Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Notes -
[citation needed]
The first microscopes capable of seeing "animalcules" date back to 1674, and as late as ~1850 we still have people like John Snow and Ignaz Semmelweis still fighting an uphill battle with their controversial theories of "cholera can spread in drinking water" and "doctors should wash their hands in between examining corpses and delivering babies".
Back in the 1500s understanding of disease was so bad that we still don't even know which diseases were responsible for the majority of New World deaths. The earliest massive plague was smallpox, but the dozen-odd plagues of "cocoliztli" are still named by that generic Nahuatl (Aztec) word for "pestilence" because nobody knows which of a half dozen candidate germs were the actual cause.
For that matter, some diseases spread so much faster than the conquerors who first transmitted them that we don't know how bad the death toll was! In hindsight we believe that a lot of European colonist reports of "gosh, look how beautiful this unspoiled wilderness is" in North America were from people describing recently-carefully-tended forests whose caretakers had just been devastated by epidemics.
This isn't to excuse any of the colonists' deliberate crimes, of course. After the rest of his Patuxet tribe had been killed by an epidemic, the proper way to treat Squanto should have been sympathy and charity, not abduction. Some of the colonized nations' treatment was "Pretty close to slavery", and some was literal "we'll take you to the slave market to sell now" slavery.
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