September 2023 archive

Sep 26 2023

Book review: The First Astronomers by Duane Hamacher

My next review is of First Astronomers: How Indigenous Elders read the stars by Duane Hamacher. It is fair to say that Western astronomers, and other Western scientists have not treated Indigenous populations, and their knowledge, with a great deal of respect. Even now astronomers are in dispute with Indigenous populations in Hawaii over the siting of telescopes. In this book Hamacher tries to redress this imbalance and in my view does a good job of treating his interviewees, and their knowledge, with respect.

Western astronomers are not alien to interacting with people outside their professional group as part of their research most notably using historical data, like Chinese records of supernova but also amateur observers play an important in modern astronomy – particularly in the observation of comets and the like and other transient phenomena accessible using modest equipment.

The book starts with a prologue describing the background to the book and introducing a number of the Indigenous people who contributed, in the longer frontspiece they are listed as co-authors. They are largely from Australia but there are references to New Zealand, North American Native Americans, Artic peoples, South American and Africa groups.

Hamacher is an astronomer by profession and this has a bearing on this interviews with Indigenous Elders. In the past anthropologists have talked to Elders about their star knowledge and a lack of astronomical knowledge has led to mis-interpretation. I was intrigued to learn that in Western mythology the star name “Antares” is derived from the greek “anti Mars” – since Mars and Antares, in the same part of the sky and with a reddish hue are often confused!

The book is then divided thematically into chapters relating to different sorts of stars (including the moon). These are The Nearest Star (the sun), The Moon, Wandering Stars (planets), Twinkling Stars, Seasonal Stars, Variable Stars, Cataclysmic Stars (supernova and the like), Navigational Stars and Falling Stars (meteors and craters).

The big difference a Western reader will see is that Indigenous knowledge is transmitted via oral traditions, incorporating song and dance. Oral traditions are about creating a story around some star locations that provide useful information like where and when to hunt a particular animal or plant a particular crop, or where you are and how to get to where you want to be . The story linked to the stars allows it to be transmitted to the next generation without error. They are mnemonics rather than an attempt to describe a factual truth. This is obvious in Indigenous oral traditions which are still alive but I suspect it would have been the case for the oral traditions of Western Europe which give us our modern constellations.

Oral traditions can be very powerful, there is a group of craters in Australia (the Henbury Craters) which were created by a meteor impact around 4200 years ago – Aboriginal oral traditions have held this knowledge of their creation across that period of time.

Indigenous constellations can overlap and change through the seasons, they also incorporate dark space – particularly in the Milky Way. These constellations are locally determined to fit with local conditions, and land features used as landmarks.

As well as maritime navigation where the stars are used directly for finding direction, the stars are also used as a navigational aid for terrestrial travel – the routes are learnt in the dark of the winter using the stars as a map of the ground (picking stars which approximate the locations on the ground). These “songlines” are reflected in some modern day highways in Australia.

What comes through from the book is that Indigenous astronomers were very astute observers of the sky, noting phenomena including the varying twinkle of stars (including colour and intensity variations), the 8 year period of Venus returning to the same location in the sky, variable stars, sunspots and their 11 year cycle, the sounds associated with aurora and so forth. Some of these phenomena were not widely recognised by astronomers in the West until into the 19th century. In addition they had a clear understanding of many phenomena: that the moon reflected the light of the sun, that the earth was a sphere, that craters were the result of rocks falling from the sky.

Unsurprisingly, I was constantly comparing with Western astronomy. The great divergence was sometime around the end of the 16th century when Western astronomers started making detailed written records of the locations of stars and planets and using mathematics to understand them, and then moved on to the use of telescopes. I can’t help feeling the Indigenous people were held back by a lack of writing.

What comes through at the end of the book is that in the Indigenous communities have a long history of passionate and astute astronomers, dedicated to their role, and increasingly they are taking part and excelling in Western astronomy and astrophysics.

Sep 08 2023

Book review: Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations by Simon Schama

My next review is of Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations by Simon Schama.

The book is divided into three parts, covering smallpox, cholera and bubonic plague – in its late 19th century manifestation – and how vaccines were developed and deployed for these diseases. Waldemar Haffkine features heavily in the chapters on cholera and bubonic plague, for which he invented and delivered vaccines, and in some senses this is his biography albeit somewhat unfocussed with much additional material.

The first part covers the introduction of inoculation for smallpox to Western Europe in the early 18th century. This a process whereby a small quantity of the material from a smallpox pustule is introduced to small cuts in the skin of a patient who then falls mildly ill with the disease but is protected from further more serious infection. Voltaire appears in this section as a hook for some of the discussion – he was one of the early promoters of inoculation in France.

Terms are a bit fluid in this area but inoculation refers to the use of the live, unaltered bacteria/virus whilst vaccination refers to the use of a vaccine which is based on a weakened or even partial version of the disease causing micro-organism.

Smallpox was a serious disease in the 18th century, having apparently mutated to a more virulent, deadly form in the mid-17th century. This newer variant killed as many as 1 in 6 of those infected with many of those surviving showing significant scarring. It was indiscriminate, killing royalty as well as paupers. The inoculation process had been used by at least some communities in the Middle East, Africa and South America. The first chapter in this section is largely about the introduction of the idea of inoculation to polite Western European society. This met with some resistance – inoculation did not fit with the then current model of the smallpox disease (essentially the side effect of a bodily purging process), and it challenged the medical establishment coming as it did from a “foreign” country and, worse than that, was often practiced by women!

The second of the smallpox chapter covers the commercialisation of the inoculation process during the 18th century. This typically involved upselling preliminary treatments and post-inoculation care which was largely superfluous. It is interesting though that as part of this process the first clinical trials were conducted to test the efficacy of the process.

The second part of the book, on cholera, features Adrien Proust, father of Marcel Proust. Adrien Proust would become very involved in creating international the first public health organisations. Cholera had come to Europe around 1817 with pandemics killing many thousands recurring through the century. Proust senior had been a young doctor in the 1854 outbreak in Paris as a hospital doctor he would have seen 40% of patients die from this disease. At the time the cause of cholera was not known, it was assumed that it was a result of “filth” and unsanitary living conditions. This perhaps explains some of the Victorian efforts to install sewers and water systems, as well as the fact that living in crowded insanitary cities was simply unpleasant.

In the case of cholera, which is a bacterial infection discovered (quietly) by Filippo Pacini in 1854 and more famously by Robert Koch in 1883, sanitation and disinfection measures are a reasonable approach which has some benefits. There was commercial opposition to seeing cholera as an infection because that implied quarantines and the like which had a commercial impact. This attitude was to recur in the subsequent bubonic plague outbreaks in Indian and China which has more serious consequences since dirty water has no bearing on plague transmission. In fact we saw this argument regarding the COVID-19 restrictions.

It is in this part we first meet Waldemar Haffkine, born into a Jewish family in Odessa in 1860. He trained as a biologist working under Ilya Mechnikov, who would later win a Noble Prize for his work on immunity. Haffkine went on to the Pasteur Institute in Paris (Pasteur was still alive at this point), where he developed a vaccine for cholera. Haffkine had a an extensive file with the authorities in Odessa as a result of his activism in the defence of the Jewish community against repeated pogroms.

He tested his vaccine in India with minimal support from the colonial medical services. Reading between the lines it looks like his expenses claims were a key historical resource. To a degree he used the Indian population as one amenable for doing controlled trials of the vaccine due to their living conditions, and their status in the colonial system.

The part of the book on bubonic plague is a repeat of the chapters on cholera with Haffkine involved in the discovery of the plague bacillus, and the development and deployment of the vaccine, particularly in India. Here the story diverges a bit, the colonial response to plague was to apply sanitation measures up to and including burning down houses where infections had occurred. This, naturally, angered the local population and played some part in the rise of Indian nationalism.

Haffkine’s medical career was to effectively come to an end in the Indian plague vaccination programme. A vial of vaccine that had been produced in the facility he led was contaminated with tetanus leading to the death of nineteen vaccine recipients. The colonial Indian medical authorities were quick to place the blame on Haffkine although later investigations showed that the vial was most likely contaminated “in the field” (literally) and so was not at all Haffkine’s responsibility. He was eventually notationally exonerated with the support of Sir Ronald Ross (who won a Noble prize for his work on the transmission of malaria) but the damage was done and after some work on a typhoid vaccine he gave up his medical work aged 54.

Haffkine, in his later years, returned to his Jewish roots – arguing the case for Orthodox Judaism, and supporting a movement to make Crimea an area for training Jews in agriculture with a view to moving to Palestine. After the Russian revolution Jews no longer faced pogroms on the basis of their religion, they experienced persecution because the Soviet Union did not want anyone, regardless of religion practicing their religion.

I have mixed feelings about this book, it feels like it is trying to be several things at once – a history of vaccination for smallpox, cholera and bubonic plague but also a biography of Waldemar Haffkine with substantial chunks of not entirely relevant material also added. The long chapters don’t suit my reading style very well. At one point Schama manages a half-page sentence which I don’t think I’ve seen before in English! The book is clearly well-researched and written with some style but it doesn’t feel like a book to be read by the pool.