"Secret Judgements of God"

In the wake of European expansion, disease outbreaks in the New World caused the greatest loss of life known to history. During the first century after contact, perhaps 90 percent of native inhabitants succumbed to diseases such as smallpox, measles, plague and influenza, against which they had no immunities. The rare collection of case studies by historians, geographers, and anthropologists is an extraordinary contribution to Latin-American colonial history, the history of medicine, and American Indian studies. These essays describe a web of disease that spread along routes of access and penetration, diffusing through time and across space according to key variables that included genetics, ecology, and the ages of potential victims, as well as social and cultural factors affecting exposure. Before the discovery of germ theory, New World epidemics seemed like "secret judgements of God", that advanced the cause of Spanish conquest at the cost of disastrous native depopulation.
Today, scholars regard the death tolls of different diseases as tragic, but also as indicators that may yield more accurate estimates of native population size in 1492, estimates which edge upward with each decade of new research such as the essays collected here.