‘SEARCHERS OF THE DEAD’
The definition of essential work depends entirely on the crisis, Kevin Siena writes.
COVID -19 has forced us all to rethink what constitutes “essential work.” In addition to public service workers, we are now adding food retail and pharmacy staff, delivery workers and many others. For those fortunate enough to have jobs — but not fortunate enough to be able to perform them from home — continuing to work presents a difficult decision, balancing economic worry against personal and family safety.
The history of labour during previous epidemics provides examples of the same dilemma. During 17th-century plague outbreaks, for instance, the need to keep working drove Florentines to evade quarantine or conceal infection.
And there was lots to do during epidemics. Plague provoked administrative scrambles. English plague orders contained a wide range of provisions: establishing pest houses (for those with infectious disease), policies for quarantine, controlling the movement of goods, providing food and support for shut-in families.
Lots of people had to be hired, too: gravediggers to bury the dead, guards to enforce quarantine, nurses to serve at the pest house. These were dangerous jobs — London lost 100,000 souls in the great epidemic of 1665-’66 — but they were essential.
If there was an “essential worker” during a 16th- or 17th-century epidemic, surely it was the Searcher of the Dead. Whether a death was caused by plague or something more mundane was the single most important piece of information needed to manage the crisis.
(We are seeing now just how vital case-recognition is in our current crisis, with some Asian countries seeming to have had considerable success managing the outbreak because of advanced disease-surveillance techniques.) If a death was identified as plague, then quarantine kicked into action. Someone thus had to inspect corpses to report the cause of death.
Who, we might ask, would be compelled to take a job like this during a raging epidemic? The answer, predictably, is the poor. It stood to reason that such an important job should fall to physicians. After all, they forever boasted that only they possessed the requisite training to decipher the bewildering array of symptoms the body produced. Tellingly, this did not happen.
Instead, authorities gave this most crucial of jobs to impoverished elderly women. Historian Richelle Munkhoff has shown they were often parish pensioners pressed into this dangerous work under threat of losing their pensions.
Traditional customs were bent. Women were barred from university, but during epidemics, authorities suddenly defended their ability to read the body. They might not be physicians, but they were good enough, and so the searchers’ reports provided the information on which the entire apparatus of plague control hinged.
These jobs had to be done. Today, we would call them essential.
They were arduous, dangerous, low-paid, occasionally even unpaid, and they were often performed by men and women facing economic precarity: domestic servants left behind when their employers fled, or workers in industries that abruptly shuttered.
Not unlike their plague-era predecessors, some workers today are reporting that fears of loss of income or unemployment drive them to continue working, even when they feel unwell. The world, it seems, is suddenly recognizing the essential value of workers who stock shelves and deliver food and goods. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau closed the borders to all but Canadian citizens recently, then quickly made an exception for migrant agricultural workers, without whom, Canadian farmers pleaded, there would be no crops. Agriculture Minister MarieClaude Bibeau put it succinctly: “Our very food security depends on them.”
This is all happening at a time when, in Canada, a five-year campaign to raise the minimum wage of such workers to $15 an hour has met stiff and, thus far successful, opposition.
Now that the importance of these jobs is on full display, let us hope that policies recognizing their true value will be one of the many lasting legacies that the current crisis produces.
Kevin Siena is professor of history at Trent University. He specializes in the history of infectious diseases.
His most recent book is Rotten Bodies: Class and Contagion in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Yale University Press, 2019). This article is adapted from the academic website History & Policy.