Debates about the epidemiological vulnerability of Indigenous people
first came to prominence in the 1970s as historians backed away from
narratives of European cultural superiority in search of more scientific
explanations. This biological turn identified microbes as a primary
culprit in the mass death of the Indigenous, suggesting that the
depopulation of the Americas was an inevitable result of Native
communities’ contact with diseases from the old world. In a 1976 essay,
the historian Alfred W. Crosby put forth the “virgin-soil epidemics”
thesis, which posited that Europeans brought diseases—in particular,
smallpox and measles—that wiped out 70 percent or more of Native people
in the Western Hemisphere because they lacked immunity. In what was
framed as the most extreme demographic disaster in human history, the
most affected regions experienced a 90 percent depopulation rate,
including deaths related to disease, which is estimated to have reduced
the population of the Americas from one hundred million to ten million.
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-empire-of-all-maladies-estes
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