Indian population died of Spanish-imported diseases such as smallpox, to which their bodies had no immunity.
"This wasn't smallpox," Acuna-Soto says. "The pathology just does not fit."
He says some historians in Mexico are offended by his theory.
Further reading:
"Much of the reason why these epidemics were left unstudied was that it was politically and institutionally easier to blame the Spaniards for all of the horrible things that might have happened," he said. "It was the official version of history."
Certainly, imported diseases such as smallpox, measles and typhoid fever did cause huge numbers of deaths starting in 1521. But the epidemics of 1545 and 1576 struck survivors of the first die-offs and their children, who would presumably have developed some immunity.
While there is no reliable figure on Mexico's population in the 1500s — estimates range from 6 million to 25 million — it is clear that by 1600 only around 2 million remained.
The epidemic "was so big that it ruined and destroyed almost the entire land," wrote Fray Juan de Torquemada, a Franciscan historian who witnessed the epidemic of 1576, adding Mexico "was left almost empty."
"Many were dead and others almost dead, and nobody had the health or strength to help the diseased or bury the dead."
Conclusion:
We learn history from such incomplete and often from distorted viewpoints of those who stand to gain from it. Isn’t it necessary then to develop a spirit of enquiry first before jumping into the bandwagon of this or that ‘isms’ or factions? All the more reason that a nation stands to benefit from investing its capital in education.
Democracy without education at it core is like letting the bind and deaf to drink and giving the car keys to him to ride home alone.
benny
Labels: history
