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

by Jennifer Wright

when plagues erupt, some people behave amazingly well. They minimize the level of death and destruction around them. They are kind. They are courageous. They showcase the best of our nature. Other people behave like superstitious lunatics and add to the death toll.

whether plagues are managed quickly doesn’t just depend on hardworking doctors and scientists. It depends on people who like to sleep in on weekends and watch movies and eat French fries and do the fantastic common things in life, which is to say, it depends on all of us. Whether a civilization fares well during a crisis has a great deal to do with how the ordinary, nonscientist citizen responds.

The past does not exist under a bell jar. Moments, ideas, and tragedies of the past bleed into the present.

If moments from the past seep so seamlessly into the present, maybe moments from the present can help us relate to the past. After all, the past was no less ridiculous than the present. Both eras were made up of humans.

It’s easy to forget that people from the past weren’t the two-dimensional black-and-white photos or line drawings you might encounter in some dry textbooks. They weren’t just gray-faced guys in top hats. They were living, breathing, joking, burping people, who could be happy or sad, funny or boring, cool or the lamest people you ever met in your life. They had no idea they were living in the past. They all thought they were living in the present. Accordingly, like any person, past or present, could be, some of them were smart and kind and geniuses about medicine and also completely dull on a personal level. (I’m trying to come to terms with loving John Snow’s deductive brilliance and being absolutely certain I would never want to spend more than ten minutes talking to him.) Others were charismatic and charming and total sociopathic maniacs. (That description gives Walter Jackson Freeman II too much credit for charm, but people liked him. He was gross, and he wore a weird penis ring on his neck. People should not have liked him for numerous reasons.) You should regard everyone in this book as human, not inanimate historical figures. We can have personal opinions about them; we’re not all that different from them. And despite what some breathtakingly stupid intellectuals would have you believe, the people and interests of the past weren’t necessarily smart and serious any more than the people and interests of the present are dumb and frivolous. Knowing about pop culture does...

pretending any historical age before proper indoor plumbing was a glorious epoch is a ludicrous delusion.

I can’t quite believe a ruler financed a war by having a crazy yard sale, but ancient Rome is surprising in many ways.

“If a plague broke out, do I think this person could navigate the country through those times, on a spiritual level, but also on a pragmatic one? Would they be able to calmly solve one problem, and then another one, and then the next one? Or would bodies pile up in the streets?”

The first lesson of this book is that plagues don’t just affect a population’s health. If they are not quickly defeated by medicine, any significant outbreak of disease sends horrible ripples through every aspect of society.

The takeaway from this story is that there is really only one thing we should collectively fear ending civilizations. It’s not licentious behavior. If the biggest problem in your civilization is people having sex, you are doing great. It isn’t even necessarily other countries attacking you because they hate you and all that you stand for. If you’ve got a big enough army you can fight them off. The real terror is plague. It’s waiting out there, somewhere, under the ice or in a jungle. If it strikes and it can’t be combatted effectively, it can take down an empire.

“In plague, fear acts as a solvent on human relationships; it makes everyone an enemy and everyone an isolate. In plague every man becomes an island—a small, haunted island of suspicion, fear, and despair.”

we can take some heart. Practically no one dies of bubonic plague now. It was one of the human race’s most terrifying adversaries for many years, and we beat it, first with a bar of soap in the sixteenth century and then with antibiotics in the twentieth.

“It was a world so glutted with misery that nearly all ranks of society drank and danced whenever the opportunity, with the intensity of those in flight from an intolerable reality.”

Whenever someone begins pompously complaining that civilization is on a downhill slide, because people participate in harmless behaviors like taking selfies or watching reality television, a good response is to stare at them and respond, “You know, we used to burn people for being witches. That’s what people used to do in their spare time.”

It’s perfectly possible to be smarter than everyone else and still be polite and even deferential—women have been doing it for centuries.

Christopher Buckley, in But Enough About You,

Empires toppled like sandcastles in the wake of diseases we do not give a second thought to today.

Freud remarked: “It is the loosening process resulting from the paresis [syphilis-induced inflammation of the brain] that gave him the capacity for the quite extraordinary achievement of seeing through all layers and recognizing the instincts at the very base. In that way, he placed his paretic disposition at the service of science.”

Owing in part to these euphemistic portrayals, during the nineteenth century people were not especially afraid of tuberculosis. The general thought was that, okay, you die, but it’s a really easy death and you’re all pale and sexy like an angel or a character in a Tim Burton movie.

You can be upset, but I don’t think you can die from a bad review. This is the only time when I have seen literary critics called actual murderers, but Shelley said it, so think about the power you wield the next time you log on to Goodreads.

“her attractiveness was inseparable from her perceived consumptive state.”

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.) In Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination Katherine Byrne writes, “It seems that [Siddal’s] desirability lay in her fragility and that she was special because she always seemed hovering on the verge of death, and looked as though she was not quite of this world.”35 This poor depressed, drug addicted, possibly anorexic woman.

He also determined how tuberculosis spread from one person to the next, proving it was not caused by having a lot of feelings, being rich, or being beautiful.

All that was needed was shrewd questioning … to conclude once again that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera.

He became such a firm convert to Snow’s theory that until his death Whitehead kept over his desk a portrait of Snow, which, he noted, “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.”

Richardson remarks that a biography of Snow would “be scanty in its details; it is of but little count that the life of him who is about to be shadowed forth is destitute of incident fitted for the taste of wonder-loving, passion-courting, romance-devouring readers. Biographies for these are common. Good men are scarce.”

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

Damien was such a jackass here. I still like him a lot, and if you’ve ever been similarly insufferable, it’s nice to know that this behavior won’t rule you out for sainthood.

Damien wrote a lot about his affection and respect for the lepers. However, he did also write, “Sometimes, confessing the sick, whose sores are full of worms like cadavers in the grave, I have to hold my nose.”34 Damien strikes me as so superhuman in his goodness that it’s relieving to stumble across an incident that reminds us that he was still a regular person sensitive to smell and worms. Supposedly, whenever he was lonely or frightened on the island, he would spur himself on by repeating to himself, “Come on, Jef, my boy, this is your life’s work!”

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. No sooner had he, widely praised, died than some iconoclasts—or, as they are called today, mean jealous haters—appeared to disparage him.

you don’t have to be a genius or a brilliant scientist or a doctor to help in this war against disease: you just have to be someone who gives a damn about your fellow man.

on both sides, cooperation requires a sizable degree of trust. People have to be able to trust officials to see them as individuals, not just as a transport system for a disease. They also have to trust that officials will not lie to them when told they are ill, even if they don’t feel sick. The government, in turn, has to trust that people will not go out of their way to harm their fellow citizens. All of that trust seems very much a matter of faith, but it’s not impossible to achieve. It just requires everyone not being the absolute worst.

John Barry, in The Great Influenza, writes: “Those in authority must retain the public’s trust. The way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one … Leadership must make whatever horror exists concrete. Only then will people be able to break it apart.”69

Telling people that things are fine is not the same as making them fine.

The public is at its strongest when it is well informed. Despite Lippmann’s claims to the contrary, we are smart, and we are good, and we are always stronger when we work together. If there is a next time, it would be very much to our benefit to remember that.

At the end of our lives I think many of us would do anything to have one more good day. All of this life seems so precious. I can’t think of anything as a failure that allows people even one more happy day.

Feel free to start using Walter Jackson Freeman II as an insult directed toward people you hate. Almost no one will get the reference, but if I am in the room we’ll high-five and it will be awesome.

“Dr. Salk’s laboratories could not produce more than a fraction of the hundreds of gallons of vaccine needed for such a massive trial. So it is being made according to his specifications on a nonprofit basis by five pharmaceutical houses—Parke, Davis & Co. in Detroit, Pitman-Moore and Eli Lilly & Co. in Indianapolis, Wyeth Inc. in Philadelphia, the Cutter Laboratories in Berkeley, Calif.”27 On a nonprofit basis. This is such a selfless moment in human history that it feels like one of those chapters in a science fiction series where there’s a brief period of “utopia” before everyone becomes reptiles or is eaten by alien overlords.

Polio was effectively eliminated throughout the world. And then people just … kind of forgot all about polio. This seems to be the human response to any disease. People forget diseases ever existed the minute they are no longer being affected by them. Maybe that’s understandable. Maybe if we all thought about all the potential diseases the world is teeming with, and the extent to which we are, every day, dancing on the edge of a volcano, the world would seem too terrifying to walk around in at all.

During the last years of his life he devoted his attention to finding a vaccine for AIDS. He said he knew that many people expected him to fail in his attempts, but he maintained, “There is no such thing as failure. You can only fail if you stop too soon.”

“What is important is that we, Number one: Learn to live with each other,” he said in 1985. “Number two: Try to bring out the best in each other. The best from the best, and the best from those who, perhaps, might not have the same endowment … the object is not to put down the other, but to raise up the other.”44

Maybe it seems a lot to expect that we can lift up our fellow man and bring out the best in everyone. But we’ve done it before. We can work miracles when we come together to help one another. Just look at how we all cured polio.

Whenever someone casually refers to “the history of civilization” in a way that does not jibe with the history of civilization as I extensively, constantly, read about it, I like to research their favorite books to see where they are getting their information. In most of these cases all their favorite books have titles like Christmas, Guns, and Integrity.

I find the forgetfulness of people, especially in true matters of life and death, so frustrating. Sometimes I look at these histories and think, People are just going to keep making the same dumb mistakes every single time. And one day those mistakes will doom us all. And I feel sad and furious and frightened for what will happen next. But then I think about how polio is almost eradicated. Or that penicillin exists. And I remember that we are progressing, always, even if that progress is sometimes slower and more uneven than we might wish. I remind myself, too, of all the ways people have persevered and survived in conditions that are surely as bad as anything that is to come.

“Even from the abyss of horror in which we try to find our way today, half-blind, our hearts distraught and shattered, I look up again to the ancient constellations of my childhood, comforting myself that, some day, this relapse will appear only an interval in the eternal rhythm of progress onward and upward.”13 I have to believe that the missteps are only intermittent relapses as we grow stronger and smarter and better. We do get better. At everything. Combatting diseases fits somewhere among “everything.”

When we fight plagues, not each other, we will not only defeat diseases but preserve our humanity in the process. Onward and upward.