I'm really pushing the mandate of this thread considerably in making this comment, but I'd like to note that the first episode of BBC Radio 4's 1914-1918: The Cultural Front aired this morning. "Words for Battle" examines the (mainly British) literary and musical responses to the war's outbreak and to the major issues at play in August of 1914, and includes many extracts from primary texts produced during that tumultuous time. I'd be promoting this series no matter what, but I've a somewhat sinister additional motive in that I was approached to be one of the contributors. This, then, is in at least one sense a manifestation of my ongoing research.

Anyway, there it is.

I would like to put in request for a book or series of books about the financial costs of waging war. I have been working my way through Medieval Warfare: History of the art of War, Volume III and in the book the author breaks down the cost of all the equipment the individual needs. Would any one be able to point me to a book that does this for other time periods? Perhaps something that looks at the cost of starting a war vs. the gains through looting or territorial acquisitions.

It's been all 830-834 this week, working on toward the last chunk of Louis the Pious' reign.

So here is a question for any other specialists out there, though this might be a bit inside ballgame. It is pretty much taken as consensus now that Louis' last years were not the disaster they used to be regarded as. What I need is some of the older stuff, works that emphasis the failure of Louis' last years, for contrast. Any suggestions?

I've been reading Johnston (1995) The Modern Epidemic: A History of Tuberculosis in Japan and quite enjoying it. The book has the same problem I find with a lot of "history of disease X" works, in that, despite the subtitle, the focus is almost entirely on the 1800s onwards. Johnston spends something like 10 pages on the disease in Japan prior to 1880, then the rest of the book tracing the effects from there. It irked me a bit, but given the problems of past diagnoses, I can begrudgingly accept the glossing. Although, since TB does have some of the most remarkable skeletal evidence (including some dramatic spinal changes) of all the infectious diseases, I remain a bit miffed. Then again, the book is called the Modern Epidemic.

(NOTE: The comment gets a bit disturbing in a "mass murder by an angry young man" sort of way from here on out. Readers take heed.)

Fortunately the book itself is quite good, and I found the chapter on the stigma associated with tuberculars quite fascinating. Johnston frames the chapter by relaying a mass murder of 31 people (including his own grandmother) committed in 1938 by Mutsuo Toi. It remains, to the best of my rudimentary searching, the most deadly crime committed in modern Japanese history (the Tokyo Subway sarin gas attack coincidentally occured in the same year as publication, killed 19, though injured thousands.).

The motivation for the massacre was a strange blend of tuberculosis stigma and the sexual frustration of the 22-year old Toi. He took his life at the end of his attack, but left several long suicide notes wherein he detailed how ostracized he felt as a result of his diagnosis of "pluerisy" (which the doctor assured him would clear up in a few months) developed into unmistakable TB. In particular, he rails against women, with whom he had previously been intimate, now rejecting him because of the disease. This is from a longer quotation in the book:

Even a woman with whom I had had such a deep relationship suffered a change of heart when I told her I had become ill... She said we could laugh together. But when she laughed she laughed down her nose at me and spread any number of rumors. Because of that I got angry and told her that if she was going to talk like that about me, I wanted to kill her. She replied by saying that if I though I could kill her I should just try it, since a consumptive like me couldn't kill anybody....

The inhabitants of Kaio village, when the story reached the national press, denied that there was stigma attached to tuberculars and that they had been sympathetic to Toi's condition, noting that he disliked those he had targeted. The local investigator ultimately concluded the massacre was a result of Toi's "inborn criminal nature," dismissing other factors. A investigation by a police inspector from the national Home Ministry Police Bureau, did not accept this explanation, and explicitly cited both Toi's diagnosis and his promiscuity as factors, saying:

From age 17 this budding delinquent had relations with many women in the village. These women, lacking fidelity, used his tuberculosis to distance themselves from him, and they finally rejected him with vilification and ridicule. This kind of moral opinion concerning the delinquent brought with it rumors both inside and outside the hamlet.

There's some interesting bias on both sides, with the locals trying to distance themselves from the event and the national inspector portraying the village a bunch of ugly backwoods bumpkins bumping uglies (he specifically notes that such villages have a "markedly low level of morals between the sexes"). What Johnston does though, is use the event to explore the very serious stigma that tuberculosis -- incurable at the time -- brought upon not only the sufferer, but their family as well. He notes that TB brought with it associations of both physical and moral stigma, and that entire family lines could be seen as diseased (the term Johnston uses is yamai make, for the Japanese speakers out there).

Notably, Toi's parents had died of TB when he was young, leaving his grandmother to raise him. The same grandmother that he made his first victim, which he explained in his notes was to both end her shame at his condition and to spare her the shame of what he was about to do next. Johnston also discusses how a TB diagnosis could lead to the sufferer being ostracized, or even shut away to die, by their family, and that physicians at the time would avoid giving the diagnosis for as long as possible (such as Toi's "pleurisy"), for fear their patients would commit suicide.

It's an interesting read, and TB stigma has long been an area of interest of me, so it is enlightening to see how this played out in Japan. I'm not entirely convinced though, by Johnston's reading of the evidence that the decision by Toi, who had read extensively on TB, to commit an atrocity

probably grew out of his rejection of what must have seemed to him a disingenuous and irrational morality, one that demanded his ostracism as a bad and dangerous person simply because a certain bacterium had afflicted his body.

The problem, of course, is that there were many cases of TB at the time (Johnston cites almost 16K deaths between 1930 and 1933), none of whom opted for mass murder followed by suicide as a course of action. As always, with case studies in history, an individual story can be used to illuminate larger issues, but the particulars of any single case are, well, particularly singular.

This comes at a good time. I'm working on an article that needs a section on occult practices in 19th and early 20th century Britain, primarily concerned with the Order of the Golden Dawn. I'm about to start Dion Fortune's What is Occultism? but need some other recommendations.

I'm dealing with Arthur Machen's temporary membership in the group and the way it shaped his life and his prose fiction. I have some decent primary sources (works by members of the Golden Dawn), but don't have much in the way of good secondary sources.

Naturally I would get to this point in my paper right when my Jstor access was cut off by my former university. Yay~

EDIT: formatting slip up