What is the topic being discussed in this document? The Impact of Disease
The charge of genocide is largely sustained by figures showing the precipitous
decline of the Indian population. Although scholars debate the exact numbers,
in Alvin Josephy's estimate, the Indian population fell from between fifteen and
twenty million when the white man first arrived to a fraction of that 150 years
later. Undoubtedly the Indians perished in great numbers. Yet although
European enslavement of Indians and the Spanish forced labor system extracted
a heavy toll in lives, the vast majority of Indian casualties occurred not as a
result of hard labor or deliberate destruction but because of contagious
diseases that the Europeans transmitted to the Indians. The spread of infection
and unhealthy patterns of behavior was also reciprocal. From the Indians the
Europeans contracted syphilis. The Indians also taught the white man about
tobacco and cocaine, which would extract an incalculable human toll over the
next several centuries. The Europeans, for their part, gave the Indians measles
and smallpox. Since the Indians had not developed any resistance or immunity
to these unfamiliar ailments, they perished in catastrophic numbers.