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

by Jennifer Wright

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.”

Silver linings we attribute to diseases—whether those linings are that syphilitics have moments of manic genius, or tuberculosis sufferers become angelically beautiful, or people with Alzheimer’s learn to live in the moment—are total bullshit. They do not lessen the horrors of the disease for anyone suffering from it. Instead they demean the very real suffering of victims and can make society less motivated to find a cure.

Shaming people for contracting a disease that we don’t have a cure for is still common today. In part we want to believe that those people are not like us. We like to believe that people somehow brought diseases on themselves, but diseases are mindless and do not judiciously pick the worst people in the world to murder. The more we distance ourselves from diseases and their victims, the harder it becomes to educate people about prevention or raise the funds for a cure (because why would you want to cure something only monstrous people get?). Portraying the afflicted in a way that acknowledges their suffering but also shows them to be brave and humorous and able to joke makes them seem like any one of us.

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

Dr. Moniz believed that such an operation would make life far better for the insane. And if “better life” just constitutes “being less worried and agitated,” he was correct. There is one problem, though: worrying about stuff serves a purpose. It’s not fun and can keep you awake at night, but it means you are capable of caring and solving problems. Which means you are qualified to be an empathetic, adult human being.

“There is no such thing as failure. You can only fail if you stop too soon.”

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.