Literature offers lessons from pandemics past

My parents were readers. I grew up in a houseful of books. As a teen, there were books accessible to me — Carl Sandburg’s biography of Abraham Lincoln, for example — and books well beyond me, such as a treatise on mushrooms of the world. Then there were books that were within my comprehension that I gave up on. Daniel Defoe’s “A Journal of the Plague Year” was one. I probably quit after 100 pages because baseball season started, and I was off to practice.

[Project Gutenberg: “A Journal of the Plague Year”]

When I heard the coronavirus had reached the United States, I returned to Defoe.

The journal is set in 1664-1666, when the plague fell upon London and killed perhaps 100,000 people — one-fourth of London’s population. The bubonic plague began with black rats and was transmitted by fleas. Defoe (1660-1731) was a child during the plague, so his unnamed narrator, the journal keeper, is fictional, although like Defoe, a modest businessman in “trade,” as the English say. I think it is fair to say the journal is a historical novel, one of the world’s first.

A modern reader will immediately be struck by the importance of religion to almost everyone in the journal. It’s true that those of us living with the coronavirus are made of the same stuff as Defoe’s 17th century characters, but we are not culturally similar. Religion permeated 17th century society from top to bottom. Londoners were anxious to know God’s plan for them in good times, but especially in bad. Titled ministers of the Church of England, humble dissenting parsons, self-appointed seers all took the public stage from the outbreak of the plague to speak for God. Many of these men of the cloth died right next to the sinners in their neighborhood. There was no shortage of sinners, the narrator explains, noting that “villainies and debaucheries” continued apace as disease spread, although as time passed, there were fewer sinners to commit villainies and debaucheries.

Londoners filled churches to hear the word of the Lord. But they soon discovered they could acquire the plague while praying. So the devout applied “preparations” to their bodies to protect themselves before attending worship. The narrator says, “In a word, the whole church was like a smelling-bottle; in one corner it was all perfumes; in another aromaticks, balsamicks, and a variety of drugs and herbs; in another salts and spirits. ...” The applications did no good. (A couple of weeks ago, I attended a church in Fairbanks that smelled of hand sanitizer -- which does good.)

Ranters on the street screaming about the arrival of judgment day were common. The narrator thought some of them were mentally ill. In March, early in the plague, he was out on a warm morning, puffy clouds above in the blue sky, and saw a crowd surrounding a woman who was carrying on about a giant angel in the clouds pointing a sword at London. She gestured upward, calling on all to see. “Yes, I can see it all plainly,” said a member of the crowd. Another “saw (the angel’s) very face and cried out what a glorious creature he was.” The narrator was having none of this; he told the crowd only clouds bathed in sunshine were above. The crowd became agitated, the visionary woman angry. She blasted the narrator, screaming God’s judgment was approaching, “and despisers ... should wander and perish.” The narrator, sensing trouble in this world if not the next, moved on.

The political authorities — the mayor, aldermen, sheriffs, bailiffs, and so forth — struggled to control the plague, primarily because they had no scientific understanding of where it came from or how it spread. They had various synonyms for the plague that were widely used but scientifically inadequate -- the distemper, the infection, particularly. It is not surprising there was a common belief that the first two victims (December 1664) were Frenchmen -- foreigners. Popular opinion ascribed the plague to poisoned air, tiny creatures borne on the air, bad breath, the weather. But the authorities did recognize the disease was spread by human contact -- hence, massive quarantine. Houses where plague was identified were off limits to everyone except those who lived within and the medical community. Guards were posted outside the houses 24 hours a day. The guards were to see no one left the home -- and to run errands for those inside. For example, obtain food or “physick.”

The narrator is of a mixed mind about the efficacy of the quarantine. Londoners were locked up for months at a time, many of them watching their families die. It is not surprising that some families broke out of their homes and took to the streets, sometimes infecting others. Families with means bribed the guards and fled to the country, where they probably would not be welcome.

Many wealthy families (and the court) left London as soon as the plague arrived and did not return until it was gone. The narrator was tempted to leave, but upon consulting the Bible, put his faith in his “sovereign” -- God.

The treatment physicians applied was barbaric -- the purple swellings that dotted victims were lanced, burned, or covered with a poultice. These remedies were about as effective as doing nothing -- and yet people did get better.

Londoners kept track of the daily death total by parish. The parishes recorded the deaths and reported them to higher authorities, who noted what they called the “bill.” At the height of the epidemic, body collectors traveled the city, adding bodies to their “death carts” and delivering the bodies to mass graves. Burial services were rarely performed at these graves. The narrator says, “All needful works that carried terror with them, that were both dismal and dangerous, were done in the night; if any diseased bodies were removed, or dead bodies buried, or infected cloths burnt, it was done in the night. ... So that in the daytime there was not the least signal of the calamity. ...” The narrator concedes anyone who walked the streets by day received the “signal of calamity” from the screams of the dying and the lamentations of their survivors.

As the months passed, the plague began to disappear. Londoners noticed this in the decline of the “bill” and took to the streets in celebration. The public contact pushed the bill upward again, forcing the celebrators indoors.

That is probably one lesson Americans of 2020 can learn from a London so distant in time. “It ain’t over 'til it’s over,” to quote not Daniel Defoe but Yogi Berra.

Michael Carey is an Anchorage Daily News columnist. He can be reached at mcarey@adn.com.

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