Negation of Disease?

What could be done as early as historically possible to negate the effects of plague and disease? I'm wondering this after seeing the death tolls from the Plague of Justinian and the Black Death, and finally realizing just how much it screwed the potential of the Mediterranean and shifted power northwards. I'm not asking for miracles to occur for both of these consecutively, but I am wondering what could be done in general to limit disease as early as possible, in a manner realistic with what was available at that time? What could have been done that wouldn't rock the boat drastically in terms of POD?
 
I am wondering what could be done in general to limit disease as early as possible, in a manner realistic with what was available at that time? What could have been done that wouldn't rock the boat drastically in terms of POD?

I suggest you make the Romans simply hate rats. A lot.

And try to kill as many off them as possible. Have an emperor declare his intention to remove all the rats from Rome or something. Wouldn't be impossible, considering how strangely often lunatics became emperors. It can then stay as part of the cultural consciousness in Europe that rats are awful and must be removed from all civilized places.

Without the rats, things are bound to be at least somewhat easier.
 
There are some pre-scientific ideas about the cause of disease that, if they were consistently acted upon, could mitigate disease.

For instance, the Bad Smell theory of disease has been attested in Roman writings as early as the first century AD. If it gets taken seriously on a society-wide scale, it implies that human and animal wastes, rotten food, corpses, and dead animals should be promptly buried, burned, or carted away from populated areas. Do this, and you remove a lot of contamination-based disease vectors (particularly for things like cholera and dysentery) as well as drastically reducing the food supply for rats and other vermin.

I also remember reading about field sanitation practices in classical armies: if memory serves, Greeks, Romans, and Persians generally understood the importance of burning or burying your wastes and your dead bodies away from and downstream of your army's camp. Extend these principles to cities. I know there were attempts at urban sewer systems in Roman times, but I'm not sure how effective they were from a sanitation perspective or whether they were still widely used in the ERE by Justinian's time. For the Black Death, though, urban sanitation in Western Europe consisted largely of a combination of "I hope it rains soon" and "Maybe a dog will eat it".

Classical peoples also had an inkling of the principles of contagion, at least to the extent that disease bred disease and close contact with an infected person put you at heightened risk of infection. I know there were attempts at quarantines (both locally upon plague ships and houses of infected individuals, and at a city-wide level) in many classical and medieval plagues, but there's plenty of room for improvement. For instance, the concept of an incubation period (if it occurs to people and gets taken seriously) implies a need for ring quarantines (i.e. quarantine not just the site of infection, but also a ring around it to capture most of the as-yet asymptomatic incubators), and for a quarantine period for travelers coming from the direction of infected areas even if the travelers themselves aren't showing any signs of illness yet.

There's also a correlation of plagues tending to hit during or shortly after a period of war or famine: these break down institutions that could enforce effective quarantines, and they tend to cause society-wide shortages (particularly malnutrition) that lead to a big chunk of the population having weaker-than-usual immune systems. If you want to mitigate a particular plague, improve nutrition and social order in the years leading up to it.
 
Based on what you all have said, it seems as though what's needed is for a general to be a bit more practical and a bit more far-thinking in terms of campaign efficiency, which could result in some of those changes that are proposed....
 

mowque

Banned
For instance, the Bad Smell theory of disease has been attested in Roman writings as early as the first century AD. If it gets taken seriously on a society-wide scale, it implies that human and animal wastes, rotten food, corpses, and dead animals should be promptly buried, burned, or carted away from populated areas. Do this, and you remove a lot of contamination-based disease vectors (particularly for things like cholera and dysentery) as well as drastically reducing the food supply for rats and other vermin.
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Victorian era London loved the Miasma theory (or the Bad Smell theory as you call it) and they got cholera on nearly unheard of scales.
 
what you need is to keep europe more focused on cleanliness & hygiene.
In other words the bathing culture of the romans never disappears.

in otl for example Louis XIV was rather infamous for not bathing, he had to be forced to bathe once a year. So you would need to invert that situation, where being clean and cleanliness is the ideal (maybe get it somehow to be part of religion?)
 
Victorian era London loved the Miasma theory (or the Bad Smell theory as you call it) and they got cholera on nearly unheard of scales.

The decision to install the Bazalgette sewer system in London was made on the basis of the Bad Smell/Miasma theory as an attempt to fix the cholera problem. The plan was to dig new sewer lines that would intercept existing drainage ditches (mostly minor tributaries of the Thames) and pump sewage parallel to the Thames and dump it in a remote part of the Thames Estuary well downstream of London rather than letting the sewage build up in the ditches or drain directly into the Thames in the middle of London. It succeeded in ending the widespread London cholera epidemics: only one cholera outbreak occurred in London after the sewers were installed, and it was confined to areas then not yet within the coverage network of the new sewers.
 
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