The Battle of the Microbes: Smallpox, Malaria and Cholera in Southeast Asia

Abstract

Data on long-term disease patterns in all parts of the humid tropics is sparse and serious research in its infancy. Until the nineteenth century there can be said to be little systematic knowledge of any diseases, and much of what we know is a matter of deduction from fragmentary reports of “plagues” and “miasmas”, and extrapolation both backwards in time from more satisfactory recent data, and laterally from better documented patterns of the same period in Europe, China and India. Nevertheless in seeking to understand the long-term disease patterns of the world’s humid tropics, no region is better provided with potential data for the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries than that offered by the copious reporting of Chinese, Spanish, Dutch and English agents in Southeast Asia (and Taiwan).