New Science and Old Sources: Why the Ottoman Experience of Plague Matters

Nükhet Varlik

doi:10.17302/tmg.1-1.8

Abstract

Reconstructing the Ottoman plague experience is vital to understanding the larger Afro-Eurasian disease zone during the Second Pandemic. This essay deals with two different aspects of this experience. On the one hand, it discusses the historical and historiographical problems that rendered this epidemiological experience mostly invisible to previous scholars of plague. On the other, it reconstructs the empire’s plague ecologies, with particular attention to plague’s persistence, focalization, and transmission. Further, it uses this epidemiological experience to offer new insights and complicate some commonly held assumptions about plague history and its relationship to plague science.

Highlights

Part I. New Science and Old SourcesFrom where we stand today, some may believe that the new science of plague puts an end to historical inquiry. Because the new science can explain the pathogen and its genetic history, one may wonder why we still need to study the old sources
Since plague had receded from Western Europe, this body of firsthand knowledge was especially valuable in promoting the empirical approach to medicine that was flourishing in early nineteenth-century England; the direct observations of physicians with overseas experience came to acquire more weight than theoretical knowledge (Kelly 2008: 569). It was in this context that cases from the Ottoman laboratory, that “last vestige of plague,” continued to be observed, studied, and discussed—until the Third Pandemic broke out
Studying the Ottoman plague experience during the Second Pandemic offers three important insights. It underscores the critical importance of focalization. Such processes may be helpful in studying the plague experience of even those areas that are historically imagined to have received the infection from outside: for example, Europe

Summary

Part I. New Science and Old Sources

From where we stand today, some may believe that the new science of plague puts an end to historical inquiry. Because the new science can explain the pathogen and its genetic history, one may wonder why we still need to study the old sources. Because the new science can explain the pathogen and its genetic history, one may wonder why we still need to study the old sources. The reasons for this are to be sought in the very etiology of plague that involves a complex system of entanglements in which every organism (as host, vector, or pathogen) constantly interacts with other organisms, as well as the surrounding environment. Historians must account for variations between the specific ways the disease manifests itself at local and regional levels Such ecological and environmental variations make it all the more compelling to pay attention to the “local knowledge” of plague, in the form it appears in the historical sources.

The emphasis on the “local knowledge” of plague and “plague experience” in

Part II: The Problem of Plague Persistence in Ottoman Lands

Conclusion