Kinda. Good Morning Hank, it's Tuesday.
So, in addition to giving us the stethoscope,
the Adirondack Chair, and the state of New Mexico,
tuberculosis a little bit, maybe, gave us World War I?
So we all know the causes of WWI from Crash Course right?
The complicated alliance system in Europe,
the growing militarization and expansion of empires, etc.,
but the other day my son came home from school and said, “Dad, did you know that
tuberculosis partly cause World War I” And I was like, what now?
I was so proud because of course making connections
between human history and Tuberculosis is my favorite leisure activity and it’s always
a joy to see your children get involved in what you’re passionate about.
And also it turns out the story he told me is true.
So World War I began after the assassination of the Austro Hungarian Archduke
Franz Ferdinand and his wife the Duchess Sophie.
Now I know I shouldn’t say this about a tragedy led to deaths of tens of millions of people,
but the whole thing was kind of a farce.
Like, on the one side, you have the wildly incompetent
support staff of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand,
and on the other side a group of wildly incompetent
would-be assassins, most of whom were teenagers.
Now sometimes you hear the assassination presented as
“Some random child anarchists started World War I,”
but in fact these child anarchists were working
for a much larger network that included like, leaders
in the Serbian army attempting to liberate Serbia from the Austro Hungarian Empire.
So yeah they were kids. But the tradition of
older men sending nineteen year olds To do war stuff actually predates 1914
and also post dates it.
Right, so when it became in 1914 clear that Franz Ferdinand is going to visit Sarajevo,
three teenagers from Bellgrade travel there in the hopes of assassinating him.
These three young men are called– Gavrilo Princip,
Najelko Chabrinovich and Trifko Grabez and each of them had been given a gun,
bombs, and a cyanide pill, with instructions
to commit suicide the moment the Archduke was dead.
And the prospect of an early death was made more palatable to these
three young men by the fact that
they already faced an early death– as one historian put it, all three
“were suffering from tuberculosis and knew they would not live long.
They were therefore willing to give their life for what they believed was a great cause.”
Like, earlier in Europe TB had been romanticized. It was seen as a beautiful way to die
and a disease of civilization and refinement that affected beautiful and intelligent and
Sensitive people.
But then in 1882, Robert Koch conclusively proved that tuberculosis was not caused
by being hot or artsy but instead by a bacterium
And soon, TB ceased to be seen as an illness of civilization
and was instead seen as an illness of contamination and filth and poverty
and those living with it were hugely and unjustly stigmatized by their communities.
A tradition which, by the way, would continue.
So basically, these teenage would be assassins knew they were already dying.
Once they get to Sarajevo they meet up with other co-conspirators
and a total of six people line the parade route
with the idea that one of them surely will succeed in killing the Archduke.
What actually happens is that the first two kind of loose their courage
and then the third Cabrinovic, throws a bomb
but misses the Archduke’s car but it blows up underneath another car.
Cabrinovic then takes cyanide pill, which it turns out doesn’t have enough
cyanide to kill him, and then jumps into a river,
which it turns out to be about four inches deep, so he survives and was quickly arrested.
The motor kid then shoots off really fast and the other three assassins are like
oh no there’s no way we can get him now, he’s going too fast.
And that probably would have been a good time for Franz Ferdinand and Sophie
to go back to the hotel, but instead one of their compatriots was like,
“What do you think that Sarajevo is full of assassins?”
and convinced them to keep driving around town.
And then, their driver, who did not know Sarajevo well and could not yet benefit from GPS–
took a wrong turn and then stalled the car trying to shift it into reverse.
I probably don't’ need to say this,
but if you’re the driver to the heir apparent to the Austro Hungarian Empire,
like, one thing you probably be pretty good at in 1914 is driving a stick shift.
But right, who should find himself standing
right outside this stalled car but Gavrilo Princip.
He then shoots the Archduke and Duchess to death,
and then Princip takes his cyanide pill, which again,
did not contain enough cyanide to kill him.
And so all three of the teenagers who traveled from Bellgrade to Sarajevo
to assassinate the Archduke survived the assassination, were imprisoned,
and died within a few years, of tuberculosis.
If they hadn’t known their time was short would we still have had Would War I?
Probably. There were just so many forces
pushing towards a major conflict. But we might have had a different
World War I and I suppose it’s possible that we wouldn’t have had one at all.
I mean that’s the thing that fascinates me about history.
So much might happen. And then only one set of things does.
So in summary, war sucks and tuberculosis also sucks.
In fact between 1914 the start of WWI
and 1945, the end of WWII,
more people died from TB then died from both those wars combined.
Hank, I’ll see you on Friday.