A Companion to Mediterranean History, First Edition. Edited by Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
chapter sixteen
The topic of disease requires consideration, first, of whether the Mediterranean forms
a useful and distinctive unit of analysis for disease history in purely biological and
ecological terms, and second, whether such an analysis can yield results of interest for
understanding the history of the human societies which lived around the Mediterranean
in the past. The Mediterranean has sometimes been defined in biological terms as the
area delimited by the geographical distribution of an individual species of tree, such as
the olive or the holm-oak, or alternatively of a particular vegetation community, such
as the evergreen sclerophyllous trees and shrubs which are widespread in Mediterranean
countries today. These definitions have always been controversial since, for example,
the distribution of the olive tree has certainly been expanded greatly by human agri-
culture in recent millennia, while the evidence of palynology indicates that deciduous
trees were more abundant in the Mediterranean in the mid-Holocene than they are
today (Blondel and Aronson, 1999: 14–16). These biological definitions of the
Mediterranean in terms of vegetation are paradoxically not very useful for the
biological topic of this chapter and will not be pursued any further here.
The Mediterranean can also be defined in purely climatic terms as an area of cool,
humid winters and hot dry summers, or alternatively by a mix of climatic and bio-
logical indicators. It shares these climatic characteristics with certain other regions of
the world, namely parts of Chile, California, South Africa, and Australia. The nature
of the climate is certainly relevant to some, but not all, infectious diseases, to a greater
or lesser extent. Consequently definition of the Mediterranean in purely climatic
terms is a more promising line of inquiry for disease history. The transmission of
pathogens which spread directly from person to person by the respiratory route
through the inhalation of droplets—such as tuberculosis and influenza—may cer-
tainly be affected by atmospheric conditions such as humidity and temperature.
Nevertheless such diseases do tend to spread everywhere through the movement of
human carriers of the infections. Respiratory diseases are not confined to specific
climatic or geographical regions.
Disease
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