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

by Jennifer Wright

Can we recover from a disease just by knowing that the people in charge want us to get better? Surely, government authorities should always want everyone to be healthy. Even if you assume government officials are all abject sociopaths, having people dying en masse in your town is bad PR. But it is rare, even today, that people suffering from diseases aren’t demonized. The U.S. government sponsors antismoking ads, which often imply that smokers deserve to get lung cancer because they didn’t quit smoking rather than putting those funds toward researching a cure for lung cancer, the actual enemy. Response to the AIDS crisis was delayed at least in part because those suffering were viewed by some as sinners. Clearly, those diseases take more than human kindness to cure, but there is never a situation where care and attentiveness by the community is a bad thing.