Ghosts of Plagues Past
In these pestilential times, we long for escape. And because irony never dies, our Shenzhen book club gathered a library of historic plagues, finding surprisingly optimistic messages amid the death toll.
Across history and fiction, 30 volumes brought us terrifying diseases like bubonic plague, yellow fever, rabies, and so much more. We even ventured into fantastic blindness, apocalyptic flus and a couple zombie plagues for good measure.
At one level, it's all the same: microbes invade intestines, lymph nodes, spines, etc. and reproduce at astonishing rates. They pollute their new home, immune systems wage war and people suffer. Some remarkable experiment discovers the microbe (or not), a remedy is devised (or not), and humanity moves on.
They also tell a tale of revolutionary science in a mere century or so. For millennia, medicine was a jumble of observation, conjecture and complete nonsense... like drinking powdered emeralds or inhaling chamber pot fumes. Nursing saved lives, but doctoring was downright deadly. Yet by the late 19th century, that superstition finally gave way to germ theory, anesthesia and antiseptics. Merci beaucoup, Louis Pasteur.
But more interesting are the themes that shine through and carry the human element behind it all.
The greatest we've read – Katherine Anne Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider and Albert Camus' The Plague – ground these disasters in the human experience, hearing them call us to evaluate who we are and what we mean to one another. Hatcher's The Black Death and Kelly's The Great Mortality tell that story at the level of medieval village and all Eurasia, which Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year picks up a few centuries later. Crosby's America’s Forgotten Pandemic brings out the same from the 1918 pandemic, while Neil White's In the Sanctuary of Outcasts uses Hanson's disease (leprosy) to rediscover shared humanity. Wasik and Murphy's Rabid bundles together our complicated feelings for dogs and the mind-destroying virus we share. Even the worst fiction – Blindness, Severance, A Beginning at the End, Station Eleven, and Kevin Chong's poor rehash of The Plague – still offer portraits of luckless characters reconnecting in plague-shattered worlds.
Beyond that common emotional response to shared suffering, many authors stress how interconnected our vast globe has become. The Ghost Map, Steven Johnson's wonderful account of sleuthing out London's worst cholera epidemic, reveals how intertwined were the bowels of the city and its people. But in a time when stinking air was thought the culprit, it took greater perspective to find the villain in the twisting complexities of their waterways. David Quammen's detailed Spillover and David Waltner-toews' jocular On Pandemics take that story around the world, showing how humanity's expanding footprint brings us ever closer to animals hosting the scariest microbes. Whether it's inbreeding livestock and feeding them their own, in Max's The Family that Couldn’t Sleep, or the international tire trade in Spielman and D'antonio's Mosquito, Quammen's motto holds: “When you shake the tree, things fall out.”
When they do, we usually fail. Distracted people ignore the problem and even governments underfund prevention, giving us the cycles of plague Jennifer Wright recounts in her whimsical Get Well Soon. When it's too big to ignore, institutions impose quarantines and information controls (as we know too well) but rarely have the right skills to respond, whether it's parish priests against the Black Death or NHS administrators dragging feet in Pimenta's Duty of Care.
But we're still here. Failures rarely endure because collective action almost always follows that initial shock. The most stirring tales are those of researchers – heroic, petty, self-taught or industryfunded – who help craft the conquering drug. Some of the best include Oshinsky's Polio and Barry's The Great Influenza where public and private actors mobilize against terrifying illness. Molly Caldwell Crosby's The American Plague, her beautiful Asleep, and its spiritual sequel Awakenings by Oliver Sacks all focus on those researchers and their life-changing passion. The greatest, for me, is David France's How to Survive a Plague, where men with HIV compel drug companies to save their lives, at a time when AIDS deaths were a punchline. Carville's Cure tells a similar tale, though less successful or celebrated, for those organizing for survival within their leprosarium. And surprising success arrives in Max Brooks' World War Z, telling a tale of incredible mobilization, after devastating failures, through touching human portraits.
These people, real and imagined, survive with a resilience that's easy to forget in the midst of our own plague. This theme of endurance appears in all we've read, best articulated in Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell. She helps us see hope in the heart of devastation, as social constraints snap and people must rely on one another. It leaves our world changed for the better, sometimes.
These tragedies, like the plague-stymied 2020 I document in my own Plaguetime Chronicles, remind us that our air, water and lives are all intertwined. We are all in this together.
At one level, it's all the same: microbes invade intestines, lymph nodes, spines, etc. and reproduce at astonishing rates. They pollute their new home, immune systems wage war, and people suffer. Some remarkable experiment discovers the microbe (or not), a remedy is devised (or not), and humanity moves on