GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

FURTHER READINGS • 4 4 I
Biology 11:207-11 (1966), uses such measles epidemics to calculate the
minimum size of population required to maintain measles. Andrew Dobson,
"The population biology of parasite-induced changes in host behavior,"
Quarterly Reviews of Biology 63:139-65 (1988), discusses how
parasites enhance their own transmission by changing the behavior of their
host. Aidan Cockburn and Eve Cockburn, eds., Mummies, Diseases, and
Ancient Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), illustrates
what can be learned from mummies about past impacts of diseases.
As for accounts of disease impacts on previously unexposed populations,
Henry Dobyns, Their Number Became Thinned (Knoxville: University
of Tennessee Press, 1983), marshals evidence for the view that
European-introduced diseases killed up to 95 percent of all Native Americans.
Subsequent books or articles arguing that controversial thesis include
John Verano and Douglas Ubelaker, eds., Disease and Demography in the
Americas (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992); Ann
Ramenofsky, Vectors of Death (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1987); Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987); and Dean Snow,
"Microchronology and demographic evidence relating to the size of the
pre-Columbian North American Indian population," Science 268:1601-
4 (1995). Two accounts of depopulation caused by European-introduced
diseases among Hawaii's Polynesian population are David Stannard,
Before the Horror: The Population of Hawaii on the Eve of Western Contact
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989), and O. A. Bushnell,
The Gifts of Civilization: Germs and Genocide in Hawaii (Honolulu: University
of Hawaii Press, 1993). The near-extermination of the Sadlermiut
Eskimos by a dysentery epidemic in the winter of 1902-3 is described by
Susan Rowley, "The Sadlermiut: Mysterious or misunderstood?" pp. 361-
84 in David Morrison and Jean-Luc Pilon, eds., Threads of Arctic Prehistory
(Hull: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1994). The reverse phenomenon,
of European deaths due to diseases encountered overseas, is
discussed by Philip Curtin, Death by Migration: Europe's Encounter with
the Tropical World in the 19th Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989).
Among accounts of specific diseases, Stephen Morse, ed., Emerging
Viruses (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), contains many valuable
chapters on "new" viral diseases of humans; so does Mary Wilson et
al., eds., Disease in Evolution, Annals of the New York Academy of Sci-