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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@ChenHuailun here. I'm adding a supplementary thread before today's scheduled one to expand on the origins and early history of the Church of the East (aka the Nestorian Church) ~ahc #jingjiao 1/


The Church of the East traces its origins to the christological position of the School of Antioch, which held that the human and divine and human essences (ουσία) of Christ were united in a single prosopon (πρόσωπον). ~ahc #jingjiao 2/


This ran against the position of the School of Alexandria, which held that the two essences of Christ were united in a single hypostasis (ὑπόστασις). In general terms, hypostasis is more inherent than prosopon. ~ahc #jingjiao 3/


One implication of the Antiochene rejection of the hypostatic union is that Mary could not accurately be called the Theotokos, or God-bearer. Instead, she is the Christotokos, the Christ-bearer. ~ahc #jingjiao 4/


These Christological debates were further complicated by Syriac terms such as 'kyana' (ܟܝܢܐ), associated with 'ousia' but later translated to 'hypostasis' by Syrian Orthodox; and 'qnoma ' (ܩܢܘܡܐ), sometimes contentiously translated as 'hypostasis' or 'person.' ~ahc #jingjiao 5/
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I want to talk about the key textual elements you might find in an Islamic manuscript. I'll focus on this manuscript, roughly 18th century, of an Arabic history of the rulers of Egypt called Nuzhat al-nāẓirīn, by Marʻī al-Karmī (d. 1623/4).
Budeiry Library (Jerusalem) MS 593 -jm


These texts have many elements designed to help the reader understand what they're saying, and choices by the scribe who copied the manuscript often help as well. Let's see what's here. -jm

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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One key element of the Islamic intellectual tradition is the commentary. Commentaries on the Qurʼan (tafsīr) began early in Islamic history, but from about the 12th or 13th century, well into the 19th, commentaries on other scholarly texts became extremely common. -jm


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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1/25 Today, I will continue looking at the lives of Palestinian poets in the context of the intellectual battle over modernizing Arabic poetry after 1948. A marginalized and maligned figure in Arab intellectual history in the Cold War is Tawfiq Sayigh (1923-71) ~AA.


2/25 I am tagging Tawfiq's nephew @SayighYezid, a brilliant political economist and political scientist of the modern and contemporary Middle East. He is the son of Palestinian economist Yusuf Sayigh and Rosemary Sayigh, the British anthropologist ~AA.

3/25 Though elsewhere in my work I closely study Jabra I. Jabra (1920-94) -- Sayigh's lifetime colleague and confidant -- I will cover Jabra, here, in relation to Sayigh for the purposes of brevity and since Jabra has received a fair amount of attention in the historiography ~AA.

4/25 The prose-poem was a form that Sayigh masterfully used to express his feelings of misery and pain. Sayigh led a tortured life that took him from one exile to another until his lonely death in Berkeley in 1971. Mounah Khouri, Arabic professor @NESUCB laid him to rest ~AA.

5/25 During the Nakba, the Sayigh family fled from Tiberias and settled in Ras Beirut, where Sayigh received them and cared for them from his income as a librarian at Beirut’s American Cultural Center and as an anonymous editor of the women's magazine "Ṣawt al-Mar’ah" ~AA.
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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

Aluoben (阿蘿本) was said to have been the Persian missionary responsible for bringing Christianity to China, arriving in Chang'an in 635 and building a church there with 21 monks. ~ahc #jingjiao /3


'Observing the azure clouds, he [Aluoben] bore the true sacred books; beholding the direction of the winds, he braved difficulties and dangers.' - Xi'an stele ~ahc #jingjiao /4


Let's pause on this name, Aluoben (阿蘿本). Some translate it as 'Olopen.' Is it a Syriac name, perhaps a rendering of Yahballaha or Abraham? Or perhaps a Middle Persian name Anōš-ruwān (meaning immortal soul)? ~ahc #jingjiao /5
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