Because of what they knew about the pesthouses, people with signs of the plague tried to hide them, and people with dead relatives (the worst sign of all) tried to hide them. The sick purged and bled themselves, and lanced and drained and cauterized their own buboes and carbuncles, but were often dragged off to the island quarantine anyway.
In late June, schools, courts, markets, and businesses—almost everything except churches—were closed. A general lockdown of the city was ordered for forty days. Doctors walked the quiet streets dressed in seventeenth-century versions of hazmat suits: waxed robes, goggles, and beaklike masks stuffed with herbs and spices. They wore sponges soaked with vinegar around their necks and sometimes carried torches or buckets of burning tar to clean the air. Soldiers, policemen, and health officials patrolled the city. People who were found violating health regulations or quarantines were jailed, or in many cases put to death. One thirteen-year-old girl, who had run out into the street after a chicken, was hanged, apparently as a lesson to others. The Vatican made an effort to help the poor and the sick and to pay for lazarettos, but there was a food shortage in Trastevere and, since the city had been brought to a standstill, a loss of work and pay everywhere.
Although the “plague most atrocious” continued for more than a year, many of these tactics of “opportune suppression,” as Kircher characterized them, did help prevent the spread of the disease. (Not the snake meat, presumably.) The effects of the epidemic were “considerably more mild than . . . at Naples”—only about fifteen thousand people died—and yet living through it was frightening. The “altogether horrid and unrelenting carnage” of Naples was on everyone’s mind, Kircher remembered, and “each man, out of dread for the ever-looming image of death, was anxiously and solicitously seeking an antidote that would ensure recovery from so fierce an evil.” As a melancholic, Kircher was supposed to be particularly susceptible.
“In this state of affairs,” he remembered, “amidst the horrible silence of the sad city and in the deepest recess of solitude (for the entrance of the Roman College had been closed), I attempted with sluggish though necessary toil to develop the ideas that I had previously begun to conceive concerning the origin of the plague.”
There was almost no commonly held, or seemingly contradictory, view of the plague to which Kircher gave short shrift. He believed that pestilence originated with God as a form of penance after the Great Flood (along with war, famine, and death), but that it raged and receded, and could be treated, by natural means. With respect to contagion, you could breathe it in. And if you ate food grown in soil that had become foul from the upward seepage of putrid poisons, you could ingest it. If you suffered from a corruption or obstruction of humors, apparently you could even generate the pestilential putrefaction yourself.
Most of Kircher’s ideas weren’t new. But during the course of his study, he became one of the very first people in history to use the microscope to study disease. Perhaps the very first. And he applied his findings to an argument that was either ancient or brand-new, or both, depending on how you looked at it or on the century from which you looked.
It is “generally known that worms grow from foul corpses,” Kircher wrote in Examination of the Plague, published in early 1658. “But since the use of that remarkable discovery, the smicroscopus, or the so-called magnifying glass, it has been shown that everything putrid is filled with countless masses of small worms, which could not be seen with the naked eye and without lenses.” Kircher would not have believed it himself if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes through what he believed was a very sensitive instrument. He’d performed an entire series of “experiments,” which he invited readers (with access to a similar instrument) to try. For example:
Take a piece of meat, and at night leave it exposed to the lunar moisture until the following day. Then examine it carefully with a smicroscopus and you will find that all the putridity drawn from the moon has been transformed into numberless little worms of different sizes, which in the absence of the smicroscopus you will be unable to detect. . . .
The same basic thing happens, he said, if you take a bowl of water sprinkled with dirt from the ground and expose it to the sun for a few days: “You will see . . . certain vesicles which are quickened into exceedingly minute worms” that eventually become “a vast number of winged gnats.”
It also happens “if you cut a snake into little pieces, soak them in rain water, expose them for some days to the sun, bury them for a whole day and night in the earth, and then, when they are soft with putridity, examine them with a smicroscopus”—except in that case the decaying mess is swarming with little “snakes.”
Kircher was hardly oblivious to the growing emphasis on experimentation, direct observation, and physical evidence during his own time. He frequently took pains to assure readers that only those ideas “which have been verified and proven by experiment” had been set down, and that those which were the “product only of opinion and remain unsupported” had been passed over. It’s just that his understanding of what it meant to perform an experiment didn’t include modern expectations related to scientific hypothesis and procedure. The word experiment comes from the Latin for “try” or “test,” as in to try out an idea rather than just think about it, but in Kircher’s case it didn’t necessarily mean that the idea itself was to be challenged. On the basis of these and other “incontrovertible experiments,” there was really no doubt in his mind about what he already thought he knew: that worms, insects, and similar creatures grew from the decay of other living things. And it occurred to Kircher that, at least as he and everyone else believed, the plague also arose from decay and putridity.
Kircher examined the blood of plague sufferers under his microscope on several occasions. “The putrid blood of those affected by fevers has fully convinced me,” he wrote. “I have found it, an hour or so after letting, so crowded with worms as to well nigh dumbfound me.” His assertion: “Plague is in general a living thing.”
Kircher’s arguments about spontaneous generation are hard to follow, largely because he did so much prevaricating and used so many ill-defined terms interchangeably. It was all utter speculation, anyway. Universal sperm was certainly involved: he believed that “seeds of a vegetative and sentient nature” are “scattered everywhere among the elemental bodies.” Whether decomposing matter also generated life on its own or acted as a fertilizer or necessary ingredient is, as one historian commented, “not perfectly clear.” In the case of the plague, Kircher suggested that when the tiny semina, or seeds, or “corpuscles,” that emanate from all natural things are corrupted by putrescence, they become the minute carriers of the disease. “Corpuscles of this kind are commonly nonliving,” he explained, “but through the agency of ambient heat already tainted with a similar pollution, they are transformed into a brood of countless invisible little worms.”
Specifics aside, Kircher was making a larger, more fundamental argument against the new mechanistic, material philosophy of Descartes and others, based on which even animals and plants were nothing but elaborate machines. He refused to concede that the physical world was merely physical. To him it was animate on some very basic level.
According to Kircher, “these worms, propagators of the plague, are so small, so light, so subtle, that they elude any grasp of perception and can only be seen under the most powerful microscope.” Therefore, they “are easily forced out through all the passages and pores” of plague victims’ bodies and of the sick, and “are moved by even the faintest breath of air, just like so many dust particles in the sun.” They are then “drawn through the breath and through the sweat pores of the body, from which later such fearful symptoms and effects result.”
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A MEDICAL HISTORIAN writing in 1932 described Kircher’s Examination of the Plague as “a farrago of nonsensical speculation by a man possessed of neither scientific acumen nor medical instinct.” But two years befo
re, another historian determined from it that Kircher was “undoubtedly the first to state in explicit terms the doctrine of ‘contagium vivum’ as the cause of infectious disease”—in other words, that Kircher discovered microorganisms and was the first to propose the germ theory of contagion. If that’s true, however, then his articulation of germ theory was predicated on notions (spontaneous generation, animism) that no modern scientist would be caught dead advancing. Besides, the concept of universal seeds went back to the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras, and the idea that disease is living turns out to be both ancient and mystical.
A lot of what Kircher wrote about plague came from Lucretius, the disciple of Epicurus from whom Gassendi got his modern-sounding ideas about atoms. In his epic poem On the Nature of Things, Lucretius wrote that “there are many seeds of things which support life, and on the other hand there must be many flying about which make for disease and death.” They can come “down through the sky like clouds and mists, or often they gather together and rise from the earth itself, when through dampness it has become putrescent.”
Among other sources, Kircher also borrowed heavily from, but doesn’t cite, a sixteenth-century writer most famous for a verse treatise called Syphilis, or the French Disease. (Understandably, no one wanted to take the credit for syphilis, which reached epidemic proportions during this time. To Muslims, syphilis was the disease of the Christians, to the English it was the French pox, to the French it was the Neapolitan disease, and to the Italians it was of Spanish origin.) The author, a physician from Verona named Fracastoro, worked out a theory of contagion involving transmission of “imperceptible particles,” infected and self-propagating, that he called seminaria, or “seedbeds,” sometimes translated as “germs.”
What did Kircher actually see when he examined the blood of plague patients? He claimed his microscope made “everything appear a thousand times larger than it really is,” but he didn’t mean that literally. It’s not possible that he saw plague bacilli, which are one six-hundredth of a millimeter long. He may have been using a relatively simple magnifying lens rather than a compound microscope, which employs a system of lenses, in which case he would have been lucky to see much of anything. Even with a compound microscope, any organic specimen might have looked like a mass of tiny worms.
Yet most of Kircher’s readers had never looked through a microscope at all. Only one or two treatises on the subject had ever been published, and so Examination of the Plague caused a kind of sensation within the Republic of Letters. A doctor in Dresden compared Kircher’s brilliance to the shining of the sun. An anatomy professor in Jena informed Kircher that “the reputation of things Kircherian” had “spread through all of Europe.” In thanks for his copy of the book, a missionary in New Spain sent Kircher chocolate and peppers “which we call Chile.” Eventually, whether or not Examination of the Plague hit upon one of the core tenets of epidemiology, it did influence thinking about the way disease is actually spread.
Eager readers may have been under the incorrect assumption that Kircher had something to do with stemming the plague in Rome. And on the question of prevention and cure Kircher did provide his considered opinion, but in this case it can’t remotely be mistaken for an early expression of modern medical thought: he believed that, short of leaving the area, an amulet made of the flesh of a toad or of dried toad powder, and worn over the heart, was probably the best antidote.
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Philosophical Transactions
Three years after the plague subsided in Rome, the Tiber flooded, having the greatest effect on the Jewish ghetto. Alexander VII spent much of his time in the Palazzo Quirinale with his wooden scale model of the streets and buildings of the city, contemplating his improvement projects. Although unenthusiastic about matters of government, he was given respect for the success of Rome’s efforts against the plague, and he had done his part in 1657 by sending the papal fleet to join Venetian ships at the Battle of the Dardanelles, part of the ongoing war with the Ottoman Empire over Crete. He’d also bowed to tradition with regard to nepotism; a little more than a year after his election his brother and nephews had gone on the payroll.
Despite Kircher’s previous output, he had only begun to become, as a twenty-first-century historian has put it, “a book-making, knowledge-regurgitating machine.” In 1658, he published Ecstatic Journey II, a precursor of a planned volume on the physical earth called Underground World that was going to take several more years to complete. In 1660, after the first major eruption of Mount Vesuvius in three decades, Kircher traveled down to Naples to investigate an apparent miracle. Crosses had mysteriously begun to appear in the folds of people’s clothes, aprons, bed linens, and other fabrics. Kircher the skeptic determined that the causes were natural, not miraculous, a result of the ash in the air—though this didn’t mean that God wasn’t responsible for them. A book on the subject naturally followed.
Also on Kircher’s agenda in the years after the plague: ingratiating himself with the new Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna. After Ferdinand III died in 1657, his seventeen-year-old son, Leopold, king of Bohemia and Hungary, succeeded him. The child of married first cousins, Leopold himself happened to be first cousins with Louis XIV of France. He was born with what became known as the Hapsburg chin—a greatly protruding jaw and almost monstrous lower lip—the result of so much inbreeding among European royalty. (His nickname: Hogmouth.) Like his father, and like other kings and queens whose subjects, peers, and family members spoke many different tongues, Leopold had a practical interest in crossing the divide of language. At the same time, because he frequently wanted to keep others from being able to read and understand his secret missives and official directives, he’d developed an interest in cryptography. For Leopold, Kircher produced both an attempt at a universal language that would allow any two parties to communicate and a system of artificial languages or codes by which only certain people could.
In fact, the possibility of a universal language was frequently discussed during the seventeenth century by the likes of Descartes, Leibniz, and many others. In the early 1650s, for example, the Englishman Francis Lodwick proposed one in a book called The Groundwork or Foundation Laid (or So Intended) for the Framing of a New Perfect Language and a Universal Common Writing. In 1657, another Englishman, Cave Beck, published his proposal in Universal Character, By which all the Nations in the World may understand one another’s Conceptions, Reading out of one Common Writing their own Mother Tongues. Kircher’s own attempt, set down in New and Universal Polygraphy and made available to a select readership beyond the emperor, was based on the use of the combinatory arts he was so fond of. In essence it was an elaborate system for translating more than a thousand core terms among five languages. It lent itself to the same kind of computing-box system as his method for composing music. As a result, Kircher made a number of wooden arks or “organs” for patrons containing many categorized, combinable slats. They served as tabletop or desktop aids to composition in his “universal language” and a variety of secret codes.
In Germany, Kaspar Schott dutifully continued to work on Kircher’s behalf, among other things publishing a new edition of Ecstatic Journey meant to address the censors’ concerns, and taking over an entire four-volume project on natural magic that Kircher had recognized he would never complete. Schott produced several other fat books of his own, on everything from “physical curiosities” to “technical curiosities” to “serious amusements.” Their final project together involved another one of Kircher’s seventeenth-century computers. He called it his mathematical organ, and it worked on the same principle as his other machines. The slats in this one were meant to enable calculations in every field in which a young prince might need to make them: arithmetic, geometry, fortifications, chronology, horography, astronomy, astrology, steganography, and music. Schott wrote an instruction book for it from his base in Würzburg, finishing just before he died of what must have been exhaustion in 1666. The manu
al, 850 pages long, was published posthumously.
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BY 1661, Kircher’s writings were so well known that Johann Jansson, a prominent Amsterdam publisher of atlases and other handsome volumes, approached him with a proposal for an agreement of international scope—an offer of twenty-two hundred scudi for the rights to publish his present and future books in several countries of continental Europe and in England. Not only did Kircher agree to the offer, he was known to mention it frequently in letters and conversation with others.
For these new Protestant publishers, Kircher decided to produce a volume on the history, topography, and landmarks of Latium (Lazio in Italian), the countryside around Rome. It was a subject that could be illustrated with many beautiful engravings, and one that was worthy of scholarly attention. According to the historian Ingrid Rowland, for example, there was a tradition of thinking that after the Flood, Noah “had taken to traveling the world by raft, vigorously repopulating the flood-drenched continents with the heroic aid of his wife.” And one strain of Hebrew scholarship suggested that Noah had finally come to rest on the Italian peninsula. (Indeed, the fifteenth-century Dominican monk named Giovanni Nanni, aka Annius of Viterbo, spent his career forging—and then translating and commenting upon—ancient Chaldean, Etruscan, and Egyptian texts in order to prove that Noah had chosen to settle down in his own Italian hometown of Viterbo.)
Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) Page 15