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

by Jennifer Wright

Whether a civilization fares well during a crisis has a great deal to do with how the ordinary, nonscientist citizen responds.

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.

So, nice job, King Casimir. I hope you receive a History Channel special.

First, your decision to travel to the plague-ridden fourteenth century is exceedingly ill-advised.

This may be the most insane, ineffective cure in the world, but if you have the opportunity to travel back in time, please go see it performed, even though visiting the fourteenth century is dumb, so dumb, just so dumb.23

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

This seems like an unfair stereotype about butchers’ wives.

(Why am I so mean to this good man who just wanted to save lives?)

Stevenson concluded the matter by stating, “Well, such is life.”

Yoda is just a little monster who lives in a backpack.

An almost Fitzgeraldian gleam in someone’s eye as they exclaim, “To the wine cellar, Maurice! We’re going to fill this bathtub with champagne!”

Women, in particular, made up the largest group of lobotomy patients. Women who were depressed, had bi-polar illness or were sexually active outside the range of socially and culturally acceptable limits of the day—including single women exhibiting typical sexual desire—were considered candidates.”

Just take it as a given that if you were a married woman who lived during the height of the lobotomy’s popularity, your husband would have been able to have you institutionalized and lobotomized if he felt like it.

Polio is one reason that the idea of someone pooping in a pool is so horrifying, in addition to just being very uncool. And the nitrogen in urine converts chlorine in such a way that it irritates the eyes, so stop peeing in pools, too. The latter has nothing to do with polio; just stop doing gross things in the pool because you’re ruining it for everyone.