Get Well Soon: History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them

by Jennifer Wright

Reading about all of these well-meaning but certainly dangerous attempts at a cure, I sometimes think the treatment for syphilis consisted of “trying things so terrifying that the disease is literally scared out of your body.”

The same Upton Sinclair novel in which the doctor describes the woman whose lips have rotted away revolves around a young man named George who, after cheating on his fiancée, discovers he has syphilis. Unable to break off the engagement without ruining their reputation, he marries her, never tells her he has syphilis, and infects her. She in turn infects their newborn child. The newborn then infects the family’s wet nurse. The compounding repercussions of George’s secret seem incredibly realistic.

Which is why I think the hero of this story is not only the inventor of penicillin. (The inventor of penicillin, which cures syphilis, is Alexander Fleming. He is great.

My favorite hero can be found in a reference in an 1818 edition of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, which described a unique London club called the “No Nose’d Club.”

The man, who is referred to as Mr. Crumpton, apparently gathered a large group of noseless, syphilitic people. Surely, most of them were unused to seeing others suffering from the some disease they were. “As the number increased the surprise grew the greater among all that were present who stared at one another with such unaccustomed bashfulness and confused oddness as if every sinner beheld their own iniquities in the faces of their companions.”24

Shaming people for contracting a disease that we don’t have a cure for is still common today. In part we want to believe that those people are not like us. We like to believe that people somehow brought diseases on themselves, but diseases are mindless and do not judiciously pick the worst people in the world to murder. The more we distance ourselves from diseases and their victims, the harder it becomes to educate people about prevention or raise the funds for a cure (because why would you want to cure something only monstrous people get?). Portraying the afflicted in a way that acknowledges their suffering but also shows them to be brave and humorous and able to joke makes them seem like any one of us.

the formation of this group helped lay the groundwork for associations for those suffering from diseases ranging from alcoholism to AIDS. The members of Mr. Crumpton’s club were—at least while they were together—liberated from shame about their disease. That is a great thing because shame is one of the enemies in the war on diseases. Shaming people cures nothing.

Diseases are not lovely under any circumstances. Pretending they are is about as effective as trying to paint a pretty face on a death mask. Applying some lipstick to a skull doesn’t turn it into Jennifer Lawrence. Diseases are the most fundamental enemy of the human race, and we must be at constant war against them.

Edgar Allan Poe wrote: “The beautiful Lady Mary! How could she die?—and of consumption! But it is a path I have prayed to follow. I would wish all I love to perish of that gentle disease.

That is what death from tuberculosis was like. It’s not cool and peaceful. There’s no such thing as a good death but especially not that one. Keats’s death sounds like something from a Lovecraft story.

It is also worth pointing out that a bacterial disease doesn’t make you smarter or more possessed of a “Vivacity of Mind.” Not only were those suffering from tuberculosis supposedly beautiful and brilliant; according to Christian tradition they were also godly and good. That belief was mostly due to the association of plumpness with worldly appetites of many kinds. If you were as bony as someone with consumption, you must have been depriving yourself in this world to feast with Jesus in the next.18

Given the age and perceived attractiveness of the sufferers, in the seventeenth century tuberculosis was thought to be a disease caused by lovesickness. Gideon Harvey, the physician to King Charles II of England, was certain that consumption was linked to love. In Of an Amorous Consumption, he explains that “when Maids do suddenly grow thin-jawed and hollow-eyed, they are certainly in Love.”20 Weight loss, a lack of appetite, and eye glitter could be caused by some unrequited passion. They just weren’t in the cases of people who were actually ill with tuberculosis. The theory went further. If sadness from a lack of love caused the disease, it could be cured by love. That was utterly untrue, but the idea of dying from lovesickness is more palatable than the idea of dying from rotting lungs. Unfortunately, this reasoning meant that a terrifying, deadly disease was reduced to something seen as delightful and ladylike.

Looking sick became fashionable. Not too different from the skinny and pale, then false rouge, of the 20's and skinny and pale of Twiggy, etc.

Overcrowded housing conditions in the nineteenth century meant that tuberculosis was prevalent among the poor, so much so that Marx and Engels later labeled the disease a “necessary condition to the existence of capital.”

Necessary to rotate a working class?

while taking, at least if Mann’s depiction is to be believed, a great deal of pleasure in their elite diseased status.

Beddoes claimed he was facing an uphill battle in convincing the “ghostly beauties of court and city that to be robust and in ‘rude’ or vulgar health is not a ‘curse.’”31

Bacteria don’t infect people based on their personality traits or income. However, given the glamor and status associated with the disease, Beddoes came to the conclusion that women were deliberately contracting consumption to look more chic. Tragically, the fetishization of this sickly physical ideal did indeed lead some women who were naturally healthy to become sickly, even if they did not contract consumption itself.

So how did they die, if they did not have consumption? Vitamin deficiency? ÷xhaustion? Organ failure? Starvation?

Here’s the thing: she probably didn’t have tuberculosis. Today, it seems more likely that she was suffering from anorexia (she wrote letters to her lover Rossetti telling him that she had not eaten for weeks) and a serious addiction to opiates.

That is just how we would say it. We are very good at confronting problems head-on. We would take Lizzie back to the future with us in our time machine. We would have to take Lizzie to a time when disordered eating and drug addiction aren’t problems for models and other women pressured to fit society’s definition of beauty, so … oh. As is, tragically, still the case today when some women engage in destructive behaviors, people didn’t want to help Lizzie so much as they wanted to praise how fashionable and skinny she looked. When the painter Ford Madox Brown visited her, he enthused, “Miss Siddal—looking thinner and more deathlike and more beautiful and more ragged than ever.”34 (Deathlike and beautiful went together so easily.)

But Tolstoy and Offenbach still managed to insert in their works enlightening messages about the realities of a terrible disease. God bless anyone whose work holds up a mirror to the world.

we often don’t think about those suffering from tuberculosis at all. The disease is still around, it’s still contagious, and despite the fact that the vaccine costs approximately sixteen cents to produce, and $3.13 to buy, tuberculosis continues to ravage periphery countries.41

His examination revealed that he had no fever, no pain anywhere, and that his only concrete feeling was an urgent desire to die. All that was needed was shrewd questioning … to conclude once again that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera. —GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

to claim in the journal of architecture the Builder that “from inhaling the odour of beef the butcher’s wife obtains her obesity.”1

thought he was going to say “as little improvement as animals,” but I was wrong! The fact that he hated the Chinese was not all that unusual by nineteenth-century British standards, but it doesn’t make me like him more.

Again, being a vegan is cool—good for him—but I will bet you every penny I have that he never shut up about it.

“ever serves to remind me that in any profession the highest order of work is achieved not by fussy demand for ‘something to be done,’ but by patient study of the eternal laws.”

Biographies for these are common. Good men are scarce.”40

The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted, uncared for, and deserted by everybody. —MOTHER TERESA

best-case scenario when it comes to the outbreak of a disease is that the community will rally around the afflicted. It will tend to them gently; it will raise funds; it will do whatever is necessary to allow the people stricken with the disease to live with dignity while science searches for a cure. When the community as a whole swings into action, plagues can be overcome relatively swiftly. That almost never happens.

Damien is the unofficial patron saint of those suffering from HIV/AIDS; the sole Catholic memorial chapel to the victims of HIV and AIDS is dedicated to him.3

Leprosy has nothing to do with whether someone has a shiny, clean soul or body. No diseases have anything to do with anyone’s soul.

Illness is not a moral judgment.

Today, like many historical plagues, leprosy can be treated with antibiotics,

If you isolate people from their families and friends when they have a serious disease, physical disabilities, and very little hope, they understandably may not behave really well.

I think a universal human fear is that we will die alone. To die, even in the absolute best possible situation, is to set off on a very big journey, and everyone deserves kind people around to see them off.

The church organist had lost his left hand but attached a piece of wood to the stump in order to play all the organ’s notes. Occasionally two people would play the organ, as between them they had enough fingers to hit every key.38 These stories might seem dark to us, but to lepers who had felt forsaken for so long, belonging to a community again must have been wonderful. It’s completely fair to say that the lepers’ band would never have been featured on the Late Show, but that wasn’t really the point. The lepers knew that their lives would never go back to “normal.” What the lepers surely wanted was to be able to participate in some way in the activities they had enjoyed before contracting their disease and, in doing so, to perhaps have a few minutes when they felt like their old, normal selves again.

I know I wish I could feel like my old self. And I don't even have leprosy.

Leprosy isn’t easily contracted, but Damien lived among the lepers so fully that he must have come to expect his fate many years before he actually developed the disease. I generally think that anyone who throws themselves in the path of a disease and doesn’t take basic precautions is stupid and reckless. But … there was a little girl covered in worms because no one would change her bandages. What would you do?

A pedestal erected on Molokai to the memory of Damien reads “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”51 Damien deserves to be a saint, whether you think sainthood is proof of God’s love for us or just a way to honor those who loved their fellow man.

Father Damien. He never confused the disease with the person suffering from it.

Mother Teresa wrote to the pope claiming that she believed his two miracles were, first, “the removal of fear from the hearts of the lepers to acknowledge the disease and proclaim it and ask for medicine—and the birth of the hope of being cured.” And second, the miraculous transformation of the community on Molokai to exhibit “greater concern, less fear, and readiness to help.”

Damien is proof that kindness and love and compassion can be stronger forces than fear, even the fear of death. That’s a good thing because we’re all going to die. None of us can beat death. And so, perhaps, like Damien, we can go out into the world bravely and make it better for the time we are alive. Individuals can change global perspectives on, well, just about anything. Before Damien’s intercession people considered lepers barely human. I don’t think Mother Teresa is overstating her case when she says that he performed a miracle in making people less afraid and more eager to fight against the miseries of the world.

Diseases are villains and should be hunted down and combatted accordingly. Separating the disease from the diseased seems crucial if we are to be decent and compassionate people. But having a disease doesn’t necessarily make someone a good person. In certain cases diseased people do seem to lapse into villainy, and there’s no more interesting example of this phenomenon than the story of Mary Mallon.

Here’s the twist: Mary Mallon was an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid. Although she carried the bacteria inside her and could transmit it to others, she never suffered any of the symptoms herself. This is as close as someone can get to having a villainous superpower in real life. But Mary didn’t know she was spreading the disease. Yet considering the extent to which everyone around her contracted typhoid, she must have suspected she was at least very unlucky. Mary left a trail of illness wherever she went.

If she did not know she had the disease, was she a villain, or was she oblivious?

She would be a virtual prisoner for the next three years.

In 1909 reporters at the New York American told the story of her situation, describing Mary Mallon as “Typhoid Mary.” They wrote: “It is probable that Mary Mallon is a prisoner for life. And yet she has committed no crime, has never been accused of an immoral or wicked act, and has never been a prisoner in any court, nor has she been sentenced to imprisonment by any judge.”25 Totally true.

I cannot stress enough how Mary should have been taught other job skills. Because, as I suspect everyone reading this chapter can guess, Mary went right on cooking. After 1912 she stopped reporting to the Board of Health. She began working under the pseudonym “Mrs. Brown.” By 1915 she took a job in a place populated by babies with weak little immune systems. That is a monstrous thing to do.

She did not have other skills?

Mary Mallon was confined for the rest of her life at North Brother Island. She began working at the Riverside Hospital as a helper. She supposedly enjoyed working in the laboratory, so it’s a shame that those weren’t skills she was taught earlier in life.

We do know that this disease wasn’t Spanish. In all likelihood, the Spanish flu was an all-American plague hailing from Haskell, Kansas. There is still research that attempts to pin the biggest plague in the twentieth century on anyplace else (guesses range from China to Great Britain), probably because “America’s bread-basket” is a much nicer way to refer to the Midwest than “the planet’s flu bin.” In spite of our First World desire to believe that diseases are fundamentally exotic imports, the first case of the Spanish flu epidemic was reported to the weekly journal Public Health Reports by Dr. Loring Miner of Haskell, Kansas, in March 1918.

This might be a good time to mention that if you learn about an airborne virus that seems to be killing otherwise healthy young people in your area from a reputable medical journal, you are reading very bad news. Go to the grocery store and start stocking up on supplies immediately. If you have someplace relatively isolated to live, go there. Doing so might feel a bit silly or paranoid, but, honestly, neither of those responses would be overreactions.

Prophetic.

So the chart of age and flu death usually looks like a U. Meanwhile, the chart of influenza deaths in 1918 looked like a crazy, badly drawn N. Around 20 percent of affected babies seemed to die, followed by a drop down to the standard less than 10 percent, followed by a spike in deaths beginning at age nineteen, and returning to normal levels by around middle age. By 1918, 35 percent of people dying from influenza were in their twenties. Apparently, the disease overstimulated healthy immune systems, turning them against the body.

seems insane that a disease killing young heterosexual white men in the middle of America would just be overlooked. (I’m not saying that diseases affecting other groups should be ignored; simply that, historically, they have been.)

didn’t report on the outbreak because they did not want to go to jail. A morale law had been passed in 1917 after the United States entered World War I. It stated you could receive twenty years in jail if you chose to “utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the government of the United States.”9 This law seems unconstitutional, but it was upheld by the Supreme Court ruling (Schenck v. United States) that you can’t say things that “represent to society a clear and present danger.”