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

by Jennifer Wright

We have been living in an age of improbable luck. We have experienced nearly thirty years without a disease—that we do not know how to combat—killing upward of thousands of otherwise healthy young people in those core countries. I can’t say whether this good fortune will run out—I hope it won’t—but it always has in the past. We just like to forget this disagreeable fact. Forgetting is soothing and probably in our nature. But disregarding, and being ignorant of, plagues of the past makes us more, rather than less, vulnerable to inevitable ones in the future.

Because 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.

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.

A man in England claimed that his movie theater was safe—and he was believed—because he had a special aerating machine.

People began to take matters into their own, often panicked and sometimes inebriated, hands. A health inspector in San Francisco shot a man who refused to wear a mask,

Telling people that things are fine is not the same as making them fine. This failure is in the past. Journalists and editors had their reasons. Risking jail time is no joke. But learning from this breakdown in truth-telling is important because the fourth estate can’t fail again. We are fortunate today to have organizations like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization that track how diseases are progressing and report these findings. In the event of an outbreak similar to the Spanish flu, they will be wonderful resources. I hope we’ll be similarly lucky to have journalists who will be able to share necessary information with the public. 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.