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No civilization was ever toppled by “too much sexy time”—except for Bavaria in 1848, but that is an unrelated (if delightful) story.
When we are electing government officials, it is not stupid to ask yourself, “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?” Certainly, it would be better than asking yourself if you would enjoy drinking a beer with them.
It is disheartening to think how simple and straightforward the cures for the diseases that we are desperately researching today will seem to people in the future, when it will be known that of course you eat five bananas a day to prevent Alzheimer’s.
The year 1517 was so awful that it was sometimes simply called “the bad year.”
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.”
Once again: Having a brilliant, beloved leader at the helm of a country when the land is in turmoil is one of the best situations people can hope for. That becomes apparent when that leader is dead.
Today, it’s estimated that smallpox killed around 90 percent of the native people of the Americas.
will go into the next severe epidemic with ten selected, vaccinated persons and ten selected unvaccinated persons—I should prefer to choose the latter—three members of Parliament, three anti-vaccination doctors (if they can be found), and four anti-vaccination propagandists.
Ask the Aztecs and Incas whether or not they would have liked to have vaccines available to them. Oh, wait, you can’t, they’re dead.
If you want to be inspired, you don’t contract a disease that’s going to blind you and give you shooting pains all over your body. You just buy one of those books with bold, blocky print on the cover that explain how to have seven ideas every seven minutes.
The treatments were so popular that people joked, “A night with Venus, a lifetime with mercury.”
You might marvel that anyone could hide a disease that resulted in their nose rotting off their face. It’s possible, though. My wonderful agent tells a story of how her great-grandfather had a wooden nosepiece that he wore when he had to go into town. His family claimed his nose had rotted away because it was always being flicked by cows’ tails. My agent now realizes that a cover-up might have been in play.
Good for Tolstoy for making death from tuberculosis sound terrible. When diseases sound frightful, people stop thinking they are a minor ailment alleviated by eating anchovies or bathing in salt water or falling in love.
tuberculosis. If you’re going with the latter option, I recommend the Stop TB Partnership, which is endorsed by the United Nations Foundation and does amazing work.
this was perhaps the only period in history when from a health standpoint you would have been better off consuming alcohol than water.
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.
In 1858, when he was age nineteen, he sought to begin his religious training. At his admission interview he said he hoped to work as a missionary in North America among the Native Americans.
Occasionally two people would play the organ, as between them they had enough fingers to hit every key.38
She occupied some of her time writing letters to Soper and Dr. Baker, threatening to kill them when she got out, to which Dr. Baker noted, “I could not blame her for feeling that way.”23 Soper remarked, “She could write an excellent letter.”24
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.
That October—which was the deadliest month in U.S. history, and that takes into account periods like, say, the Civil War—195,000 people died of the Spanish flu.
the Savoy Hotel in London did a brisk business with its new Corpse Reviver cocktail of whiskey and rum.
Molly Caldwell Crosby, the author of Asleep: The Forgotten Epidemic That Remains One of Medicine’s Greatest Mysteries,
the actress Frances Farmer
He initially had no interest in visiting Warm Springs, remarking that he did not wish “to associate with cripples.”
If Salk had patented his vaccine, he would have made, depending upon how you interpret patent law, between 2.5 billion and 7 billion dollars.30 Can you imagine how many Wu-Tang albums he could have kept from the public with that money?
