Human kindness counts.
There are, of course, going to be those who scoff at this notion, especially in the context of a book about diseases. Their scoffing changes nothing.
One explanation for mass hysteria, according to the New York Times Magazine, is that it is caused by “the maladaptive version of the kind of empathy that finds expression in actual physical sensation: the contagious yawn or sympathetic nausea or the sibling who grabs his own finger when he sees his brother’s bleed.”32
Of course diseases occur independent of mental states, but it is also true that given enough stress, people’s internal miseries can manifest themselves physically. In a culture where being tough or cool means holding back most of your emotions almost all of the time, we are very used to suppressing loneliness or stress or sadness, and just deciding not to think about these feelings rather than admitting them. That’s not an approach that works out really well. Extreme stress can manifest in real, physical, horrifying ways. It’s great to deal with internal turmoil before you dance your feet off. And if you feel you might, talk to someone, who may or may not be a doctor.
We are good at treating people with medicine. It’s one of the most amazing, magical accomplishments of the modern world. But that doesn’t mean that people don’t sometimes require more than medicine. We can all tend to our medicinal gardens, but we can also tend to one another. That’s why every person in this chapter who came up with some crazy recovery plan or religious cure, or who just didn’t believe the people in question were faking, qualifies as a hero in my book.
Smallpox
I was nauseous and tingly all over. I
was either in love or I had smallpox.
—WOODY ALLEN
The impact of the Black Death on European nations from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century is remembered as one of the more horrifying chapters in history. However, European civilization endured. Some of the greatest artistic accomplishments in the Western world coexisted with the plague. Shakespeare’s brother and sisters and his son died of the bubonic plague. Theaters were closed due to the plague during his lifetime. Hans Holbein and Titian painted great works before their deaths from the plague. Would they have preferred to live in a time without the Black Death? Yes. (This is not speculative. I called them all and asked.) But life went on in the face of death. Even the Roman Empire was able to endure for a few hundred years after the Antonine plague. Commodus was able to dither around killing ostriches.
So you might say, “Plague is not such a big deal, then, really.” To which a more compassionate person might reply, “You know, we’ll never read the plays Shakespeare’s son might have produced.” To be fair, they probably wouldn’t have been that good. When children of famous people try to follow in their parents’ footsteps, the output is decidedly mixed. However, I imagine a good bit of genius and human accomplishment were lost to the bubonic plague, even if European society did not completely collapse.
But if your definition of a big deal is the total destruction of a civilization, here is a plague for you. After being exposed to smallpox, the Aztec and Incan societies were devastated almost instantly. One year they were among the greatest civilizations in the world. The next year they basically didn’t exist.
A front-runner in “historical outcomes you would not expect” was Francisco Pizarro’s defeat of the Inca monarch Atahualpa—who was regarded as a god—in 1532. Atahualpa had an army of eighty thousand soldiers; Pizarro had a force of 168 men, of whom only 62 had horses.1 Not only did the Spanish army kill seven thousand Incan soldiers the first night, Pizarro supposedly captured Atahualpa within minutes. After he did so, he promised Atahualpa, “We treat our prisoners and conquered enemies with mercy and only make war on those who make war on us. And, being able to destroy them, we refrain from doing so, but rather pardon them.”2 Anyone who has read about the Spaniards’ treatment of native populaces during this period will recognize this statement as being the opposite of true. I can’t even call it a lie, because there are plenty of big-fish stories and friendly white lies that are not the precise opposite of everything your society has ever done. Pizarro then demanded an entire room—twenty-two feet long by seventeen feet wide—full of gold in exchange for Atahualpa’s life. The Incas peacefully provided the gold in the hope that the Spaniards would take it and leave. Pizarro then killed Atahualpa. Before the monarch died he promised to convert to Christianity if only the Spaniards would not burn him at the stake, as Incas believed that if a body was burned it could not ascend to the afterlife. They strangled him. Then, after he was dead, they set fire to his corpse.
All that in spite of the fact that, of the Incas, conquistador Pedro Cieza de León wrote: “Had [Pizarro] wished to convert [the Incas] with kind words, this people were so gentle and peaceful that all he needed was those few people with him and he could have done it.”3
Between the conquistadores and the Spanish Inquisition, the Spaniards have a strong history of “doing unimaginably terrible stuff” through the sixteenth century. Christopher Buckley, in But Enough About You, describes the Spaniards’ general attitude: “What an excellent time we shall have kidnapping, torturing and burning the Incas alive, to say nothing of raping their women, looting the country and destroying the last of a seven-thousand-year-old line of civilizations—all in the name of the One True Faith!”4
My favorite story about the Spaniards’ horrific relationship to Amerindians comes from John Campbell’s An Account of the Spanish Settlements in America. In this eighteenth-century report Campbell relays how the Spaniards reached Cuba in the sixteenth century and committed “the most horrid barbarities ever to taint the page of history.” Before burning one native at the stake, a Spanish friar told him “that if he would embrace their religion he would go to heaven, but if not he would burn in hell forever.” The Cuban asked if there were any Spaniards in heaven. The friar responded that there were. The Cuban replied, “If it be so, I would rather be with the devils in hell.”5
Sick burn, Cuban guy. Nicely done—high five through time and space.
Now that everyone, including us and Christopher Buckley, is very clear that the Spaniards behaved deplorably in regard to America’s native populace, we can ask how they won such a mismatched battle with the Incas and went on to take over the entire region.
The Spaniards had their own opinions on their success. At the time they seemed to think their unlikely victory was due to the fact that they were excellent Christians. They were zealous and devout. The message that Pizarro’s brothers sent back to King Charles of Spain explained their victory over the Incas: “[It was] not accomplished by our own forces, for there were so few of us. It was by the Grace of God, which is great.”6
I strongly suspect that sixteenth-century Spaniards merely skimmed the numerous “don’t be awful people” portions of the Bible.
A more secular explanation for their victory is that the Spaniards had horses and guns and the Incas did not. The equipment certainly helped, but it’s a stretch to believe that this factor alone would have been adequate against such a large Incan force. For some perspective: 168 people are about the number that a typical Chili’s restaurant can accommodate. Hand all those diners guns—in addition to southwestern eggrolls and fire-grilled corn guacamole because it’s going to be that kind of night—and tell them they’re going to be fighting a mob of eighty thousand people just outside. You might persuade them to join in this bold adventure if they are all extremely religious and you tell them God wants them to do this, but I think they’d still be scared. And remember you are giving them the kind of guns the Spaniards were using at the time, which took forever to load. I just don’t think the diners at Chili’s are going to be enthusiastic. I expect they might wish, in retrospect, that they had stayed home and ordered in.
Hold this fortress at any cost.
Even the fervently religious Spaniards at the time understood that the odds were against them. They were scared. One of Pizarro’s companions wro
te: “The Indians’ camp looked like a very beautiful city. They had so many tents that we were all filled with great apprehension. Until then, we had never seen anything like this in the Indies. It filled all our Spaniards with fear and confusion.”7 Even if they did credit the victory to God, many Spaniards seemed to think it was a weird fluke that they won such a mismatched battle. Especially because Pizarro had waged similar expeditions against the Incas in 1524 and 1526 and found that his army was too small and weak for effective combat against them.
The better explanation for their victory than God intervening on behalf of a bloodthirsty conquering army or the Spaniards’ semi-okay guns and horses was the extent to which the Incas had been devastated by the arrival of smallpox. As the journalist Charles Mann writes: “So complete was the chaos [surrounding the smallpox outbreak] that Francisco Pizarro was able to seize an empire the size of Spain and Italy combined with a force of 168 men.”8
Victory didn’t hinge on guns and horses. It hinged on one man. A lone diseased Spaniard is believed to have introduced smallpox to the Incan society around 1525.
Today we know that smallpox is caused by the Variola virus. Once someone is infected they develop a fever—up to 104 degrees—which is sometimes accompanied by vomiting. Then they break out in a rash, which turns into bumpy pustules filled with clear liquid or pus. These later crust over and fall off, leaving pox marks on the skin.
Now, that description makes the disease sound unsightly but not deadly. Chicken pox (which is caused by a different virus) bears some resemblance and very rarely kills anyone. Meanwhile, smallpox is generally fatal in about 30 percent of the people it infects—though it would kill far more Amerindians. The best we understand it, the very condensed explanation for this death rate, which a wonderful doctor friend of mine provided, is that “smallpox makes your immune system go nuts. You die because your immune system kills you.” The technical term is an uncontrolled immune response. Your immune system identifies an intruding virus or bacteria and, in its attempt to rid the body of the danger, freaks out. Chemicals are released in the bloodstream to fight the infection and trigger inflammation throughout the body. Organs are compromised and may shut down. If your immune system attacks your heart and your heart stops pumping blood effectively, your cells don’t get oxygen. You die. If it attacks your kidneys, your blood can’t be purified. You die.
The chicken pox virus doesn’t generally provoke such a violent response in the body. It mostly just hangs out relatively harmlessly in your cells, sometimes causing new symptoms years later. If you love thinking in metaphorical terms, you could consider your body as a house and the chicken pox virus as an unpleasant former bandmate who wants to crash in your guest room indefinitely. The smallpox virus, however, is Godzilla. If Godzilla was suddenly inside your house, authorities (your immune system) would probably freak out and might firebomb the whole thing in an attempt to get rid of him. Deadbeat chicken pox is uncomfortable, but authorities aren’t going to do much about it. He (chicken pox) is just going to live there, eating your food, having sex on your couch, and drinking your beer forever. You’ll probably forget he’s there after a while.
In some cases smallpox also causes a condition called disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC). There are lots of little proteins in your body called clotting factors that cause your blood to coagulate, which stops you from bleeding to death every time you cut yourself shaving. If DIC occurs, those clotting factors come and start forming little tiny blobs in your bloodstream. Then more clotting factors join, and the blobs become bigger. The end result is that your blood stops clotting normally. You begin bleeding from abnormal places. And if the blobby clots get too big, blood cannot flow properly and your cells do not receive oxygen. Again, you die.
Prior to the outbreak of smallpox, the Inca civilization was thriving, in large part due to the ruler Huayna Capac. When he assumed control in 1493, the empire was already enormous. It stretched from Argentina all the way up to Colombia—encompassing about half of South America. Huayna Capac visited each province to meet with the governors. He oversaw repairs of infrastructure—like irrigation systems—and encouraged the planting of new crops like peanuts and cotton. During this time he commanded over fifty-five thousand troops and waged several victorious campaigns. Drawings from the period depict him being carried into battle on a litter covered in jewels. The great palace Quispiguanca was built as his hunting lodge, a kind of sixteenth-century South American Versailles, and there he partied and gambled with his favorite courtiers and generals. Meanwhile his wife amused herself tending to a flock of doves.9 (This detail about the doves isn’t really important. It just strikes me as a nice, civilized image. A dove is the most refined pet I can imagine.)
It was a good time to be Incan!
But that was before smallpox began to afflict the empire. Huayna Capac died of the disease in 1527. So did all of his favorite generals and most of his family. Supposedly on his deathbed Huayna Capac named his infant son as his heir, but by the time he did so, that baby had died as well. Then Huayna Capac said, “My father the sun is calling me. I shall go to rest by his side,” which are very poetic last words. Unfortunately, better last words would have been a definitive statement on the order of succession. People couldn’t decide whether Huayna Capac would have rather seen the country ruled by his legitimate son, Huáscar, or his favorite illegitimate son, Atahualpa.
Obviously, any confusion about who is going to rule is not desirable. It leads to civil wars. But dynastic squabbles were common among the Incas, and the people would have been happy with whoever emerged victorious in battle as their ruler. Huáscar and Atahualpa assembled armies, and a bitter civil war began to determine who would succeed Huayna Capac. Unfortunately, this war killed off many of their warriors while more were falling victim to smallpox. The Incas were experiencing great numbers of fatalities on two fronts. It is believed that if Huayna Capac had lived, even with the plague afflicting the Incas, the Spaniards would never have triumphed. Pizarro himself admitted: “If Huayna Capac had been alive when we invaded Peru, we could not have won for he was greatly loved by his people … We could neither have invaded nor triumphed—not even if over a thousand Spanish troops had come at once.”10 Once again: Having a brilliant, beloved leader at the helm of a country when the land is in turmoil is one of the best situations people can hope for. That becomes apparent when that leader is dead.
By the time Pizarro met and defeated Atahualpa’s troops in 1532, they had been grievously weakened by war and disease. It’s still remarkable that Pizarro’s tiny band of men won, but maybe your fellow Chili’s warriors would be more optimistic about their chances for survival if you told them that they would be facing a mob that was malnourished, exhausted, and very ill from a disease that had killed their leader and caused a civil war, but was one you had most likely already become immune to after suffering through it in childhood.
Smallpox also beset the other great American empire of the time, the Aztecs, who were settled in what is now Mexico. When a Spanish company, led by Hernán Cortés, arrived in 1519, they brought smallpox with them.
With the benefit of hindsight, the Aztecs should have immediately sprung into battle against the Spaniards. Instead, when Cortés’s forces arrived in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, they were welcomed in the way that American forces today expect to be greeted anytime they go anywhere. The Aztec leader Montezuma II showered Cortés with gifts, including beautiful necklaces of precious jewels, gold, and feathers.
This warm welcome wasn’t extended because the Aztecs were as “gentle and peaceful” a people as the Incas. The Aztecs were—there is no way to get around this—generally described as bloodthirsty maniacs who practiced cannibalism and daily human sacrifice.
Let us digress for a small gory moment to talk about human sacrifice. Aztecs weren’t alone in this practice. The Incas sacrificed humans as well—they just went about it in a sort of civilized way. Children, often chosen for their beauty,who w
ere raised to be eventual preteen and teenage sacrifices for the community, were given high social status. They dined on special foods (like maize) that members of the lower classes couldn’t enjoy. Before they went to their deaths, they were given a great feast in their honor and a personal meeting with the emperor. One sacrifice supposedly claimed, “You can finish with me now because I could not be more honored than by the feasts which they celebrated for me in Cuzco.”11 Afterward, they would be given drugs and alcohol and led up a mountain, where they would be knocked on the back of the head and left to die of exposure. Their families would be considered honored people for their sacrifice.
Two points: (1) I am not defending Incan human sacrifice just because the feast sounds like fun and (2) a historical YA novel from the perspective of such a doomed teenager would be a very good premise. I will likely not sue you if you steal this idea. I will, however, expect to be invited to the book party, which must be as good as that feast in Cusco.
Aztecs, on the other hand, would tie people to rocks each day and rip out their still-beating hearts, believing that this was necessary to keep the sun burning. They’d then kick the bodies down the temple stairs and, depending upon the source of information, allegedly eat the corpses. It was “considered a good omen if [the victims] cried a lot at the time of sacrifice.”12 To my fellow late risers: if every Aztec could have slept in until noon even one day, they would have realized the sun rose without requiring still-beating hearts, and countless lives would have been saved. Remember this the next time anyone criticizes your sleeping habits.
So Cortés wasn’t welcomed in a surprisingly friendly fashion because the Aztecs were nice guys. It is instead likely—and most fortuitous—that he was warmly received because the timing of his arrival fell perfectly in line with prophecies regarding the return of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, a nice-ish deity who only required sacrifices of hummingbirds and butterflies. When the group of strange men on horseback, impressively firing guns, arrived at the same time as the expected coming of the god, some of the Aztecs were, at least temporarily, understandably confused.
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