The Impact of Smallpox on the New World

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The Impact of Smallpox on the New World

Transportation and migration has been important to Homo sapiens since the time of the hunter-gatherer. Humans have used the different methods of transportation since this time for a number of reasons (i.e. survival in the case of the hunter-gatherer, to spread religion, or in order to search for precious minerals and spices). What few of these human travelers failed to realize is that often diseases were migrating with them. This essay will look at the spread of the disease smallpox. In the following I hope to reveal the history of smallpox as well as why it devastated the New World.

In order to understand the history of smallpox one first has to understand how diseases like it evolve. Much like other species, diseases that survive in the long run are the microbes that most effectively reproduce and are able to find suitable places to live. For a microbe to effectively reproduce, it must "be defined mathematically as the number of new infected per each original patient." This number will largely depend on how long each victim is able to spread the virus to other victims (Diamond, 198).

Besides reproduction, a microbe needs a suitable environment to survive. In most cases this environment is a large animal population. With this type of environment a microbe is able to survive by, ironically, not killing everyone off. If a population is small and dense, the microbe will spread to all the animals in the immediate area and, if lethal, kill the entire species off. This not only ends the existence of the animal in this immediate population, but the existence of the microbe since it has no carrier to leach itself to. Therefore, the ideal population for a deadly microbe is a population t...

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...nt of the Western Hemisphere. Today, for example, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Haiti, Cuba, and Puerto Rico all have substantial or predominantly black populations in place of indigenous Indians lost to smallpox." (Thomson, 122) This, in turn, lead to the triangle slave trade, which produced the largest level and wide spread practice of slavery ever seen. Many historians agree that these turn of events could not have happened without smallpox. This single microbe not only changed the population makeup of the New World, but forever changed the New World culture and economy.

Sources

1) Diamond, Jared, "Ch. 11: Lethal gift of livestock," in "Guns, Germs, and Steel" W.W. Norton & Co, 1997, ISBN 0-393-03891-2, pp. 195-214

2) Thomson, Mark. "Junior Division Winner: The Migration of Smallpox and Its Indelible Footprint on Latin American History". The History Teacher. 1998.

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