Malaria and Rome: A History of Malaria in Ancient Italy, Robert Sallares [reading a book TXT] 📗

In localities in Italy where malaria was endemic the proportion of deaths which were directly attributed to malaria (the significance of this phrase will be seen shortly) was far higher than the national statistics for mortality indicate. Bonelli gave as examples for 1882

Rossano in Calabria, Grosseto, and Paola in Calabria where 24.8%, 23%, and 19.5% respectively of all deaths were directly attributed to malaria. An earlier, less complete database of causes of death yielded a figure of 19% of all deaths directly attributed to intermittent fevers in Grosseto in 1840–1. This result is of the same order of magnitude as the result for 1882. However, it is probably an underestimate since the surviving records for 1840–1 excluded almost entirely causes of death for infants and children under the age of five, who would be expected to suffer severely from P. falciparum malaria when it is endemic.⁶ Bonelli stated that ‘in the 1880s ⁴ Shaw (1996: 133 and note 108); Balfour (1935: 302) on Greece.

⁵ Del Panta (1997: 10).

⁶ Bonelli (1966: 662); del Panta (1989: 48–9 n. 23), using the statistics of Salvagnoli Marchetti.

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it was quite common in the Mezzogiorno for malaria to account for 20–30% of all deaths . . . in numerous other localities malaria accounted for 10–15% of all deaths’.⁷

There are two lessons to be drawn from this. First, in any kind of comparative history it is essential to look for appropriate parallels.

Since the ancient medical authors Asclepiades and Galen provide positive evidence that P. falciparum, the most dangerous species of human malaria, was common in ancient Rome (see Ch. 8 below), the appropriate parallels are places in more recent periods of Italian history where malaria was common, such as Grosseto, not places where it did not occur at all. A good example of a comparison that should be used as a source of contrasts with the city of Rome in antiquity, not as a source of parallels, is Florence at the time of the famous Catasto in 1427.⁸ The Catasto is of course a very important historical document, to which further reference will be made in Chapter 11 below. However, the demographic situation in Florence then was fundamentally different from the situation in ancient Rome for (at least) two major reasons: (1) Florence in the late medieval period was affected by epidemics of bubonic plague, for which there is no evidence in Rome in antiquity; (2) Florence had no history of endemic malaria.⁹ Since there were significant differences in the causes of death between imperial Rome and late medieval Florence, there is no reason whatsoever for expecting the mortality patterns of ancient Rome and late medieval Florence to be similar. It follows that it is essential to investigate the causes of death in detail at the local level, before choosing comparisons for demographic purposes. Shaw did not consider the important evidence of Asclepiades and Galen. He stated that ‘it seems clear that it is the factor of temperature variability that marks the main separation between “northern” and “southern” regimes of seasonal mortality’, but failed to notice that out of the various diseases which he considered malaria is the only one in fact which is strongly temperature-dependent.¹⁰ Both what he termed ‘normal’ diseases, such as tuberculosis, and epidemic diseases, such as typhus, flourish equally well in Africa and in northern Europe. In 1998 there were ⁷ Bonelli (1966: 662): negli anni ’80 era abbastanza frequente nel Mezzogiorno che il numero dei morti per malaria rappresentasse il 20–30% del totale dei morti . . . numerose altre località presentano una mortalità per malaria compresa tra il 10 e il 15% della mortalità generale.

⁸ Herlihy and Klapisch-Zaber (1985).

⁹ Carmichael (1989) on mortality patterns in late medieval Florence.

¹⁰ Shaw (1996: 132).

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outbreaks of epidemic typhus in Burundi in Africa and in Russia.¹¹

Similarly Shaw noted the gradual disappearance of the excess summer mortality in Italy from the 1860s to the 1960s, but did not notice the almost exact correlation of this trend with the gradual eradication of malaria. In contrast Brown found a very strong statistical correlation between mortality trends in Sardinia and malaria eradication over the very same hundred-year period.¹² Del Panta observed that ‘the official statistics can only reveal, however, the phase in which mortality from malaria was declining, starting in 1887’. The data for causes of death upon which Shaw relied postdate the beginning of the demographic transition towards the modern low-mortality and low-fertility demographic regime in Italy. Consequently these data are of limited value for the pre-modern period. Del Panta stated that the transition towards the modern low mortality demographic regime commenced in Tuscany in the period 1875–80.¹³

The second lesson to be drawn from examining Shaw’s use of national statistics is that in demography all valid studies must commence at the local level, with, for example, the sort of parish studies which formed the foundation for the monumental population history of England by Wrigley and Schofield. The failure to appreciate the importance of local variation in demography, such as the differences between Grosseto and Treppio noted at the beginning of this book (see also Ch. 5. 4 below), is the single biggest deficiency of the bulk of research in ancient Roman demography carried out over the last thirty years or so. One of the main conclusions reached in this book is that it is in fact impossible to generalize about the demography of a region as small as central Italy in antiquity, never mind the whole Roman Empire.

There is a second very important reason why the national statistics for mortality in 1887–9 in Italy are an unreliable guide to the likely impact of malaria on mortality patterns in antiquity. As a specialist in malariology put it, ‘reporting of deaths by cause has been of limited use for the investigation of the impact of malaria and its control on mortality’.¹⁴