India as he thought he was. Some historians have noted that there is a tragic irony in the fact that the greatest threat to the health of the Native Americans in the New World was the fact that they had such extraordinary good health when the European explorers arrived:
For in the tens of thousands of years of isolation from the rest of the earth's human populations, the indigenous peoples of the Americas were spared from contact with the cataclysms of disease that had wreaked such havoc on the Old World, from China to the Middle east, from the provinces of ancient Rome to the alleyways of medieval Paris (Stannard 53).
There were some diseases in the New World before Columbus, and people did die from them. However, the great plagues that beset the Old World and that brought entire societies in Asia, Africa, and Europe to their knees did not emerge on their own among the native peoples of the Western Hemisphere; among the diseases not found in the New World were smallpox, measles, bubonic plague, diphtheria, influenza, malaria, yellow fever, typhoid, and others. The ocean provided a natural barrier keeping these diseases in the Old World, Africa, and Asia until Columbus carried them with him and his men. The natives did not have any immunity to these diseases, so a disease like smallpox could wipe out huge numbers of people: "Such devastating contagion was simply unknown in the histories of the Cree or other indigenous peoples of the Americas" (Stannard 53).
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 ...