History of diseases and christianity

[guno]

Disease and stench in europe



Christianity turns out to be the only great world religion — great in the sense of widespread and influential — that had no teaching or interest in hygiene. In the early years of the church, the holier you were, the less you wanted to be clean. Cleanliness was kind of a luxury, like food, drink and sex, because cleanliness was comfortable and attractive. The holier you were — and this really applied to monks and hermits and saints — the less you would wash. And the more you smelled, the closer to God people thought you were.

So then did Buddhists and Muslims think Christians were filthy?

Absolutely. And they were right, too.

And didn’t Westerners have a reputation among Asians for being filthy?

Yes. They probably were, relatively speaking, compared to affluent Chinese and to Japanese people of every class. One of the reasons may have been the influence of Christianity. Europe suffered this hiatus in cleanliness for about four or five centuries. When the great plagues came, the Black Death, in the 14th century, the king of France asked the medical faculty at the Sorbonne in Paris, “What is causing this hideous plague that is killing one out of every three Europeans, and what can we do to prevent it?” And the doctor said the people who were at risk for getting the plague had opened their pores in warm or hot water, in the baths, and they were much more susceptible.

So in France and England and most European countries, for about five centuries, people really believed that it was very, very dangerous to get in water, and this only really broke down in the 19th century. There was nothing like this, nothing corresponded to that belief, in Asia or in India, so they had an unbroken tradition of cleanliness. They also had religions, like Islam and Hinduism, that took cleanliness very seriously, which Christianity never did.

The filthy, stinking truth - Salon.com

 

[guno]

European Diseases:

The three most frightful European diseases were smallpox, typhus, and measles. Other European diseases included malaria, yellow fever, chickenpox, whooping cough, scarlet fever, diphtheria, plague, typhoid fever, poliomyelitis, cholera, and trachoma. All of the diseases introduced in the Americas by the Europeans were crowd diseases. Ann Ramenofsky, in an entry in The Oxford Companion to Archaeology, explains: “Because individuals develop permanent immunity, the organisms survive indefinitely in cities where people are concentrated. Measles, for instance, requires a population of about 300,000 to survive. If the population size drops below this threshold, the virus can cause illness and death, but after one epidemic, the virus itself dies out.”

Ann Ramenofsky goes on to write: “In the end, understanding and explaining the demographic collapse of Native Americans involves two facts: the absence of herd animals to serve as sources for the evolution of human diseases and the number of diseases introduced. Each new introduction created new waves of illness and death: the combination of all disease made the scale of Native American depopulation unique in human history.”

Overall, hundreds of thousands of Indians died of European diseases during the first two centuries following contact. In terms of death tolls, smallpox killed the greatest number of Indians, followed by measles, influenza, and bubonic plague.


American Indians and European Diseases | Native American Netroots

 

[guno]

Illness was indisputably caused by sin. The Bible said so, and so did Church Councils. The only alternative explanations given credence were diabolical possession, witchcraft and other satanic machinations. In Christendom, from AD 300 to around 1700 all serious mental conditions were understood as symptoms of demonic possession. Since illness was thought to be caused by supernatural agents, cures had to be essentially supernatural as well. Every cure was literally miraculous, and these miracles could be effected only by prayer, penance and the assistance of saints. To claim otherwise was heretical and blasphemous.

The Christian ideal was that women should die rather than allow themselves to be helped by a physician. Some women won their sainthood for doing no more than declining medical assistance. In the fourth century Saint Gorgonia, the daughter of two saints, was trampled by a team of mules, causing multiple broken bones and crushed internal organs. She would not see a doctor, as she thought it indecent. According to Christian sources this modesty miraculously cured her, and a second such self-healing miracle assured her sainthood. Today, Gorgonia is a patron saint for people afflicted by bodily ills. We do not know how many thousands of other women with identically modest Christian scruples died following her example and are now forgotten.

Christianity and Medicine - Bad News About Christianity

 

[Jroc]

Disease and stench in europe



Christianity turns out to be the only great world religion — great in the sense of widespread and influential — that had no teaching or interest in hygiene. In the early years of the church, the holier you were, the less you wanted to be clean. Cleanliness was kind of a luxury, like food, drink and sex, because cleanliness was comfortable and attractive. The holier you were — and this really applied to monks and hermits and saints — the less you would wash. And the more you smelled, the closer to God people thought you were.

So then did Buddhists and Muslims think Christians were filthy?

Absolutely. And they were right, too.

And didn’t Westerners have a reputation among Asians for being filthy?

Yes. They probably were, relatively speaking, compared to affluent Chinese and to Japanese people of every class. One of the reasons may have been the influence of Christianity. Europe suffered this hiatus in cleanliness for about four or five centuries. When the great plagues came, the Black Death, in the 14th century, the king of France asked the medical faculty at the Sorbonne in Paris, “What is causing this hideous plague that is killing one out of every three Europeans, and what can we do to prevent it?” And the doctor said the people who were at risk for getting the plague had opened their pores in warm or hot water, in the baths, and they were much more susceptible.

So in France and England and most European countries, for about five centuries, people really believed that it was very, very dangerous to get in water, and this only really broke down in the 19th century. There was nothing like this, nothing corresponded to that belief, in Asia or in India, so they had an unbroken tradition of cleanliness. They also had religions, like Islam and Hinduism, that took cleanliness very seriously, which Christianity never did.

The filthy, stinking truth - Salon.com

Funny Salon doesn't mind the beheadings from the muslim nutjobs...Hey fake Jew!.. Why do you love muslims?. Why do you only hate white Christians?

 

[Spinster]

Yep, bathing in rivers or lakes/ponds full of filth and raw sewage makes one "clean" I guess, according to you anyway. Where'd you get your doctorate from, again?

 

[Abishai100]

Traffic Tom

Imagine that a 45+ year-old man has a heart attack while in the throws of passion during an evening of intercourse with a beautiful blonde 20 year-old woman. This is the sort of of human gossip dominating the modern world of networking and scandal, as echoed in the Woody Allen film "Celebrity" (1998).

It's the propagation of modern lifestyle-relevant maladies such as AIDS which have brought more direct sociological links between Christianity and populism.




And the Band Played On (Film)

 

[Spinster]

Illness was indisputably caused by sin. The Bible said so, and so did Church Councils. The only alternative explanations given credence were diabolical possession, witchcraft and other satanic machinations. In Christendom, from AD 300 to around 1700 all serious mental conditions were understood as symptoms of demonic possession. Since illness was thought to be caused by supernatural agents, cures had to be essentially supernatural as well. Every cure was literally miraculous, and these miracles could be effected only by prayer, penance and the assistance of saints. To claim otherwise was heretical and blasphemous.

The Christian ideal was that women should die rather than allow themselves to be helped by a physician. Some women won their sainthood for doing no more than declining medical assistance. In the fourth century Saint Gorgonia, the daughter of two saints, was trampled by a team of mules, causing multiple broken bones and crushed internal organs. She would not see a doctor, as she thought it indecent. According to Christian sources this modesty miraculously cured her, and a second such self-healing miracle assured her sainthood. Today, Gorgonia is a patron saint for people afflicted by bodily ills. We do not know how many thousands of other women with identically modest Christian scruples died following her example and are now forgotten.

Christianity and Medicine - Bad News About Christianity

Christainity isn't the sole reason for folks not seeking medical treatment. Some of us came to the conclusion doctors can't cure anything, they are "practicing" on your dime, if they don't treat you they can't make their mortgage and Mercedes payments, they are basically egotistical thieves. That leaves us with being our own best physician by trying our best to educate ourselves and do what's right for our own bodies. Ingesting any number of prescriptions can't be all that good as our bodies weren't designed to run on chemicals all of which have a host of side effects. Some of us reach that conclusion in time to make a difference. For others, it was arrived at too late.