– In which Dorn tries to learn from history.
thought it would be interesting to see how the coronavirus pandemic compared and contrasted with famous pandemics of the past. The most famous pandemic I knew about was the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918, so I started looking around for books about that. I especially wanted books written around that time, where the disease was a current event, rather than a historical analysis of a distant calamity.
The first book I found was America’s forgotten pandemic: the influenza of 1918 by Alfred W. Crosby. It came out in 1976, so didn’t meet my criterion of a contemporaneity, but at least it was a book I could get ahold of, from the trusty Internet Archive, my go-to source for all old books.
Trouble was, the thing was so dense and so dry that I just couldn’t get into it. I’m sure it is very scholarly and informative, but it wasn’t at all what I was looking for in light epidemic reading. So I kept searching. The second book I found had more of a reputation as a good read (it’s touted as a “New York Times Bestseller”), The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History, by John M. Barry. Sounds like a thriller from the title! And it’s available digitally from the local library!
Unfortunately, I guess a lot of people stuck at home had the same idea, so the best I could do was get on the wait list for a copy of the epic story. I am currently at position number 69 on the list. So while waiting for my turn with this e-book, I decided I had to expand my search further back in time. This time, I struck pay dirt, in A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe, of Robinson Crusoe fame.
This is the story of the Great London Plague of 1665, written “by a citizen who continued all the while in London”. Daniel Defoe published this book in 1722, more than 50 years after the plague. Indeed he was only five years old in 1665, but he claimed that he was publishing an actual journal of someone (perhaps his uncle) who lived through the plague. The debate continues to this day whether this is a book of fiction or not.
The London plague of 1665 was certainly a whole different kind of catastrophe than our coronavirus epidemic. A quarter of the city’s population died from the plague that year. Much of Defoe’s story is grim and sometimes horrifying (there are descriptions of pain and despair sometimes to the point of insanity, and lots and lots of dead bodies, if you are horrified by such things), but the book also brought out some thought-provoking parallels to our own pandemic.
The unnamed Narrator of the story started his experience of the epidemic as we did, stuck in his house, afraid to go out for fear of catching the contagion. Initially he passed his time like we did, in some ways: baking bread and trying to hoard-buy meat and supplies.
This difficulty and danger of getting food and supplies was mentioned, but they had their own version of contactless shopping—if it’s too risky to go to the store yourself, just send a servant:
When I first read this, I was grateful that we now have the internet and online ordering and contactless delivery, so I wasn’t put into the ethically questionable situation of sending my servants out to risk their lives for chores that I wasn’t willing to risk mine for. It was hard to suppress the realization that there wasn’t really much moral difference between using people employed by me to perform these risky tasks and using people employed by Amazon, Fedex, or GrubHub, but I did my best!
There were a lot of parallels in the socio-medical response to the plague. The medical experts then, like now, warned the population of the dangers of asymptomatic transmission of the disease:
Social distancing was practiced widely, although the protocols were a bit different, such as the rule (thankfully not needed now) that one should cross the street rather than stepping over a dead body on the sidewalk. I expected to read something of the ancient equivalent of the face-mask, that bird-shaped contraption that plague physicians wore with the beak stuffed full of perfumes, but I don’t recall there being any mention of it.
The almost sacred spot reserved in our daily rituals for hand sanitizer was filled back in 1665 with an assortment of perfumes, aromatics, and smoke-generators. There was scholarly debate about just the right kind of fire to build to create the proper prophylactic smoke haze. Pitch, sulfur and gunpowder were all popular combustants. (This debate isn’t as pointless as it might sound. The plague was caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which was carried by fleas, which in turn were carried by rats. Smoke or other smells that repelled insects or other pests probably did increase the safety of a household.)
The narrator wrote movingly about the economic hardships. As always, these fell squarely on the poor. Massive unemployment was caused by businessmen responding to the epidemic by shuttering their shops and staying at home, fleeing the city, or dying.
That the poor were able to find food and work at all, the narrator gives effusive credit to the Lord Mayor and his Aldermen, who undertook their jobs with courage and compassion. The book describes the city government’s work at this time chiefly as distributing charity for the poor, maintaining the public order (such as by locking infected people and their families in their houses), and taking over the task of burying the dead from the overwhelmed churches.
The book tells many stories of the noble work of the Lord Mayor and his staff fighting the plague and its effects. Of the work of the national government (what he calls “the Court”), the narrator is charitably brief. (What parallels one might draw with the current pandemic on our country, I leave to the reader.)
My poor recollection of the history of science received a lesson in this book. The microscope had been invented 75 years before the London plague, and men of science had become acquainted with microbes. The risk of contracting the disease from someone with no symptoms was already well-known, and physicians and scientists of the time attempted to design a test to be able to tell if someone was infected but pre-symptomatic, a side story I found chillingly parallel to the efforts of our own medical community.
The Narrator, and apparently all the intelligentsia at the time, recognized that the plague was a biological contagion, and was spread by natural, rather than magical, means. They also were certain, however, that the plague was a warning sent from God to tell Londoners they must return to the proper Christian path. They saw no contradiction in these two beliefs—as the Narrator put it,
Then as now, the workers on the front lines of the battle against the disease were rightly praised as heroes. The Narrator includes clergymen in his list (indeed, they are the first group he calls out). As now, clergy played a crucial role in the comfort of the afflicted and their loved ones, but they played an even more crucial role back then as the interceders requesting supernatural help on behalf of the Londoners (which, the Narrator reports, was occasionally provided), and in shepherding the citizens back to the necessary proper path (which they were happy to return to, at least for as long as death was all around).
The story draws to the close with the end of the London plague, to the great jubilation of the survivors. Sometimes, the Narrator complained, their celebrations were too early and too carefree, when the grip of the plague had dissipated (the death count was down to “only” 1800 a week!) but not vanished entirely.
Daniel Defoe’s Narrator says he wrote his journal for the edification of any who find themselves in a recurrence of the plague. I don’t know but that the book holds a few valuable lessons for us even now, 350 years later. Plus, it was a fascinating story. If you’re curious, you can find it at Project Gutenberg, here. (It’s currently Daniel Defoe’s most popular book on the site, with more than twice as many downloads as Robinson Crusoe!)
Thanks,
Dorn
June 16, 2020