I’m glad Jared Diamond’s award-winning book had the title Guns, Germs, and Steel. It gave me the opportunity to talk about things I had learned about “germs” with respect to the belief that cholera was caused by sin (including marital sex that wasn’t specifically for engendering children), 1840s ignorance of bacteria, and the reality of veneral disease.
I twigged to beliefs about cholera in the 1840s because of an article I found while volunteering at my local Family History Center. The article was a photocopy. If there was a citation of where and when it was published, I didn’t note it at that time. Later, when I asserted the information about cholera that I’d learned from the article, I faced derision and worse. So I finally located the article, which was written by Thomas V. DiBacco and published in The Washington Post on 11 September 1990.[1] Professor DiBacco has impeccable historical credentials, even if his research interests mean religious historians are unlikely to have encountered him in their researches.
The focus on ignorance of bacteria came from a book my local Book Group read, Candice Millard’s New York Times best-seller Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President. President Garfield died in 1881, before Sarah Bates Pratt made her ludicrous assertions regarding abortion to the pseudonymous Wilhelm Wyl. But Sarah and Wyl apparently didn’t realize the bacterial infection that killed President Garfield would also play a role in women’s health. Their ignorance is understandable – it would take decades after Garfield’s death before the impact of bacteria with regards to maternal outcomes would be understood by lay people.
Book Group also informed me regarding the effects of venereal disease decades after the spread of veneral disease: Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective, basis of the BBC drama, The Suspicions Of Mr. Whicher: The Murder At Road Hill House. Summerscale was able to trace the deleterious effects of veneral disease to the medical histories of the wives and children of Samuel Kent, owner of Road Hill House. There are various effects of veneral diseases, including infertility, mortality among infants and women, and deformities of children born to diseased mothers. While numerous children conceived by plural wives in Nauvoo died soon after birth, it is difficult to confidently attribute these deaths to veneral disease. We do not see the effects of veneral disease persist to the Utah era, though such veneral disease could have been presumed to persist and spread in an environment where men had many wives. This would be even more true since unhappy wives in Utah were free to divorce and remarry, introducing any veneral disease they might unknowingly carry to a new pool of individuals.
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- No More Than Six Days After: Timing Joseph’s Instructions regarding Plural Marriage to his Apostles in 1841
- 3 – Guns, Germs, and Sex (Part 2 – Germs)
- 3 – Guns, Germs, and Sex (Part 1 – Guns)
- 2 – Why would God command Polygamy?
- 1: Prelude to a Killing
- [1]DiBacco, Thomas V., “The Ravages of Cholera”, The Washington Post, 11 Sep 1990, online 19 Sep 2016 at https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/wellness/1990/09
/11/the-ravages-of-cholera/c819a8bf-faba-4989-b7ad-974e4a22b747/.↩