The British journal Nature — the most prestigious scientific journal in the world — recently reported on tidings from the World Health Organization, carrying reassuring news with regard to the worst nuclear accident in history, almost 20 years ago, at Chernobyl in 1986 in what was then the Soviet Union, now the Ukraine.  As the article relates, “Poverty and mental-health problems, such as stress, depression and anxiety, pose a much greater threat to the local communities than radiation, the report concludes.”  Here's what Nature piece has to say: ¹

The Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986 will lead to far fewer deaths than originally thought, according to a report from the United Nations.

Some 4,000 people — including emergency workers and residents of the most contaminated areas — could eventually die of factors linked to radiation exposure, the report says.  Earlier estimates had ranged widely but regularly suggested that there could be many tens of thousands of deaths (see Nature 351, 4; 1991).

“The effects on public health were not nearly as substantial as had at first been feared,” says Michael Repacholi, head of the radiation programme at the World Health Organization in Geneva.

Repacholi was among more than 100 scientists, economists and health experts who worked on the 600-page document, which aimed to summarize the available scientific data on the accident and the countries most affected by it: the Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia.  The report was due to be released by the Chernobyl Forum at a meeting in Vienna this week.

On 26 April 1986, one of four reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine suffered a series of explosions and a meltdown — the worst nuclear accident in history.  Radioactive fallout contaminated more than 200,000 square kilometres of Europe [about half the size of California –Imp.], leading to the eventual relocation of more than 350,000 people.

So far, the report says, fewer than 50 deaths have been directly attributed to radiation exposure — most of them rescue workers who died of acute radiation syndrome shortly after the disaster.  The authors estimate that the incidence of radiation-induced cancer rose by only about 3% in the affected areas.

They add that the thousands of children who contracted thyroid cancer after the accident are likely to have a 99% survival rate, higher than the 80-85% previously thought.

Poverty and mental-health problems, such as stress, depression and anxiety, pose a much greater threat to the local communities than radiation, the report concludes.  It argues that future aid should focus on improving the healthcare system and promoting local economic development.
 
 

¹ Valeska Stephan, “Chernobyl: poverty and stress pose ‘bigger threat’ than radiation,” Nature, Vol. 437, p. 181 (issue dated 2005-09-08).

Glenn Reynolds the Instapundit, in his alternate forum GlennReynolds.com over at MSNBC, has a piece titled “Repeal the seventeenth amendment? How can we build a better Senate?,” whence he writes: 

[T]he Senate hasn't been distinguishing itself in the Roberts hearings.  In fact, I haven't seen anyone — with the exception of some self-congratulation by the Senators on the Judiciary Committee — who's impressed with the job that those Senators are doing.  They talk too much, they listen too little, and they often — despite having had weeks to prepare, and despite, presumably, being the best legal minds in the Senate — get the law wrong.  […]  It's enough to make you lose faith in the institution.  It's even enough to get some people calling for a repeal of the Seventeenth Amendment, which required direct popular election of Senators, whose selection was previously left in the hands of state legislatures.

I don't know what I think of this idea — you want to think that anything would be an improvement over what we've got now, but heck, that's probably what people thought when we ratified the Seventeenth Amendment — but I have heard it proposed more than once recently.  (Some somewhat more serious criticism of the Seventeenth Amendment can be found here.)  And this is surely a bad reflection on the Senate as it exists now.

Reynolds goes on to relate his own somewhat different idea for improving the Senate, which I won't get into here (follow the above link to his article to read about it).  Glenn also points in his piece to others' discussion of the issue, one of which, an article by Bruce Barlett in National Review Online, I've carried through here and the quoted link above.

What I want to bring forward into this amalgam is profound French observer of early American democracy Alexis de Tocqueville's perceptive insights into the matter of the quality of the Senate — writing back in 1838, three-quarters of a century before the 17th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified almost a hundred years ago in 1913.  Tocqueville wrote: ¹

There are some laws, democratic in their nature, which nonetheless succeed in partially correcting democracy's dangerous instincts.

When one enters the House of Representatives at Washington, one is struck by the vulgar demeanor of that great assembly.  One can often look in vain for a single famous man.  Almost all the members are obscure people whose names form no picture in one's mind.  They are mostly village lawyers, tradesmen, or even men of the lowest classes.  In a country where education is spread almost universally, it is said that the people's representatives do not always know how to write correctly.

A couple of paces away is the entrance to the Senate, whose narrow precincts contain a large proportion of the famous men of America.  There is scarcely a man to be seen there whose name does not recall some recent claim to fame.  They are eloquent advocates, distinguished generals, wise magistrates, and noted statesmen.  Every word uttered in this assembly would add luster to the greatest parliamentary debates in Europe.

What is the reason for this bizarre contrast?  Why are the elite of the nation in one room and not in the other?  Why does the former assembly attract such vulgar elements, whereas the latter has a monopoly of talents and enlightenment?  Both spring from the people, both are the result of universal suffrage, and as yet no voice has been raised in America declaring that the Senate is hostile to popular interests.  Whence, then, comes this vast difference?  I can can see only one fact to explain it: the election which produces the House of Representatives is direct, whereas the Senate is subject to election in two stages.  All citizens together appoint the legislature of each state, and then the federal Constitution turns each of these legislatures into electoral bodies that return the members of the Senate.  The senators therefore do represent the result, albeit the indirect result, of universal suffrage, for the legislature which appoints the senators is no aristocratic or privileged body deriving its electoral right from itself; it essentially depends on the totality of citizens; it is generally annually elected by them, and they can always control its choice by giving it new members.  But it is enough that the popular will has passed through this elected assembly for it to have become in some sense refined and to come out clothed in nobler and more beautiful shape.  Thus the men elected always represent exactly the ruling majority of the nation, but they represent only the lofty thoughts current there and the generous instincts animating it, not the petty passions which often trouble or the vices that disgrace it.

It is easy to see a time coming when the American republics will be bound to make more frequent use of election in two stages, unless they are to be miserably lost among the shoals of democracy.

I have no objection to avowing that I see this system of election by two stages as the only means of putting the use of political freedom within the reach of all classes of the people.  Those who hope to make it the exclusive weapon of one party, and those who fear it, seem to me to be making equal mistakes.
 
 

¹ Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 12th Edition, 1848, edited by J. P. Mayer, translated by George Lawrence, Anchor Books, Doubleday and Co., Inc., New York, 1969; pp. 200-201.  For more on Tocqueville check out Impearls' previously published “Tocqueville acknowledgments and links.”

Today is the fourth anniversary of September 11, 2001, when suicide murderers hijacked four American airliners and used three of them to demolish the towers of the World Trade Center and surroundings in New York City and attack the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C. — while the fourth crashed in a Pennsylvania field as a result of a passenger revolt — causing some 3,000 deaths.  May the victims rest in peace, while the perpetrators and their allies and helpers writhe in hell.

Beyond its recent connotation, however, “9-11” is also the anniversary of a lesser known but perhaps more significant event in the history of humanity, which occurred around 1,905 years ago, also on September 11 in the Julian calendar of that era.  Women no doubt have been literate and writing far longer than 1,900 years — see the above stunning image, for instance, a fresco from destroyed Pompeii, of a woman wearing a stylish Roman hairdo of the 1st century a.d., while holding a pen and journal (or rather, stylus and “book” of Roman writing tablets), as she contemplates what she wishes to put down.  Though the above painting is suggestive and terrific, no demonstrable writings by women dated prior to the document illustrated below-right have survived from antiquity.

Around 100 a.d., a woman named Claudia Severa, wife of a garrison commander in the far north of the Roman province of Britannia (Roman Britain), in a letter to her friend, Sulpicia Lepidina, also wife of a garrison commander at the Roman fort of Vindolanda, on Hadrian's Wall which separated Roman Britain from what is now Scotland, sent her the following birthday invitation, written on the wooden writing tablets common at the time: ¹

Claudia Severa to her Lepidina, greetings.  I send you a warm invitation to come to us of September 11th, for my birthday celebrations, to make the day more enjoyable by your presence.  Give my greetings to your Cerialis.  My Aelius greets you and your sons.  I will expect you, sister.  Farewell sister, my dearest soul, as I hope to prosper, and greetings.

While the more formal portion of the letter was apparently taken down by a garrison scribe (other documents in the same handwriting have also been found at the fort), the personal closing appears to have been written in Claudia's own hand.

We see that Claudia Severa's birthday was September 11.  Happy Birthday, Claudia!  (If it seems odd to say that to a person almost two millennia dead, see Impearls' posting here, where it's pointed out that, according to modern physics, everyone who ever lived still lives in a very real sense today — far from us across the chasm of time.)

To recall again the latter-day significance of “9-11,” now we know why the 9-11 terrorists chose that particular day to strike — those misogynist jihadists intended to inverse-commemorate and show their contempt for the dawn (to history anyway) of uppity, literate women!  I'm joking, but only somewhat: in spirit the modern-day Islamofascist jihadists do show everywhere, every day just how they despise educated, capable and independent women.  In my view, one way we can show our love for our smart, cultured women is by defending them against such low-lifes and defeating those who would reenslave them.

 

Dedicated to my mother, always an independent woman, 92 years old today.  Happy birthday, Mom!
 
 

UPDATE:  2005-09-18 16:50 UT:  History Carnival XVI hosted this time by Orac's Respectful Insolence blog has linked to this piece.
 

¹ Chris Scarre, The Penguin Historical Atlas of Ancient Rome, 1995, Penguin Books Ltd., London (ISBN 0-14-0-51329-9); p. 78.

See also this piece from Natalie Bennett's intriguing blog Philobiblon, which scooped me last month (since I was waiting for 9-11 to post) on this subject.  Since I distributed a message to family members half a year ago, however, along these lines (my mother's birthday is also 9-11), I can console myself that I actually scooped Natalie!

The foregoing link points to this terrific site, the “Vindolanda Tablets Online,” which includes the original Latin text, photographs and details on all the Roman tablets which have almost-miraculously survived two millennia of decay and destruction at the old Roman fort, including the one we've been discussing, shown above, and here: Tablet 291.

While on the subject of Hadrian's Wall in the far north of Roman Britain, don't miss Impearls' earlier piece on The Builders of Hadrian's Wall.

Archaeologist Stuart Fiedel's Prehistory of the Americas is an excellent resource for those interested in the history (or prehistory) of the peoples inhabiting the American continents during the 10,000 years since the end of the last ice age, before the permanent arrival of Europeans at the end of the 15th century a.d.  We're particularly interested today in Fiedel's comments concerning the differing natures of epidemic disease in the histories of the Old World vis-a-vis pre- and post-Columbian America.  Impearls will return to this subject again in a later posting.  Here's what Fiedel had to say: ¹ 

Several differences in the development of Old and New World cultures may help to explain why, when they finally came into contact, the American civilizations collapsed before the onslaught of the European invaders.  For one thing, the Native Americans never made any practical use of the wheel.  Finds of wheeled toys demonstrate that the basic principle was known to the ancient Mexicans ²; but as they lacked any domesticated animal larger than the dog, vehicles offered no obvious advantage over the human back as a mode of transport.  In the Andes, the domesticated llama was used as a pack animal, like its Old World cousin, the camel.  The steep mountain slopes would have rendered wheeled vehicles useless.  In Europe, the wheel was the basic device from which all advanced technology involving pulleys, gears, cogs and screws was derived.  However, despite the obvious advantage that the Spanish invaders held because of their crossbows, cannon, sailing ships, and other military hardware, the Aztecs successfully drove them out of Tenochtitlan.  Superior wheel-based technology certainly contributed to the Spanish victory, but it was not the decisive factor.

Cortes's troops carried steel swords, and wore steel armor; the Aztec warriors wore cotton armor, and their swords were edged with sharp, but brittle, obsidian.  Metalworking had not been introduced to Mexico until after a.d. 900.  Gold and copper were used almost exclusively for nonutilitarian objects.  The techniques of metalworking had probably diffused northward from the Andes, where copper smelting seems to have begun as early as 1200 b.c., in the southern Titicaca basin.  At about the same time, gold was being worked in the central Andes.  In Peru, some tools were made of copper and (by the time of the Incas) bronze; but, as in Mexico, metal was used primarily for ornaments and ceremonial objects.  Iron smelting, which began in the Near East before 1000 b.c., was never developed by New World metalworkers.  Again, as in the case of the wheel, the defeats suffered by Spanish forces at the hands of obsidian-armed Aztec warriors suggest that the natives' lack of iron or steel did not predetermine the outcome of their struggle with the Europeans.

The critical factor seems instead to have been the Native Americans' lack of antibodies against Old World microorganisms.  Few, if any, infectious diseases were endemic in American populations.  Several depictions in Mexican and Peruvian art of hunchbacks suggest that tuberculosis may have been present aboriginally, but if so, it was not a common ailment.  A form of nonvenereal syphilis also seems to have been known in Mesoamerica before contact, and there is archaeological evidence of its early presence in North America: several skeletons dating from ca. 4000-3000 b.c., found at the Carrier Mills site in the lower Ohio Valley, displayed lesions that have been attributed to syphilis (Muller 1986). ³  However, it was the arrival of the white man that first exposed the Native Americans to the viruses that cause smallpox and measles, and the rickettsia that cause typhus.  An infected black soldier in the army led by Cortes's rival, Narvaez, brought smallpox from Cuba to the Mexican coast.  The disease was soon carried to Tenochtitlan, where it ravaged the defenders of the city; among the dead was Cuitlahuac, who had organized the successful uprising against the Spanish.  Decimated and demoralized, the Aztecs could no longer hold off Cortes's army, and Tenochtitlan fell (Diaz 1963). ⁴  Within five years, smallpox spread through Central America, and reached Peru in 1525.  The death of the Inca ruler, which precipitated the civil war between his successors and thus facilitated Pizarro's conquest of the empire, was caused by smallpox.  These devastating smallpox epidemics were followed by outbreaks, in Mexico and Peru, of measles in 1530, and of a disease that was probably typhus in 1546.  The cumulative effect of these uncontrollable epidemics was a population loss of almost unimaginable dimensions (Ashburn 1947). ⁵  Reasonable estimates of the Native American population at the time of contact are on the order of 57 million; some 21 million people lived in Mesoamerica, about 7.5 million inhabited the Inca empire, and the population of the Intermediate area and Caribbean islands may have been 14 to 15 million (Denevan 1976). ⁶  It is thought that disease had wiped out 90% of the population of the nuclear zone (Mesoamerica, Peru, and the Intermediate area) by 1568; in other words, more than 39 million people had perished in less than 50 years following the initial outbreak of smallpox.

Why were there no American diseases to afflict the European invaders with equally terrible virulence?  It has long been thought that syphilis was such a disease, because the first well-reported outbreak in Europe occurred shortly after Columbus's return from the New World.  However, it now appears more likely that a nonvenereal strain of syphilis had always been present in Europe.  When Europeans, reacting to the colder weather of the Little Ice Age, began to wear more clothing indoors, thus hindering the usual skin-to-skin transmission of the spirochete bacillus, the microbe responded by taking the venereal route (McNeill 1976). ⁷  The virulence of the European outbreak might also have been caused by hybridization of Old and New World viral strains following contact.

Syphilis is the only disease for which an American origin is even arguable.  There are two possible explanations for the absence of endemic diseases in the New World.  The first is that microbes like the smallpox virus can only become established in human populations that are dense enough to permit frequent transmission from one human host to another, and numerous enough for there always to be disease-resistant survivors in which the virus can reside until the next outbreak — in other words, these germs can only flourish in urban situations.  Densely occupied cities appeared in the New World 3,000 years later than they did in the Old World; nevertheless, the first probable smallpox epidemic struck the Mediterranean region as late as the third century a.d.  Evidently, even in a hospitable urban environment, a human virus may take a long time to evolve.  Perhaps the 1,500 or 2,000 years of urban life in the Americas were not enough time for this process to occur.  However, early references to pestilence in the literature of both Mesopotamia and Egypt show that some form of contagious disease was already present in the Near East by 2000 b.c., only 1,000 years after the beginnings of urbanism.  So lack of time in the New World does not seem to be an adequate explanation of the absence of endemic diseases in such dense settled areas as the Valley of Mexico.

The near absence of diseases in pre-Columbian America can be more convincingly attributed to the paucity of domesticated mammals.  Most of the microbes that caused the Old World diseases seem to have originally infected animals, and then shifted to human hosts.  Thus, smallpox was evidently derived from cowpox, measles from rinderpest, and influenza from a disease that affects pigs (McNeill 1976). ⁸  For the same reasons that endemic human diseases require large, dense populations, microbes more often afflict herd animals than the more solitary species.  As we have seen, the people of Mesoamerica never domesticated any herd animals.  They did, of course, have the dog; but the dog, which lived in small packs in the wild, was not the primary host for diseases that would attack humans.  This explanation therefore seems to be valid for Mexico, but it does not account very well for the Peruvian case.  In Peru, llama herding seems to have been practiced by 2000 b.c., and possibly began as early as 4000 b.c.; the raising of guinea pigs may be of comparable antiquity.  So not only was there a long period during which the ancient Peruvians maintained close contact with large camelid herds, but they also kept domesticated rodents in their dwellings.  In the Old World, of course, the dreaded bubonic plague was transmitted by fleas from rodents to humans.  If we hope to explain the absence of infectious disease in the native human population of Peru, we must first ask why the domesticated animals did not suffer from diseases similar to those that afflicted their Old World counterparts.  Unfortunately, no one has come up with a very good answer to this question.

We can only speculate about the possible outcome of the confrontation between the Old and New Worlds, had disease not played so crucial a role.  Might the highly-organized Incas, and the less efficient but equally fierce Aztecs, have successfully resisted the European invasion?  Japan was never subjugated by the Europeans, and although China and India fell under Western domination for a century or two, the colonizers were ultimately driven out.  Similarly, white colonists were ultimately forced to cede most of Africa to the native populations, retaining only the southern tip of the continent.  In contrast, only tiny remnants of the native population survived the wave of European colonization that swept over North America and much of South America.  In the nuclear zone, a few million native people were left alive when the epidemics subsided.  They abandoned the gods who had failed them in their time of need, and adopted the god of the Catholic priests.  Unable to offer effective resistance, they generally resigned themselves to political domination and economic exploitation, although rebellions against the Spanish elite did flare up from time to time.  Although the native ideologies and political systems were obliterated by the conquest, many aspects of aboriginal culture, including some of the ancient languages, persisted among the rural villagers.  After centuries of dominance, Hispanic culture has become so firmly entrenched, and the commingling of the native and alien races has proceeded so far, that full restoration of the indigenous traditions is impossible.  Nevertheless, there has been a recent resurgence of interest and pride in the achievements of the Indian ancestors.  This trend was nicely exemplified by the decision to demolish several seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings in the heart of Mexico City, in order that the central pyramid of Tenochtitlan might be excavated and restored.
 
 

¹ Stuart J. Fiedel, Prehistory of the Americas, Second Edition, 1992, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge; pp. 362-366.

² “[A]ncient Native Americans were not ignorant of the principle of the wheel.  Toy ceramic dogs, mounted on four wheels, have been found in Mexico, near Veracruz.”  Figure 55: “Dog figurine on wheels, Veracruz, Mexico, Classic period.”  Fiedel, op. cit., pp. 182-183.

³ J. Muller, Archaeology of the Lower Ohio Valley, 1986, Academic Press, New York.

⁴ Bernal Diaz, The history of the conquest of New Spain, translated by A. P. Maudsley, 1963, Pelican, Baltimore.

⁵ P. M. Ashburn, The ranks of death: a medical history of the conquest of America, 1947, Coward-McCann, New York.

⁶ W. M. Denevan, ed., The native population of the Americas in 1492, 1976, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison.

⁷ W. H. McNeill, Plagues and peoples, 1976, Anchor Press, Garden City, New York.

⁸ McNeill, op. cit.