Year: 2022
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: In a previous contribution to The Medieval Globe, I proposed the hypothesis that certain epidemics reported in association with the Mongol invasion of China and adjacent states during the thirteenth century and after were plague, and perhaps the first historically recorded manifestation of the Second Pandemic. This article supports that hypothesis using evidence largely from Chinese medical texts of the eleventh through the eighteenth centuries, to show that these epidemics in North Chinese cities directly followed Mongol sieges, as reported by the thirteenth-century physician Li Gao (who witnessed one of them). In turn, they were followed (within twenty-five to fifty years) by the appearance of a brand new symptom in Chinese medical texts: a large purulent sore, called by a name almost new to Chinese medical discourse and entirely new in discourses on epidemic: geda, which I argue was the label applied to the bubo of plague. I show further that Li Gao's description of the treatments attempted by doctors during the siege epidemic of 1232, in the Jin-dynasty capital Kaifeng, strongly imply that the doctors were treating such large purulent sores; and that two of Li Gao's students were leaders in introducing the term geda to epidemic discourse in the decades that followed. What distinguished the response of Chinese physicians to plague from the response of their later European counterparts, I conclude, was that they largely registered its presence by incorporating a new symptom into older epidemic categories rather than by seeing it as a new disease. In a foreword and afterword I frame my work in the context of Monica H. green's recent ambitious and highly persuasive picture of thirteenth-and fourteenth-century plague as a many-branched global phenomenon.
Author: Robert Hymes
Language: English
Topic: History of Medicine Studies
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4310914933