Radio România Internațional

Tag: Plague

The epidemics in Romanian Principalities

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic
has been hitting the headlines for almost two years now, worldwide, in the news
program and in talk-shows. Physicians, psychologists, sociologists, educational
experts as well as other categories of specialists have presented data from the
stand point of their own branch of science, in a bid to draw relevant conclusions.
Historians have also responded to the challenges of our times, even though their
profession is closely linked to exploring the past. So, historians provided
their own account of humankind’s past experiences related to epidemics. For us,
Covid-19 has an identity of its own. And that because science in the 21st
century has succeeded to notice it and analyse its behaviour. However, in the past,
the agents of disease were not that very well known. At that time, fatality and
doomed fate were considered the causes of plagues by the vast majority of
people.

Romania’s National History
Museum and Romania’s National Archives jointly staged an exhibition themed Epidemics
in the history of Romanian Principalities. The former institution played host
to the exhibition. In 2021, Romania’s National Archives celebrate 190 years of
existence. The Archives were founded in 1831, at a time when the Organic Regulation
was issued and which was an early version of a constitution in the
principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia. By way of celebration for its 190 years
of existence, the national Archives presented visitors with relevant documents
for the plagues that hit Wallachia and Moldavia in the past: the contagions of
cholera, typhoid fever, exanthematous typhus and Spanish flu. Archivist Claudiu
Turcitu was the coordinator of the exhibition. He gave us details on the exhibition
proper and its follow-up.

Claudiu Turcitu:

In our undertaking,
we sought to make the documents visible to the lay public, under the present
circumstances. And what better documents we could make visible for them, other
than those pertaining to plagues, now that we’re celebrating The National Archives
190 years of existence. That’s how we got the idea of mounting this exhibition,
all the more so as we’re also preparing a volume, an edition of documents related
to the quarantines service.

Photocopies as well as original
documents are among the exhibits. Reproductions of documents include photographs,
maps, charts, diary pages, church official acts, official notes, personal
notes. But the oldest document the National Archives presented to the public
dates form the 17th century, it was also issued at the time of a plague,
the disease that claimed the lives of the biggest number of people until the 19th
century. On the day of March 12, 1637, Nedelco gave Gligor an acre of vineyard,
tools and money found in the house of his brother, Tudor, so that Gligor may
get in there and take out his woman and his little boys who had died of plague,
and bury them, since nobody could be found to see to their interment. From another
documents dated September 1657, we find out that a one Petre Epure had given father
Negutu and his sons some apple trees during the plague, when his wife and
children had died without taking the Communion.

Claudiu Turcitu:

We started
off from document issued in the year 1637. We grouped them according to the
main plagues that struck the Romanian principalities until 1918, being aware of
the existing space constraints. The first document dates from the time of the plague
and is a zapis, a certifying signed document, from a person, for the
burial of those who had died because of the plague. Then we go through
documents dated 1813, at the time of Caragea’s harrowing plague. We even have a
hrisov, a charter, from 1813, signed by Caragea for the Dudesti hospital
which had been previously prepared, in 1789, for those who suffered from the
plague.

While visiting the
exhibition, we also read that in 1827, Ahmed pasha in Nicopole on the river Danube’s
south bank, allowed the free circulation to the north bank of the river only in
the Teleorman river area, where the quarantine was instated. Elsewhere in the
principality of Wallachia, people still had to cope with the violent manifestations
of the plague. A document, which is relevant even for the year of 1831, is the
prayer written by a one Stan, a parish Clerk with the Coltea monastery, located
nearby the hospital with the same name in Bucharest. Those were the harrowing
years of the cholera epidemic which had terrified the entire population of
Wallachia. Another noteworthy document is the executive order issued on
February 14, 1846, by Wallachian ruler Gheorghe
Bibescu, whereby parents had to get their children vaccinated against the
chicken pox. Apart from the plague, the exhibition presents the other
epidemiological scourges that hit the Romanian society in the 19th century
and in the first decades of the 20th century.

Claudiu Turcitu:

We then
go through the cholera epidemic with documents that are part of the War
Ministry’s quarantines service collection, private documents actually. There
are letters and impressions of the personalities of that time having to do with
the symptoms of the cholera epidemic, with the treatment, with the medical recipes
used to contain the cholera epidemic, which lasted rather long. We then go through
the exanthematous typhus, then there is another epidemic that broke out towards
the end of World War One, namely the Spanish flu. We’re closing the exhibition with
Queen Marie’s notebooks. We rounded off the exhibition with original documents
issued by the interior office of the High Steward (The Interior Ministry) and
by the War Ministry, the Ion I. C. Bratianu private collection, actually a report
compiled in a bid to get the funding that was required for the exanthematous typhus.

In the past, the
epidemics struck the Romanian territory with a devastating force and people
know how to cope with the epidemics. However, in our times, in the technological world
we live in, we can easily imagine an aseptic future, yet microbiology has not
had the last word yet.

(Translated by Eugen Nasta)

28 November 2021
Pandemics in 19th century Romania

Microorganisms
and the associated diseases that made pandemics possible have occurred with the
advancement of medicine, in the life of modern man. Because of microbes and
pandemics, healthcare policies were thought out and also because of microbes
and pandemics social behavior patterns were changed. In the Romanian space,
microorganisms and the diseases they caused grabbed everyone’s attention and
generated healthcare public policies precisely because they caused epidemics
and pandemics. The Romanian world in the 19th century had to face a
common enemy: the plague. However, other enemies, unseen and, until then, unbeknownst
to man, had manifested with a destructive virulence. Cholera was one such
enemy.

Jointly with
physician, anthropologist and professor Calin Cotoi with the University of
Bucharest we had a closer look at the new phenomenon that emerged in Romanians’
mindset, namely the microorganism. We found out from Calin Cotoi when the Romanians
first found out about the existence of the microorganisms that generated the
pandemics.

Part of the Romanians got to know that at the same time when the rest of the
world got to know it, after Pasteur first discovered the lactic acid fermentation
and then the alcoholic one. Then Pasteur revealed there was no such thing as a
spontaneous generation, meaning that small animals could not possibly be formed
out of nothing. The Romanian population elsewhere around the country, apart
from the numbers that had been involved in the healthcare and medical reform
was rather late to impart that kind of knowledge. In late 19th
century and early 20th century, the image of the microbe becomes
more popular in Romania.

The fear of
pestilence of the people in the 19th century was at least as strong as the fear
of the medieval man. According to Calin Cotoi, in 19th century
Europe, the microbiological enemy was a different one. The plague had by then
become history and a new, unseen, enemy emerged: the cholera.

Until around 1830 or thereabouts, the plagues had still been reported for
Romania. In the 19th century there was Caragea’s plague which
claimed the lives of many, many people. But the most interesting and, to my
mind, the most important disease for 19th century Romania was the cholera.
I should say, exaggerating things a little bit, that modern Romania was one of
the creations of cholera, of the European cholera pandemics. It is one of the
most creative diseases, socially speaking, in the 19th century, and
is very different from the plague, in this respect. The cholera succeeded to
break through the Hapsburg sanitary cordon, and, from India, its hotbeds
reached as far as Paris, London and North America, generating a thorough change
in the Western social space and, somehow indirectly, in the territories at the
Mouths of the Danube.

There is no
secret that epidemics and pandemics were literally generators of change in
history. Cholera did not make an exception to that rule either. Calin Cotoi
also shown that imposing the strict quarantine, whereby for 40 days running,
any transport of commodities and the movement of people were immediately
confined on the ship or in quarantine stations on the banks of river Danube,
all that favored the enhancement of the authority of the Romanian state.

Calin
Cotoi:

The Romanian state created quarantine stations on the banks of river Prut, but
mainly on the banks of river Danube. This time, the quarantine stations are
very tough, it’s just that, once created, these stations enter a time of
crisis. The Romanian state increasingly depended on the trade of grains, which
provided a source of financing and subsistence, and that grains trade is
jeopardized by too tough a quarantine. So there was always a tension between
the freedom of trade and the danger of cholera. I think it was out of that
crisis dilemma that Romania was created.

In the early 19th
century, Europe was hit by cholera, a new, unbeknownst disease, against which
no form of efficient fight had been discovered. The fact that the Romanian
space was modernized, becoming more European, made it possible for solutions
and treatments of the developed states to reach the Romanian space.

Calin Cotoi:

SOUNDBITE V.M.:
The cholera had no problem breaking through the old sanitary cordons that had
been erected especially against the plague and, elsewhere around the world,
against the yellow fever, devastating a Europe where the commercial, industrial
and urban progress saw their heydays. Europe had been taken by surprise by the
virulence of the cholera. As a reaction to that unknown disease, Europe created
several governance and medical systems, as we well as systems of recording the
diseases and of certain theories on the relationship the social milieu had with
the disease. All that put together provided a makeover regarding to European administration
and governance. Such public hygiene models, models of public policy, reached
Romania as well, somehow transforming the society. Those international models
occurred, as a reaction to that terrible and unknown disease. In Romania, they
failed significantly, because of the rift between the urban and the rural
areas. In the urban areas the implementation of the public hygiene methods was
successful, to a certain extent, yet in the rural regions, the failure of all
that was blatant.

In 19th
century Romania, microorganisms and pandemics did not cause only sorrow and
death, just as they had caused in the previous centuries. The contacts with the
Western European world made it possible for the Romanian world to turn from a
world of pessimism and fatalism into a world that had real possibilities of
eradicating all forms of pestilence.

(Translation by Eugen Nasta)

9 August 2020
The Plague in 19th Century Romania

In the 18th and 19th
centuries, it was dubbed ‘the Levant affliction’, the Wallachian disease’, or
‘the sticky disease’, believed to be one of the most dangerous ailments per
number of victims, and for the lack of treatment. It was spread by fleas hiding
in the fur of rats, with the bubonic plague being the most widespread form. It
manifested itself by high fever, blisters, vomiting, hemorrhage, and
hallucinations, resulting in death.

The plague was not a constant
presence in the Romanian Principalities, nor a center for its spread. Every
time it spread here, it was brought over by traders, soldiers, pilgrims, and
other travelers from the Orient, or by caravans or ships. Historian Sorin
Grigoruta, with the A. D. Xenopol History Institute of Iasi, wrote a book about
the plague and attempts to contain it. He also wrote about how the disease was
perceived and the way these perceptions reflected mentalities in centuries
past.

Sorin Grigoruta: In the centuries before the 19th, the
general conception of the plague was that it was caused by imbalances in
nature, most likely caused by astronomical factors such as the conjunction of
planets, eclipses, comets, but also by disasters such as earthquakes and
floods. It was seen as a divine punishment for the sins of mankind. In early 19th
century, while still holding on to previous misconceptions, people in the
Romanian Principalities started taking into account the human element in the
spread of the plague. After many waves of the epidemic, empirical observation
started making a contribution to action taken against the spread of the
disease. The only methods so far were running away from the centers of
infection or the banishment of the infected.

The plague was mostly an urban
disease. The measures taken by the authorities would be considered repressive
by today’s standards. Here is Sorin Grigoruta at the microphone.

Sorin Grigoruta: Aware of the fact that urban crowds increased the
risk of contamination, the authorities took drastic measures to limit human
contact. What we see back then were courts, schools, churches, and cafes being
closed down, and curfews being imposed, especially at night. Around 1785, the
ruler ordered his Sword Bearer to close down coffee houses, with coffee only
being sold at counters open into the streets. A night curfew was imposed
because the ill and the dead were taken out of the city at that time. It was
not a pleasant view, and the measure was taken in order to diminish the
emotional effect that it would have had upon the rest of the population.

Isolation was another measure taken
against the plague. Here with details is Sorin Grigoruta.

Sorin Grigoruta: The other measure taken by the authorities was to
isolate infected houses. The first form of isolation was to lock the diseased
into their homes. I would mention that this method was not limited to the
Romanian Principalities, it could be found all over Europe. If someone
survived, fine, if not, everyone in the house got infected and died. The second
form of isolation was that of taking everyone, infected or not, out of the
house, and getting the house disinfected, so to say. This could be simply
airing it or cleaning it up, but could go as far as partial or total
destruction, with fire being most often the purifying agent. Stefan
Episcupescu, who dubbed the plague ‘spirit of death’, wrote in 1824 what the
means for protecting against the plague were. I quote from what he wrote: ‘of
all the cures known to the physician’s knowledge we have water, vinegar, and
fire as the strongest and most powerful against the affliction of the plague.
Water washes and cleanses the affliction, vinegar’s vapors weakens the rush of
the affliction, while the fire draws out the plague’s spirit itself away from
afar, burning and extinguishing it.’

The most effective method of
combating the plague in Western Europe was quarantining. The first European
quarantine was in the port of Ragusa, which compelled every ship coming from
the Orient to stay at anchor outside the port for 40 days. The idea was
imitated by other European ports and cities as well. On dry land, the Austrian
sanitary blockade was extremely effective, and was based on military borders.
The Russian quarantine was temporary, held only for the duration of the
epidemic, and was largely ineffective. In the Romanian space, the quarantine
was used, also in a less than effective way.

Sorin Grigoruta: Without consciously aiming at the factor that
spread the plague, gradually, all the measures that isolated the sick or the
suspected victims started yielding results. As a result, the next step was to
check and isolate for a few days the people that came from the areas affected
by the plague, be it within the country or from abroad. At the same time, a system of health messages
and notes started circulating, attesting to the fact that the person did not
arrive from an area unaffected by the plague. This is how domestic or foreign
quarantines came to be. They were known in domestic documents as lazarettos,
and these isolation grounds were improvised in the points of entry into cities
or villages. A few houses were requisitioned to house the quarantined, as well
as the personnel in charge of treatment.

The plague disappeared from the
Romanian Principalities around mid-19th century, alongside the
appearance of the modern state and its hard borders.

11 March 2019