What We Didn't Learn In History About Plagues

Andrew Sullivan has an essay in New York Magazine: "A Plague Is an Apocalypse. But It Can Bring a New World. The meaning of this one is in our hands"  on the history of plagues, or maybe plagues in history, is a better way to phrase it.  As I think about my knowledge of such things, I was taught about the Black Death and as best as I can remember, the message was:  "You should be glad you live in a civilized society where this doesn't happen anymore."

And I probably learned that just after a vaccine for polio had been created.  I don't recall anyone connecting the scourge of polio with the Black Plague.

Sullivan starts with what he calls, perhaps the deadliest plague - when small pox came to the "New World" and killed of 90% of the indigenous people there.

Then he goes back to the Roman Empire.  Here's a description of one of many plagues.

"John of Ephesus noted that as people “were looking at each other and talking, they began to totter and fell either in the streets or at home, in harbors, on ships, in churches, and everywhere.” As he traveled in what is now Turkey, he was surrounded by death: “Day by day, we too — like everybody — knocked at the gate to the tomb … We saw desolate and groaning villages and corpses spread out on the earth, with no one to take up [and bury] them.” The population of Constantinople was probably reduced by between 50 and 60 percent. The first onslaught happened so quickly the streets became blocked by corpses, the dead “trodden upon by feet and trampled like spoiled grapes … the corpse which was trampled, sank and was immersed in the pus of those below it,” as John put it."

Sullivan points out that it is, precisely, the move toward civilizations and living with domesticated animals that allowed for viruses to be transmitted from animals to humans.  And travel then carried these to others.

An interesting piece, worth reading.  A lot longer than a tweet, but a lot more comprehensive and worth reading.