Abstract
Bloodsucking insects and other arthropods have had great influence on the history of mankind by causing epidemics that have been reported in many books, e.g., the Bible, and anecdotal narratives. They have contributed to defeating armies, like those of Napoleon during the invasions of Palestine, Haiti, and Russia, usually causing more morbidity and mortality than by battles. Insects and other arthropods have also been utilized as weapons, since the Paleolithic until now, and could possibly be dangerous as terrorist devices.
The knowledge of the influence of arthropod-borne diseases in history and the history of their discoveries and epidemiology is very useful for the understanding of disease transmission and prevention. Considering social and climatic changes, the distribution in the past can provide information on their possible occurrence nowadays.
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Notes
- 1.
In classes of genetics in my undergraduate course in 1972, cervical cancer was associated to promiscuity , and just some years later HPV was incriminated as a cause of such cancer. In 1842, analysis of data from death certificates of women in Verona from 1760 to 1839 already had related such cancer to sexual contacts.
- 2.
- 3.
There are three chapters in Quran in the honor of insects which are called The Ants (Al Naml) , Chapter 27; The Bees (Al Nahl), Chapter 16; and The Spider, Chapter 29. Eight arthropods were mentioned in the Quran: moths (Chapter 101, verse 4), ants (Chapter 27, verse 18), honeybees (Chapter 16, verse 68), flies (Chapter 22, verse 73), mosquitoes or gnats (Chapter 2, verse 26), locusts (Chapter 54 verse 7 and Chapter 7 verse 133), lice (Chapter 7, verse 133), and spiders (Chapter 29, verse 41). God tries to show his ability in creation of living beings and emphasizes that just he can do it as in the case of flies and mosquitoes or gnats (Mycetophilidae). Also God punished sinful people with lice and locusts. God mentions that ants speak with each other, honey which is made by honeybees is used for healing, moths to describe the situation of people on judgment day , and the “house web ” which is made by spider is very weak (from Amer Al-Jawabreh, Reza Yaghoobi, and Alon Warburg).
- 4.
“Nul bain pendant mille ans” and “la guerre que le moyen âge déclara et à la chair, et à la propreté, devait porter son fruit” in the original 1862 version of Michelet’s book (“La Sorcière”). The translator of the book to English (F. J. Trotter) recognized to have done some modifications, due to different readers (men in France and “drawing-room ladies, who tolerate grossness only in the theaters and the columns of the newspapers”).
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A very complete and interesting review of the history of discoveries on plague etiology and history
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The city capitulated to Russian army on 30 September 1710, and from ~20,000 inhabitants in August, about 15,000 had died of the plague by mid-December. Surviving Swedish troops and some citizens were authorized to leave by ship and carried the plague to Finland (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Northern_War_plague_outbreak#Lithuania.2C_Livonia.2C_Estonia). Simultaneous outbreaks occurred in several nearby countries.
- 7.
Sans moustiques, les Etats-Unis pourraient être francophones—that is, “without mosquitoes, the United States might be French-speaking” (Lockwood 2009).
- 8.
These horses would produce approximately 1277 tons of dung per day and 128 billion of flies per year (http://www.banhdc.org/archives/ch-hist-19711000.html).
- 9.
The term was originally coined for Sierra Leone, Britain’s first West African colony, conceived as a home for slaves freed after slavery was declared illegal in Britain (http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/kenanderson/histemp/whitemansgrave.html).
- 10.
According to an African song , The poor white man, faint and weary/Came to sit under our tree/He has no mother to bring him milk/No wife to grind his corn/Let us pity the white man (Spielman and D’Antonio 2001).
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- 14.
Many Chinese prisoners (“maruta”) were maintained in cages, infected by plague bacillus, and bled to infect millions of fleas (Lockwood 2009).
- 15.
The Chinese provinces of Yunnan and Shandong were called “the Hiroshima and Nagasaki of China ” (Lockwood 2009).
- 16.
This name (Бoльшaя игpa, Bolshaya Igra, in Russian) has been utilized to designate the dispute for the Central Asia, the so-called Stans , developed from 1837 to 1907, between Great Britain and Russia. The expression was created by Captain Arthur Conolly (one of the victims in Bokhara) and popularized by Rudyard Kipling, in “Kim.”
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A human case, the first in Brazil, was observed in the state of Piauí in the end of 2014.
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This brilliant scientist, born in Guadeloupe in 1808, also associated, in 1853, the “striped-legged mosquito ” (Aedes aegypti, “zancudo bobo”) to yellow fever (Agramonte 1908).
- 20.
Albert F. A. King (1841–1914) presented and elaborated his hypothesis on the role of mosquitoes in the transmission of malaria to the Philosophical Society of Washington in 1882 (also proposing to protect Washington from malaria encircling the city with a wire screen as high as the Washington Monument) and published it in 1883. He served in both sides in the American Civil War and helped the president Lincoln just after he was shot.
- 21.
Nobel Prize in 1902 should possibly have been shared by R. Ross and these two Italian workers, and the 1928 one on exanthematic typhus, given to C. Nicolle, forgot Henrique Rocha Lima, who described Rickettsia prowazekii (http://www.invivo.fiocruz.br/cgi/cgilua.exe/sys/start.htm?infoid=752&sid=7).
- 22.
“The narrow valleys are very unhealthy where two kinds of maladies are noted; these diseases are also present in other cool provinces. One is verruga [Carrion’s disease ], which happens to be very troublesome and dangerous if not accompanied by cutaneous eruptions. The other results in corrosive ulcers , located on the face, is very difficult to cure, and causes the death of some people. It is said that both diseases originate from the bite of a small insect called uta [sand fly]” (translated from Spanish by Herrer and Christensen 1975).
- 23.
Edmond Sergent (1876–1969) was the director of Pasteur Institute of Algeria for over 60 years (1900–1963), with 592 publications (Dedet 2006).
- 24.
This observation of laypeople, like that on uta , stimulates the adaptation of the nineteenth-century Russian Narodnik proposal: “Go to the people.”
- 25.
Lockwood (2009) included a detailed (and vivid) description of delousing in a German prisoner camp in WW1.
- 26.
A campaign developed by Brazilian colleagues probably jeopardized his nomination, twice pondered, for Nobel Prize (Lewinsohn 2003).
- 27.
More details on vector incrimination are in Chap. 2.
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Acknowledgments
To Amer Al-Jawabreh, Dietmar Steverding, Domenico Otranto, Jeffrey Lockwood, Kosta Mumcuoglu, and Reza Yaghoob for information useful for this chapter.
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Marcondes, C.B. (2017). Arthropod-Borne Diseases and History. In: Marcondes, C. (eds) Arthropod Borne Diseases. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13884-8_3
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