Lecture 8 : The Urban Revolution Overview

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Lecture 8 The Urban RevolutionOverview

• THE URBAN REVOLUTION
• Developments in technology, society etc.
• Health and disease
• EMPIRES
• ANCIENT GREECE
• Outline history
• The Plague of Athens

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The Urban Revolution

• Technology - wheel, plough, fertiliser,
  irrigation.
• Food surplus division of labour (craftsmen,
  traders).
• Towns and cities.
• Stratified class system administrative/military
  elite.
• Religion and science (writing, mathematics,
  astronomy).
• Arts and culture.
• Farmers converted to peasants.

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The First Civilisations

• The earliest was Mesopotamia in modern Iraq.
• Egypt and the Indus valley civilisations followed
  soon after.
• Northern China (Huang-Ho) around 2,000BC.
• Meso-America and Peru first milllennium AD.

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Health And Disease

• The urban revolution resulted in a further
  decline in health and life expectancy. Factors
  included
• Diet further deficiencies.
• Airborne diseases increased due to crowding.
• Water-borne diseases increased due to
  contamination by sewerage.
• Irrigation also created new risks.
• Food-borne infections increased due food
  storage and handling.
• Vector-borne infections increased due to
  increase in rodents, birds and arthropods.
• Direct contact more opportunity for sexual
  transmission.

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Epidemics And Endemics

• Susceptibility to devastating epidemics due to
  absence of previous exposure.
• Increased populations enabled some diseases to
  become endemic.
• Adaptation between agent and host meant some
  diseases became relatively mild diseases of
  childhood.
• This conferred a military advantage on urban
  armies which carried immunity.

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Demographics

• Despite developing immunity against certain
  diseases, cities became much more unhealthy than
  rural areas.
• Death rates in cities exceed birth rates.
• Cities became dependent upon the migration of
  surplus rural people to maintain numbers.
• This continued throughout history cities only
  became self-supporting around the beginning of
  the 20th century.

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Empires

• Some city states developed into extensive
  empires, which came and went.
• The change in scale does not appear to have had
  any major implications for the history of disease.

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Ancient Greece

• In Europe urban civilisation first made its
  appearance in Greece, initially in Crete and then
  on the mainland.
• Athens and Sparta emerged as the most influential
  city states between the 8th and 6th centuries BC,
  but Greece was never politically unified.
• Athens led the resistance against the Persians in
  the 5th century BC and might have formed the
  focus for a unified Greece.
• Athens lost the Peloponnesian War against Sparta
  in 431-404 BC, after being devasted by a plague
  in 430-429 BC.

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Thucydides

• No healing art was of any use, nor were
  prayers, consultations of the oracles or anything
  else. Men in perfect health were seized in a
  moment with violent fever, inflammation of the
  eyes, sore throat and tongue. The breath was
  foetid, there was coughing and vomiting, violent
  convulsions, livid skin breaking out in pustules
  and ulcers. The internal fever was intense so
  that the sufferers could not bear to wear even
  the finest linen garments, but insisted on going
  naked. They longed for cold water many threw
  themselves into the cisterns. There was an
  intolerable restlessness which never left them.
  Either they died on the seventh or ninth day or,
  if they lived, the disease descended into their
  bowels where it produced violent ulceration,
  severe diarrhoea, and later exhaustion that
  carried them off. The fury with which it fastened
  on each sufferer was too much for human nature to
  endure.