Gothic epidemiology
AFTER last year’s Halloween was plagued by doubt and worry thanks to a pandemic with no clear end in sight, last week’s Halloween may have felt especially exciting for those who were ready to celebrate it.
I am a historian of pandemics. Halloween is my favourite holiday because I got to wear my plague doctor costume complete with a beaked mask.
But the annual occasion opens a little window of freedom for all ages. It lets people move beyond their ordinary social roles, identities and appearances.
It is spooky and morbid, yet playful. Even though death is symbolically very much present in Halloween, it’s also a time to celebrate life. It draws from mixed emotions that resonate even more than usual during the Covid-19 era.
Looking at the ways survivors of past pandemics tried to celebrate the triumph of life amid widespread death can add context to the present-day experience.
Consider the Black Death – the mother of all pandemics.
The Black Death was a pandemic of plague, the infectious disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. Between 1346 and 1353, plague rampaged across Afro-eurasia and killed an estimated 40% to 60% of the population. The Black Death ended, but plague carried on, making periodic return visits through the centuries.
The catastrophic effects of plague and its relentless recurrences changed life in every possible way.
One aspect was attitudes toward death. In Europe, high levels of mortality caused by the Black Death and its recurrent outbreaks made death even more visible and tangible than ever before. The ubiquity of death contributed to the making of a new death culture, which found an expression in art. For example, images of the dance of death or “danse macabre” showed the dead and the living coming together.
Even though skeletons and skulls representing death had appeared in ancient and medieval art, such symbols gained renewed emphasis after
COULD what happened in Wuhan, China, have had the same effect on Durban as it did at the National Zoo of Cuba, where species bred more efficiently in the peace and quiet of lockdown, according to an international news agency report?
The Mitchell Park Zoo had a pair of common marmosets reproduce twice in the year of lockdown, instead of only once as they had done in normal years, and at the Umgeni Bird Park, greater flamingos reacted to the tranquillity by building nests and laying.
“Although only one chick was successfully reared in the season, it was very exciting,” said Msawakhe Mayisela, spokesperson for the ethekwini Municipality, which runs the two entities.
Meanwhile, staff are keeping an eagle eye on avian behaviour to see if the birds succeed again this year now that restrictions have eased.
“They have already started displaying their breeding behaviours.”
Mayisela said the bird park also saw its lesser palm cockatoos lay and successfully incubate and hatch their first chick.
“The palm cockatoos are a young pair, and both are hand-reared, so it has taken the birds a while to figure out what they are supposed to do.
“The female finally figured out that the Black Death. These images epitomised the transient and volatile nature of life and the imminence of death for all rich and poor, young and old, men and women.
Artists’ allegorical references to death stressed the closeness of the hour of death. Skulls and other memento mori symbols, including coffins and hourglasses, appeared in Renaissance paintings to remind viewers that because death was imminent, one must prepare for it.
Bruegel the Elder’s famous Triumph of Death stressed the unpredictability of death: armies of skeletons march over people and take their lives, whether she must lay the egg in the nest box and not smash it on the ground.
“They just need more practice at rearing a chick now.”
He added that a pair of blue-headed macaws had also laid for the first time.
“While the eggs turned out not to be fertile, it is a positive sign that they laid. Blue-headed macaws are not easy species to breed. It turns out all the birds and animals needed was a bit of peace and quiet.”
On the other side of the city, in ready or not.
Death culture influenced the 19th-century Western European doctors who started writing about historical pandemics. Through this lens, they imagined a specific version of past pandemics the Black Death, in particular that one modern historian named “Gothic epidemiology”.
The German medical historian Justus Hecker, who died in 1850, and his followers wrote about the Black Death in a dark, gloomy, emotional tone. They emphasised its morbid and bizarre aspects, such as violent anti-jewish pogroms and the itinerant Flagellants who whipped themselves
Yellowwood Park, Clint Halkett-siddall of the Centre for the Rehabilitation of Wildlife (Crow) noted the peacefulness of fewer animals being brought in because there were fewer cars on the roads to hit them, although boredom saw people shooting them.
But on the breeding front, something out of the normal happened in July on the monkey calendar: a winter baby. Staff were called out to a railway yard, where they found a tiny, very tiny vervet monkey baby they named Noah. in public displays of penance. In their 19th-century writing of the Black Death, it was cast as a singular event of cataclysmic proportions a foreign, peculiar, almost wondrous entity that did not belong to European history.
As it is remembered today, the dominant symbols of the Black Death
like images of uncanny dancing skeletons and the Grim Reaper are products of that Gothic imagination. Ironically, the iconic plague doctor was not a medieval phenomenon but a 17th-century introduction. It was only then 300 years post-black Death that doctors treating plague patients started wearing special full-body outfits and a
“When we receive these calls referring to a ’baby monkey’ at this time of year, we expect to find a six-month-old baby,” former primate officer Tayla Hawkins wrote in her report. “Oh boy, were we wrong.
“Vervet monkeys breed between May and August, with babies being born between October and February, so this gorgeous little guy really came out of the blue.”
Hawkins said she was not sure what had happened to the mother. She suspected Noah’s being so tiny at 266g
beaked mask, a precursor of modern personal protective equipment. So, sadly, my own plague doctor Halloween costume had nothing to do with the Black Death pandemic itself.
Even the term Black Death is a 19th-century invention; none of the medieval witnesses wrote of a “Black Death” or thought of plague as black.
The living legacy of this Gothic epidemiology still defines scholarly and popular understanding of plague and creep into modern Halloween costumes and decorations.
Pandemics never mean death and suffering for all. There is strong evidence that Black Death survivors experienced better living standards and increased prosperity. Even during subsequent outbreaks, differences in class, location and gender informed people’s experiences. The urban poor died in greater numbers, for example, as the well-off fled to their countryside residences. Giovanni Boccaccio’s famous Decameron, written in the immediate aftermath of the Black Death, tells the story of 10 young people who took refuge in the countryside, passing their days telling each other entertaining stories as a way to forget the horrors of plague and imminent death.
A later example is Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, a Habsburg ambassador to the Ottoman Empire who took refuge in the Princes’ Islands off the coast of Istanbul during a plague outbreak in 1561. His memoir describes how he spent his days fishing and enjoying other pleasant pastimes, even while the daily death toll in the city surpassed 1 000 for months.
Countless narratives testify that recurrent outbreaks of plague inspired people to find new ways to embrace life and death. For some, this meant turning toward religion: prayer, fasting and processions. For others, it meant excessive drinking, partying and illicit sex. For still others, self-isolation and finding comfort in one’s own company did the trick.
No one yet knows how the Covid19 pandemic will be remembered. But for the moment, you may find comfort thinking about how the way you feel about life and death connects you to those who survived past pandemics. |
Varlik is Associate Professor of History, Rutgers University Newark