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

by Jennifer Wright

It does appear that we are living in a world where the word plague has shockingly little meaning for many.

Too true!

Because 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,

I think the current pandemic has shown this, we all need to socially distance, wear masks if you can't and wash our hands - oh and Vaccinate!!!

The philosophy is beautifully summarized by Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations: “Say to yourself in the early morning: I shall meet today inquisitive, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men. All of these things have come upon them through ignorance of real good and ill. But, because I have seen the nature of what is good and right, I can neither be harmed by any of them, for no man will involve me in wrong, nor can I be angry with my kinsman or hate him; for we have come into the world to work together.”12

This is just wonderful - what a guy!

Of course he did. Charlatans preying upon people’s fear with false hope during plague times often do. (This is the “career advice for sociopaths” portion of the book.)

Remember when Trump said "it'll be over by Easter"?

“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

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.

In 1796 Jenner found a milkmaid with cowpox and injected the matter from one of her sores into an eight-year-old boy, who developed a mild fever and a loss of appetite but recovered quite quickly. Ten days later, Jenner proceeded to inject the boy with actual smallpox. The boy survived! With no signs of smallpox. That experiment sounds terrifying, but it worked. Jenner called the technique vaccination, as vacca was the Latin word for “cow.”

This must be one of medicine's greatest discoveries, I mean who would've thunk??

or tuberculosis sufferers become angelically beautiful,

was called the "White Death"

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.

Tuberculosis was, even early on, associated with attractiveness. The first-century physician Aretaeus of Cappadocia described the typical sufferer as having a “nose sharp, slender; cheeks prominent and red; eyes hollow, brilliant and glittering.”14 Admittedly, big-eyed and skinny with rosy cheeks is a description that sounds a lot like today’s supermodels.

Gosh!!

Millions of people worldwide die from tuberculosis every year—and it’s totally treatable.

Guided by his faith, Father Damien chose to live among the lepers on the island of Molokai as their priest, assisting them practically and spiritually and, while doing so, contracted leprosy himself. In 2009 he was canonized by Pope Benedict XVI,

Father Damien is a legend...

Shortly thereafter he began visiting each of the lepers’ homes. At one he found a young girl whose wounds were so untended that worms covered the side of her body.32 Damien started changing the lepers’ bandages by hand.33 I suspect as soon as Damien saw that girl, he knew that he couldn’t make life bearable for the people of Molokai if he wasn’t

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

In slightly more medical terms, the Spanish flu triggered what’s called a cytokine storm. Cytokine proteins exist in your body to modulate the release of immune cells when there is an infection. A healthy immune system has a lot of those little fellows. In a cytokine storm, too many immune cells flood the site of the infection, which causes inflammation around that site. If the site of the infection is in the lungs—as it could be in a respiratory disease like the Spanish flu—the inflamed lungs fill with fluids. Then you die.

A very good description of the pathogenesis of flu

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

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

So they developed the transorbital lobotomy, which involved inserting an ice pick into a patient’s skull through the bone known as the orbit at the back of the eye socket. Patients were generally subdued with electroshock therapy beforehand. Then the ice pick was driven through the back of the eye with a hammer. There, it would

The obsession with lobotomies in the mid 1900s was appalling....

Jonas Salk is often remembered as the closest you can come to a secular saint in U.S. history, but he started life as a regular kid growing up in New York. Salk was born in 1914 in New York City,

Salk participated in a study that injected institutionalized mental patients with an experimental flu vaccine without their consent. Many of them were senile and barely able to describe their symptoms. That behavior was so stupid and evil. If it makes you hate Jonas Salk, that’s fine!

Wonder if this would obtain ethics approval today....

For some comparison, if this sort of thing interests you, there is a smaller trace amount of formaldehyde in a vaccine than you would find in an apple. (A vaccine contains at most 0.1 milligrams, while your average apple contains 6 milligrams.)22

One for the anti-vaxxers

One of the interesting takeaways from both the Antonine plague and polio is what a difference a strong leader can make during an epidemic.

Amen.

On October 15, 1982, at a White House press briefing, reporter Lester Kinsolving asked press secretary Larry Speakes about a horrifying new disease called AIDS that was ravaging the gay community. “What’s AIDS?” Speakes asked. “It’s known as the ‘gay plague,’” Kinsolving replied. Everyone laughed. “I don’t have it,” Speakes replied. “Do you?”

Oh dear...