disease 259
to move the capital from Qufu in Shandong to Anyang in Henan (Shengsheng,
1996). If we now turn even more briefly westwards to North America, exactly the
same picture emerges of an unhealthy south and a healthy north, with major conse-
quences for long-term economic history and also substantial political and even military
consequences (McNeill, 2010; Bell, 2010). Latitude, because of its relationship to
temperature and the temperature requirements of pathogens and their vectors,
emerges as a more significant variable than longitude. The significance of temperature
for pathogen communities explains why definitions of the Mediterranean in purely
climatic terms are the best way of defining it for the purposes of disease history.
ReferencesAplin, K.P., Suzuki, H., Chinen, A. et al. (2011) Multiple geographic origins of commensalism
and complex dispersal history of black rats. PLoS ONE 6 (11): e26357. DOI:10.1371/
journal.pone.0026357.
Bell, A.M. (2010) Mosquito Soldiers: Malaria, Yellow Fever, and the Course of the American Civil
War, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Benedictow, O.J. (2010) What Disease was Plague? On the Controversy over The Microbiological
Identity of Plague Epidemics of the Past, Leiden: Brill.
Betrán Moya, J.L. (2006) Historia de las epidemias en España y sus colonias (1348–1919),
Madrid: La Esfera de los Libros.
Bianucci, R., Giuffra, V., Bachmeier, B.E. et al. (2012) Eleonora of Toledo (1522–1562):
Evidence for tuberculosis and leishmaniasis co-infection in Renaissance Italy. International
Journal of Paleopathology, 2: 231–235.
Biraben, J.-N. (1997) Les routes maritimes des grandes épidémies au Moyen Age, in L’homme,
la santé et la mer (ed. C. Buchet), Actes du Colloque international tenu à l’Institut Catholique
de Paris les 5 et 6 décembre 1995, Paris: H. Champion, pp. 23–27.
Biraben, J.-N. (1998) Diseases in Europe: Equilibrium and breakdown of the pathocoenosis,
in Western Medical Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (ed. M. Grmek), Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, pp. 319–353.
Birch, D.J. (1998) Pilgrimage to Rome in the Middle Ages, Woodbridge: Boydell Press.
Blondel, J.and Aronson, J. (1999) Biology and Wildlife of the Mediterranean Region, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Borsch, S.J. (2005) The Black Death in Egypt and England: A Comparative Study, Austin:
University of Texas Press.
Bowden, S., Michailidou, D.M. and Pereira, A. (2008) Chasing mosquitoes: An exploration of
the relationship between economic growth, poverty and the elimination of malaria in
Southern Europe in the 20th century. Journal of International Development, 20, 1080–1106.
Brown, P.J. (1986) Socioeconomic and demographic effects of malaria eradication: A com-
parison of Sri Lanka and Sardinia. Social Science and Medicine, 22: 847–859.
Buell, P.D. (2012) Qubilai and the rats. Sudhoffs Archiv, 96.2: 127–144.
Campbell, B.M.S. (2011) Panzootics, pandemics and climatic anomalies in the fourteenth
century, in Beiträge zum Göttinger Umwelthistorischen Kolloquium 2010–2011 (ed. B. Herrmann),
Göttingen: Universitätsverlag Göttingen, pp. 177–215.
Cliff, A.D., Smallman-Raynor, M.R. and Stevens, P.M. (2009) Controlling the geographical
spread of infectious disease: Plague in Italy, 1347–1851. Acta medica-historica Adriatica, 7:
197–236.
Duncan-Jones, R.P. (1996) The Impact of the Antonine Plague. Journal of Roman Archaeology
9: 108–136.