BC HISTORY
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Happy Friday! I'm @khowaga, and I'm talking about the social history of medicine and disease in #Egypt. Today's topic is the cholera of 1883. (1/19)

#tweetistorian #twitterstorians #histmed #epitwitter

 It goes like this.

According to popular legend, Patient Zero of the 1883 cholera epidemic was a mason in his mid-forties named Ḥassan Nūr-al-Dīn, who lived in the port city of Damietta (34,000 people). (2/19)
Nūr-al-Dīn rarely traveled outside of Damietta, but on the morning of Thursday, June 21, he took the local train to the next major town upriver, Manṣūra (30,000 people) for a weekend trip. The next day, Friday, he began to feel unwell. (3/19)
After a fitful night, he went to the station to return home on Saturday. His condition deteriorated rapidly: on boarding the train he exhibited no symptoms, but by reaching the hamlet of Rās al-Khalīg, about an hour later, he had become violently ill. (4/19)
By the time the train arrived in Damietta, he was so weak that he had to be carried home from the station. He arrived at his house before sunset, died shortly before midnight and was buried promptly the next day, Sunday, June 24. (5/19)
Vital statistical data suggests that Nūr-al-Dīn--if he actually existed--could not have been Patient Zero, but the story's persistence (it appeared in a government report) is telling: he was an Everyman.

In short, this time it was him, but it could have been you or me. (6/19)
I have a special relationship with the 1883 outbreak. It was my first real deep dive into the history of medicine, and my first experience really starting to understand what a social historian can get out of an epidemic event, so please indulge me for a bit. (7/19)
When cholera first began to spread outward from Bengal--and, at the risk of flogging a European horse, the first wave that went out from India went East, but I've seen more than one current text that says the first wave occurred in the late 1820s and 1830s to the west. (8/19)
ANYway.

When the disease began to appear outside of India, there was immediate concern about the possibility that it would appear along shipping lines. And the British, as the newly dominant imperial force in South Asia, stood to lose the most. (9/19)
You'll remember that when cholera appeared in Britain, local health authorities were accused of using the illness as a means to increase their power. The reaction to this--backed in certain scientific circles--was an insistence that contagion did not exist. (10/19)
The miasmic theory--which held that diseases were endemic to a particular place, and spread through vapors, air, or other as-yet-not understood mechanism--had been around for millennia. (11/19)
Many scientists, even if they believed contagion was possible, continued to believe that some diseases were spread through some localist, miasmic means as yet unidentified. Reports of epidemics were often accompanied by meteorological observations for this reason. (12/19)
However, when presented with the cost of refitting medieval English towns, and the potentially invasive response of mandating vaccines (the debates over the smallpox vaccine occurred at the same time), the idea of localism found political support. (13/19)
Even as British *scientists*, like their colleagues on the continent, became more and more certain of the existence of contagious agents, British policy shifted toward a staunchly anti-contagionist stance. (14/19)
In 1851, the major maritime powers in Europe and the Mediterranean came together at the first of 14 International Sanitary Conferences to standardize quarantine procedures to control the spread of cholera, yellow fever, and other diseases. (15/19)
The Egyptians were represented by the Ottoman delegation as Egypt was technically not independent, but each successive Egyptian government after Mehmet Ali's death in 1849 was clear about its adherence to the agreed-upon international protocols. (16/19)
While Clot Bey himself did not personally believe in contagion, the Supreme Council of Health had always implemented quarantine protocols as a means to assure European trading partners that Egypt was serious about the protection of health and prevention of disease. (17/19)
Britain was a vociferous objector to the implementation of quarantine protocols. Cholera was already present in Europe, the argument went. Therefore, it cannot have come from India--and even if it had done, it was entrenched in Europe, and so there was no point. (18/19)
And so, in June of 1883, with reports that cholera had appeared in Damietta, a port city where ships coming from India often called after exiting the Suez Canal, the British Surgeon General saw an opportunity to settle the issue once and for all. (/fin)

~csr

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Budeiry Library (Jerusalem) MS 593 -jm


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First, almost every Islamic text begins with the invocation "in the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful." The wording is never changed, and it's always in Arabic, no matter what language the text is, although you might add phrases like "and we ask God for help." -jm


Christians were able to do more experimentation with their invocations, as you can see from the examples here. https://t.co/wEPWRitCWA -jm


After the invocation (basmalah), you might have what this text has, which is an introduction of the author in the form "the poor slave of God [so-and-so] said..." often followed by a quick prayer for the author. -jm
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1 So, today we turn to early Islamic Beirut. what do we know of the earliest times of #Beirut under early Islamic rule, starting with the #conquest. How and when did Beirut enter the emerging Muslim empire? -rm


2 Let’s start with traditional sources for the early Islamic period. Of those, only al-Balādhurī (d. ca. 892), the Abbasid scholar, is informative. Other Muslim and non-Muslim sources including al-Ṭabarī's Tārīkh are silent on the matter.-rm


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4 Hence, the men who conquered Beirut were Yazīd b. Abī Sufyān (d. 639) and his half-brother and future caliph Mu‘āwiya (r. 661-680). The date of the conquest of the coast falls between 636 and 639 at the latest, the date of the death of Yazīd in the plague of Emmaus. -rm


5 Yazīd and the Muslim army likely took the coastal road to Beirut, a path taken by numerous armies before. They would have either swung from Damascus to Baalbek through the Hims gap to ‘Arqa, then Byblos, crossed the Dog River, and arrived at the eastern side of Beirut.
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Usually a commentary is called a sharḥ, and a supercommentary (i.e. a commentary on a commentary) is called a ḥāshiyah. Sometimes you get all the way up to a fourth- or fifth-level supercommentary. -jm


Sometimes it's hard to even tell what the "core text" is, because even a very famous text that's the core of many commentaries might present itself as an abridgement or comment on something even earlier. -jm


Commentaries might serve multiple purposes: to explain obscure grammar or vocabulary, to dig into particular legal cases, etc. Even to show why the core text is wrong. Eventually you get some Ottoman Turkish commentaries that translate Persian poems and then comment on them. -jm


Authors of commentaries often mark quotes from the core text by key words like "qawluhu" ("what he said") and manuscripts often emphasize this by writing these words in red or putting a line over the quoted text, so you can figure out who is talking. -jm
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How do you explain the Trinity in Chinese? If you're a Christian in Tang China, there's a few ways!

I'm @ChenHuailun, back for my last #Twittistorian thread, this time on translating the names of God in Chinese Christian documents. ~ahc #jingjiao 1/


There are two main writers/translators credited in the extant documents of the Christian (called 'Jingjiao' 景教 in Chinese) corpus of Tang China: Aluoben and Jingjing. ~ahc #jingjiao /2

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Panchbhootasthalam representing vayu element, also called Dakshin Kailasha.
As per Shiva’s boon, Vayu is incarnated here as Shiva and worshipped as Kalahasteeswara.
The kshetram is also associated with Rahu and Ketu.


The Kshetram is named after 3 devotees of Shiva- a snake, spider and elephant who worshipped a lingam in the forest. Elephant did jal abhishek with water from its trunk, spider protected it from dust by weaving a web on it and snake adorned it with his jewel.
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Once, the web and jewel got washed away when elephant sprayed water on the lingam. Angered snake entered elephant’s trunk and bit him but died in the process. The agitated elephant trampled the spider accidentally. Shiva gave moksha to all three.


Hence the name-Sri for Spider, kaal for snake n hasti for elephant.

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