Historically Speaking: The Ancient Elixir Made by Bees

Honey has always been a sweet treat, but it has also long served as a preservative, medicine and salve.

The Wall Street Journal

February 9, 2023

The U.S. Department of Agriculture made medical history last month when it approved the first vaccine for honey bees. Hives will be inoculated against American Foulbrood, a highly contagious bacterial disease that kills bee larvae. Our buzzy friends need all the help they can get. In 2021, a national survey of U.S. beekeepers reported that 45.5% of managed colonies died during the preceding year. Since more than one-third of the foods we eat depend on insect pollinators, a bee-less world would drastically alter everyday life.

The loss of bees would also cost us honey, a foodstuff that throughout human history has been much more than a pleasant sugar-substitute. Energy-dense, nutritionally-rich wild honey, ideal for brain development, may have helped our earliest human ancestors along the path of evolution. The importance of honey foraging can be inferred from its frequent appearance in Paleolithic art. The Araña Caves of Valencia, Spain, are notable for a particularly evocative line drawing of a honey harvester dangling precariously while thrusting an arm into a beehive.

Honey is easily fermented, and there is evidence that the ancient Chinese were making a mixed fruit, rice and honey alcoholic beverage as early as 7000 BC. The Egyptians may have been the first to domesticate bees. A scene in the sun temple of Pharaoh Nyuserre Ini, built around 2400 B.C., depicts beekeepers blowing smoke into hives as they collect honey. They loved the taste, of course, but honey also played a fundamental role in Egyptian culture. It was used in religious rituals, as a preservative (for embalming) and, because of its anti-bacterial properties, as an ingredient in hundreds of concoctions from contraceptives to gastrointestinal medicines and salves for wounds.

The oldest known written reference to honey comes from a 4,000-year-old recipe for a skin ointment, noted on a cuneiform clay tablet found among the ruins of Nippur in the Iraqi desert.

The ancient Greeks judged honey like fine wine, rating its qualities by bouquet and region. The thyme-covered slopes of Mount Hymettus, near Athens, were thought to produce the best varieties, prompting sometimes violent competition between beekeepers. The Greeks also appreciated its preservative properties. In 323 B.C., the body of Alexander the Great was allegedly transported in a vat of honey to prevent it from spoiling.

Honey’s many uses were also recognized in medieval Europe. In fact, in 1403 honey helped to save the life of 16 year-old Prince Henry, the future King Henry V of England. During the battle of Shrewsbury, an arrowhead became embedded in his cheekbone. The extraction process was long and painful, resulting in a gaping hole. Knowing the dangers of an open wound, the royal surgeon John Bradmore treated the cavity with a honey mixture that kept it safe from dirt and bacteria.

Despite Bradmore’s success, honey was relegated to folk remedy status until World War I. Then medical shortages encouraged Russian doctors to use honey in wound treatments. Honey was soon after upstaged by the discovery of penicillin in 1928, but today its time has come.

A 2021 study in the medical journal BMJ found honey to be a cheap and effective treatment for the symptoms of upper respiratory tract infections. Scientists are exploring its potential uses in fighting cancer, diabetes, asthma and cardiovascular disease.

To save ourselves, however, first we must save the bees.

Historically Speaking: Anorexia’s Ancient Roots And Present Toll

The deadly affliction, once called self-starvation, has become much more common during the confinement of the pandemic.

The Wall Street Journal

February 18, 2022

Two years ago, when countries suspended the routines of daily life in an attempt to halt the spread of Covid-19, the mental health of children plunged precipitously.

Two years ago, when countries suspended the routines of daily life in an attempt to halt the spread of Covid-19, the mental health of children took a plunge. One worrying piece of evidence for this was an extraordinary spike in hospitalizations for anorexia and other eating disorders among adolescents, especially girls between the ages of 12 and 18, and not just in the U.S. but around the world. U.S. hospitalizations for eating disorders doubled between March and May 2020. England’s National Health Service recorded a 46% increase in eating disorder referrals by 2021 compared with 2019. Perth Children’s hospital in Australia saw a 104% increase in hospitalizations and in Canada, the rate tripled.

Anorexia nervosa has a higher death rate than any other mental illness. According to the National Eating Disorders Association, 75% of its sufferers are female. And while the affliction might seem relatively new, it has ancient antecedents.

As early as the sixth century B.C., adherents of Jainism in India regarded “santhara,” fasting to death, as a purifying religious ritual, particularly for men. Emperor Chandragupta, founder of the Mauryan dynasty, died in this way in 297 B.C. St. Jerome, who lived in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., portrayed extreme asceticism as an expression of Christian piety. In 384, one of his disciples, a young Roman woman named Blaesilla, died of starvation. Perhaps because she fits the contemporary stereotype of the middle-class, female anorexic, Blaesilla rather than Chandragupta is commonly cited as the first known case.

The label given to spiritual and ascetic self-starvation is anorexia mirabilis, or “holy anorexia,” to differentiate it from the modern diagnosis of anorexia nervosa. There were two major outbreaks in history. The first began around 1300 and was concentrated among nuns and deeply religious women, some of whom were later elevated to sainthood. The second took off during the 19th century. So-called “fasting girls” or “miraculous maids” in Europe and America won acclaim for appearing to survive without food. Some were exposed as fakes; others, tragically, were allowed to waste away.

But, confusingly, there are other historical examples of anorexic-like behavior that didn’t involve religion or women. The first medical description of anorexia, written by Dr. Richard Morton in 1689, concerned two patients—an adolescent boy and a young woman—who simply wouldn’t eat. Unable to find a physical cause, Morton called the condition “nervous consumption.”

A subject under study in the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, 1945. WALLACE KIRKLAND/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/SHUTTERSTOCK

Almost two centuries passed before French and English doctors accepted Morton’s suspicion that the malady had a psychological component. In 1873, Queen Victoria’s physician, Sir William Gull, coined the term “Anorexia Nervosa.”

Naming the disease was a huge step forward. But its treatment was guided by an ever-changing understanding of anorexia’s causes, which has spanned the gamut from the biological to the psychosexual, from bad parenting to societal misogyny.

The first breakthrough in anorexia treatment, however, came from an experiment involving men. The Minnesota Starvation Experiment, a World War II –era study on how to treat starving prisoners, found that the 36 male volunteers exhibited many of the same behaviors as anorexics, including food obsessions, excessive chewing, bingeing and purging. The study showed that the malnourished brain reacts in predictable ways regardless of race, class or gender.

Recent research now suggests that a genetic predisposition could count for as many as 60% of the risk factors behind the disease. If this knowledge leads to new specialized treatments, it will do so at a desperate time: At the start of the year, the Lancet medical journal called on governments to take action before mass anorexia cases become mass deaths. The lockdown is over. Now save the children.

A shorter version appeared in The Wall Street Journal

WSJ Historically Speaking: In Epidemics, Leaders Play a Crucial Role

ILLUSTRATION: JON KRAUSE

Lessons in heroism and horror as a famed flu pandemic hits a milestone

A century ago this week, an army cook named Albert Gitchell at Fort Riley, Kansas, paid a visit to the camp infirmary, complaining of a severe cold. It’s now thought that he was America’s patient zero in the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918.

The disease killed more than 40 million people world-wide, including 675,000 Americans. In this case, as in so many others throughout history, the pace of the pandemic’s deadly progress depended on the actions of public officials.

Spain had allowed unrestricted reporting about the flu, so people mistakenly believed it originated there. Other countries, including the U.S., squandered thousands of lives by suppressing news and delaying health measures. Chicago kept its schools open, citing a state commission that had declared the epidemic at a “standstill,” while the city’s public health commissioner said, “It is our duty to keep the people from fear. Worry kills more people than the epidemic.”

Worry had indeed sown chaos, misery and violence in many previous outbreaks, such as the Black Plague. The disease, probably caused by bacteria-infected fleas living on rodents, swept through Asia and Europe during the 1340s, killing up to a quarter of the world’s population. In Europe, where over 50 million died, a search for scapegoats led to widespread pogroms against Jews. In 1349, the city of Strasbourg in France, already somewhat affected by the plague, put to death hundreds of Jews and expelled the rest.

But not all authorities lost their heads at the first sign of contagion. Pope Clement VI (1291-1352), one of a series of popes who ruled from the southern French city of Avignon, declared that the Jews had not caused the plague and issued two papal bulls against their persecution.

In Italy, Venetian authorities took the practical approach: They didn’t allow ships from infected ports to dock and subjected all travelers to a period of isolation. The term quarantine comes from the Italian quaranta giorni, meaning “40 days”—the official length of time until the Venetians granted foreign ships the right of entry.

Less exalted rulers could also show prudence and compassion in the face of a pandemic. After the Black Plague struck the village of Eyam in England, the vicar William Mompesson persuaded its several hundred inhabitants not to flee, to prevent the disease from spreading to other villages. The biggest landowner in the county, the earl of Devonshire, ensured a regular supply of food and necessities to the stricken community. Some 260 villagers died during their self-imposed quarantine, but their decision likely saved thousands of lives.

The response to more recent pandemics has not always met that same high standard. When viral severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) began in China in November 2002, the government’s refusal to acknowledge the outbreak allowed the disease to spread to Hong Kong, a hub for the West and much of Asia, thus creating a world problem. On a more hopeful note, when Ebola was spreading uncontrollably through West Africa in 2014, the Ugandans leapt into action, saturating their media with warnings and enabling quick reporting of suspected cases, and successfully contained their outbreak.

Pandemics always create a sense of crisis. History shows that public leadership is the most powerful weapon in keeping them from becoming full-blown tragedies.