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Baptism bowls spread the epidemic
Four humors
In the 1500s nobody understood germs. Europeans still believed the body ran on four humors, yellow bile, black bile, blood, and phlegm, and treated illness with leeches. The Maya were a cleaner people, but they read disease as a spiritual attack or a sign that the gods had turned away.
Gods turn away
That belief made the epidemics devastating a second time. Everyone getting sick looked like proof the gods had abandoned them, and the conquistadors arrived with priests carrying an answer: the sickness came because they were pagans, and following the Christian God would fix it. The reasoning went that this God must be more powerful, and conversion sped up.
The priest's bowl
A priest in the Brazilian Amazon wrote a heartbreaking chronicle. He had built utopian communities and was baptizing thousands of people a day, yet God kept taking them, and he asked for a sign. The same bowl of holy water splashed across face after face was probably accelerating the deaths.
Why did the four humors last so long?
The humoral theory came from Hippocrates and was systematized by the Greek physician Galen in the second century CE. It explained every illness and every treatment with one tidy framework, which made it hard to replace. European medicine leaned on it for roughly two thousand years. Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch established germ theory only in the 1860s and 1880s.
Why did Native Americans lack immunity?
Smallpox, measles, and many other Old World diseases came from long contact between people and herd animals such as cattle, pigs, and sheep. The Americas had far fewer domesticated animals, so those diseases never took hold there. Jared Diamond makes this argument in Guns, Germs, and Steel. A population that has never met a disease has no antibodies, so it can spread through every age group at once.
How did diseases outrun the conquistadors?
Epidemics traveled along trade routes and between neighboring villages, moving faster than any army. Smallpox reached Hispaniola in 1518 and struck Tenochtitlan in 1520, a recorded epidemic that struck while the Aztec capital was under Spanish pressure. In some regions, whole communities had died before a European arrived. Spanish accounts sometimes describe empty villages that earlier visitors had seen full.
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