Columbus and the New World

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how the discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus in 1492 changed the the geography of the world with an entire new continent appearing on maps of what would soon be seen as a globe instead of a flat surface. In particular it looks at how the geography of known disease also changed as Old World diseases such as smallpox, measles and influenza found a new population with no immunity because it had had no exposure to these diseases before. It examines how this effect became known as the Columbian Exchange and evaluates the result of this exchange of diseases between the Native Americans and the Europeans.

From the Paper:

"To this day there are arguments among researchers about the presence or absence of some diseases in the population of the New world, such as tuberculosis and syphilis. These may or may not have been found among the population before Columbus. Recent research suggests that there was some sort of "tuberculosis-like pathology" in the population before 1492, though it was of a type not associated with pulmonary disease. There was also a relatively benign nonvenereal (meaning not sexually transmitted) treponemal infection that was related to syphilis. There is no evidence, however, that either disease was at all widespread in either North or South America. Recent studies conducted in great detail show that large-scale sedentary societies in the Americas, where such diseases could have taken hold, did not."

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