ABSTRACT
Infectious diseases have plagued humans since the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution. Newly infected natives carried the pathogens to others, even at great distances, so that inland epidemics often preceded direct European contact by months. The technical difference between an 'outbreak' of whooping cough and an 'epidemic' of whooping cough may only be a few deaths or cases, but the perceived or rhetorical effects can be huge. As with finding the line between an outbreak and an epidemic, so determining when an epidemic becomes a pandemic is rather messy business. There is also a quantitative difference between historical epidemics and modern ones. Before the emerging discovery of germs and their effects on the human body in the later nineteenth century, the origins of disease remained mysterious. Indeed, disease, with its unexpected patterns of death, its unpredictable onsets and indeterminable duration, and potential for recurrence, has carved a place of its own in the human history of death.
