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Welcome to the Rest Is History and our second episode on the History of Disease when we're

joined by the University of Oklahoma's Magisterial Professor Kyle Harper.

So if we can jump on a couple of centuries from where we were before but also kind of

back to something you alluded to earlier, the Colombian Exchange which is this absolutely

extraordinary moment in world history when Columbus arrives first all in the Caribbean,

then you have the arrival of the conquistadors in Mexico and Peru, the classic stories that

Tom, you and I would have read as pure adventure stories when we were growing up as boys

and there was virtually no mention at all I would have said in the kind of children's

histories of the subsequent kind of death toll.

So what's the thinking now?

Because you, obviously there is a colossal death toll but it's not as cataclysmic as

is often thought and what are the diseases that the Europeans are bringing and what's

at crucially I suppose, obviously an exchange implies two way process.

So how is it that the indigenous Americans as it were are dying in such large numbers

but not the Europeans or are the Europeans dying and we just don't talk about it?

Yeah, well those are all great questions and I'd say there was a tendency in the maybe

...