Sometime- the Plague World

by Meredith Mason Brown

  “I’m getting on in years,” Dan said. “I want to stay alive for a while yet. That’s why I thought I had better learn something about plagues and their risks.”

  “You’re still plenty smart, Dad. I wish you well. Root around some more in the plague would, and then let’s have a talk.”

  And it was so, that, after they had carried [the ark of the God of Israel unto Gath], the hand of the Lord was against the city with a very great destruction: and he smote the men of the city, both small and great, and they had emerods in their secret parts… .And it came to pass, as the ark of God came to Ekron,… there was a deadly destruction throughout all the city; the hand of God was very heavy there.

  And the men that died not were smitten with the emerods: and the cry of the city went up to heaven. (1 Samuel 5:9-12)

  3

  Emerods in Their Secret Parts: Pestilence in Mesopotamia

  As Nat had suggested, Dan continued to root around about the plague world. He realized, just from looking at the Bible and googling its age that several of the biblical references to plagues and pestilence probably dated back close to four thousand years before the present – that is, more than two thousand years before the birth of Christ. Dan remembered that some of the ancient Mesopotamian texts had been written in cuneiform on clay tablets even earlier, close to a thousand years earlier than the earliest Bible texts. Looking for plague and pestilence in English translations of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a Mesopotamian poem written at least 2,500 years before Jesus was born, Dan found in a description of the Great Flood unleashed by the gods to destroy mankind, written in Akkadian long before the Old Testament description of Noah and the Flood, that one of the people-destroying gods was referred to as “Nergal, the god of pestilence.” Also in the Gilgamesh description of the Flood, Ea, the cleverest of the gods, said to Enlil (a god who helped to govern the universe, and who sent forth the Great Flood): “Instead of sending the Flood, let pestilence arise to destroy the land.” Dan concluded that humans living thousands of years ago had enough experience with sickness or death from plague or pestilence to be scared of them, and to attribute to divine wrath their ability to sicken people or to kill them.

  Dan also reread more in what struck him as the strangest plague or pestilence text in the Bible, the verses in 1 Samuel, chapters 5 and 6, dealing with how God dealt with Philistines who harbored the ark of God of Israel after the Philistines had defeated Israel in battle and captured the ark. The Philistines took the ark successively to several of their cities – Ebenezer, Ashdod, Gath, and Ekron. In each city, the Bible recorded that God came down upon the Philistine inhabitants with a heavy hand, and smote them with “emerods” – that is, as Dan dug out from definitions in his computer, with “tumors” or “hemorrhoids.” In one city, the Lord “smote the men of the city, both small and great, and they had emerods in their secret parts.” Having the ark in the Philistine cities turned out to be like having a pox in the cities’ midst. Smitten with tumors in their genitals, the Philistines asked their priests and diviners what to do with the death-inducing ark of the Lord. Send the ark back to Israel, the priests and diviners told them, but with a “trespass offering” – a guilt offering, consisting of “five golden emerods and five golden mice, according to the number of the lords of the Philistines,” and perhaps the God of Israel will lighten his hand on you. Why were the Philistines trying to buy peace with God by a guilt offering made up of five gold tumors and five gold mice? After his usual solitary dinner, Dan, evening wine bottle at hand, called Nat in his hospital in California to ask him that question.

  “Sounds to me, Dad, that the Philistines must have tried to buy peace after they had picked up the plague,” Nat said. “Bubonic plague. The combination of swollen tumors and rodents – mice or rats – tells me that’s what it was. Buboes are the swollen tumors – typically black in hue – that often mark some lethal kinds of plague. The swellings form in the lymph nodes – sometimes in the armpits, more often in the groin, which is how come the plague is sometimes called bubonic—a plague that has buboes, a plague that spreads painfully swollen testicles. I’m glad to say that I’ve never had to wrestle with that plague, but I had to study up on it at medical school and at the CDC. Hang on a second, let me check what I told you about the name. Yeah, bubonic apparently traces back to the Greek word boubón, which means groin – not Bourbon, which usually is a pleasant drink. You do not want to drink a boubón. And rodents – particularly mice or rats – carry the plague and spread it to each other and to people. There’s a neat line at the beginning of Albert Camus’s 1947 novel “La Peste” – The Plague – that starts with a doctor coming out of his office and stumbling on a dead rat in the middle of the stairway. The moment I read that line, I knew that lots of people in Camus’s book were going to die from the plague. So in 1 Samuel, the Philistines – who were plenty smart – by giving to Israel gold images of tumors and of mice, were trying to use presents to steer the plague away from themselves and instead direct it to their enemies the Israelites. To me, that means that about 3,000 years before Camus was writing his book about the plague, the Philistines knew about the Black Death. Have you seen any dead mice or rats in Rockinam, Dad?”

  “Not for years.”

  “Well, if you see them, avoid them like the plague. Damn, but I’m witty – almost up there with my wise-cracking brother Michael – although that isn’t setting a very high level. Keep reading about all these ailments, Dad. There have been loads of pandemics, and there are bound to be many more of them. There is a deadly game or fight between microbes and people that has gone on for millennia. Microbes try to lodge in animals and people, and to multiply in them. Inside people, immune cells react and try to block and kill the microbes. The microbes in turn try to modify themselves so as to circumvent the human immune cells. It sounds like a game of ping-pong – and it is – but of a lethal sort. So beware of the stout lady from Rockinam, the one with the goopy sneeze, whenever you see her in church. And keep a look-out for flu or other microbe-caused diseases. Stay calm, and sleep well. We can talk some more when you’ve read some more.”

  Dan was not calmed by his call to his doctor son Nat. That did not surprise Dan. In his experience, most conversations he had had with doctors were not calming. After Nat hung up, Dan mulled on Nat’s complex words and prospects of dire ailments – perhaps plague or pestilence – coupled with some prospect of cure or protection – and no likely calculation of the odds of the outcome. Dan finished the bottle of wine he had been nursing, took a shower, and attempted, without success, to fall asleep soon. Instead of sleeping, he thought of emerods. He explored his groin with his hands, and was pleased to find that his testicles lacked painful swollen emerods.

  The Peloponnesians and their confederates … had not been many days in Attica when the plague first began among the Athenians … but so great a plague and mortality of men was never remembered to have happened in any place before… [N]either were the physicians able to cure it through ignorance of what it was, but died fastest themselves, as being the men that most approached the sick… . All supplications to the gods and enquiries of oracles and whatsoever other means they used of that kind proved all unprofitable…

  [S]uddenly, without any apparent cause preceding and being in perfect health, they were taken first with an extreme ache in their heads, redness and inflammation of the eyes; and then inwardly, their throats and tongues grew presently bloody and their breath noisome and unsavoury. Upon this followed a sneezing and hoarseness, and not long after the pain, together with a mighty cough, came down into the breast. And when once it was settled in the stomach, it caused vomit; and with great torment came all manner of bilious purgation that physicians ever named.

  [M]ost of them either died of their inward burning in nine or seven days,… or, if they escaped that, then the disease falling down into their bellies and causing there great exulcerations and immoderate looseness, th
ey died many of them afterwards through weakness. For the disease, which took first the head, … came down and passed through the whole body; and he that overcame the worst of it was yet marked with the loss of his extreme parts; for breaking out both at their privy members and at their fingers and toes, many with the loss of these escaped; there were also some that lost their eyes. And many that presently upon their recovery were taken with such an oblivion of all things whatsoever, as they neither knew themselves nor their acquaintance.

  For all, both birds and beasts, that used to feed on human flesh, though many men lay abroad unburied, either came not at them or, tasting, perished. (Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 2:47-50, translated by Thomas Hobbes.)

  4

  Plague in Athens, Flu All Over

  Dan did not sleep well after his scriptural readings and after having heard Nat’s description of the endless one-upmanship battles between microbes and immune cells. He tried to distract himself with thoughts of sex, but given his age and concomitant erectile dysfunction, those thoughts were brief and led him nowhere, other than to a daily longing admiration of a fine Swedish drawing of a warm, cheerful, and playful naked young woman. Dan had inherited the drawing from his father, who had bought it in the 1920s.

  Dan talked out loud to himself as he walked up to bed: “I don’t limp, but my dork sure stays limp.” As Dan often did at night and alone, he quietly recited the Lord’s Prayer to himself as a soporific. The recitation of the prayer worked that night, as it usually did. Dan finally fell to sleep. When he woke up, after his customary morning exercises and breakfast cereal, he turned his focus to the fourth century B.C., to what Thucydides, in his History of the Peloponnesian War, had to say about the plague that attacked Athens when the Spartans, in the second year of their war against the Athenians, came up again into Attica in an attempt to destroy the Athenians.

  Having next to no Greek himself, Dan picked up at the local library two translations by outstanding English writers of the Thucydides History. Thomas Hobbes, philosopher, author of The Leviathan, wrote in the 1620s a vigorous translation – a translation whose 17th century wording sometimes necessitated further translation, to be understandable today. Over three hundred years later after the Hobbes translation, the English classicist Rex Warner in the 1950s did a clear crisp translation of the History that reputedly sold a million copies – and deserved that result, because of the translation’s strength and clarity. What leapt out to Dan from both translations was how vicious and lethal the Athenian plague was – and how totally incapable the Athenian doctors were to mitigate or cure the disease, or even to begin to identify it.

  What kind of disease did the Athenians have? Why did it kill them? Wandering in the internet, Dan found as many theories as there were writers on the subject – each with some logical-sounding basis for the theory. Thucydides, who wrote that he himself had had the disease, noted that the disease was said first to have started in Ethiopia, and then to have spread to Egypt and Libya, before appearing in the Athenian port town of Piraeus. Some modern doctors, coupling the purported African origin of the disease with the pain, the effusion of blood, the vomiting, and the uncontrollable dehydrating diarrhea suffered by the sick, concluded the Athenian plague was a viral hemorrhagic fever such as the Ebola and Marburg diseases which had come from Africa. Others saw in the speedy deaths and high mortality recorded by Thucydides, and the close crowding of the besieged Athenians, the likelihood that the plague was a form of Black Death, likely to have been transmitted by rats to the crowded populace. A medical conference in 1999 at the University of Maryland concluded that the Athenians’ disease was typhus. According to one professor, Dr. David Durack, “Epidemic typhus fever is the best explanation. It hits hardest in times of war and privation, it kills the victim after about seven days, and it sometimes causes a striking complication: gangrene of the tips of the fingers and toes. The Plague of Athens had all these features.” Others disagreed, noting that typhus did not result in the violent gastrointestinal symptoms Thucydides recorded.

  Dan, talking only to himself and to his dog Don Carlos, developed his own theory of the Athenian plague. Thucydides, in his chapter on the plague, had noted that despite the many dead people lying about, birds did not come at the dead – or, in Warner’s translation, “if they did taste the flesh [of those dead from the plague], died of it afterwards,” as evidenced from “the complete disappearance of all birds of prey: they were not to be seen either round the bodies or anywhere else.” Dan drew from this the thought that the Athenian plague was what Nat had called an avian flu – a flu that killed birds and that birds could (and did) communicate to people. So many theories, so little curative medicine!

  After lunch, Dan sent an e-mail to his sons, enclosing pages of English translations of the Thucydides chapter on the plague, with a plea for help:

  Nat and Michael: I am in water above my head, and would be grateful for your help. I’m trying to learn about plagues and pestilences. I’ve read up on biblical plagues, and, at Nat’s good suggestion, I also read the chapter in Thucydides on the plague of Athens – as translated by Thomas Hobbes and by Rex Warner. I’ll read some more this afternoon, especially about influenza. But I’d love to pick your brains for a few moments this evening on what you think are the most threatening diseases these days, and what to do about them. If OK by you, I’ll call about 7:30 PM your time. Love, Dad.

  Not wishing to look completely ignorant, Dan began doing some background reading about flu in recent centuries. Googling took him quickly to current information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Rockinam library lent Dan a book about the flu in World War I – a book by John M. Barry with the cheerless title The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. Dan parked himself in his study and began filling a lined notebook with influenza information. The afternoon and early evening went by with sufficient flu facts, deadly and mild forms of influenza, and technical terms, to cause Dan to change his usual dinner food consumption to pretzels, tomato juice and a full bottle of red wine. He doubted that his wine would kill influenza virus, but the wine tasted good and led to sleep. Not having another person to talk to, not being satisfied by unburdening himself to Don Carlos the shaggy dog, and finding himself unable to remember things as well as he had in younger years, Dan talked or wrote a fair bit to himself, as he had done with increasing frequency after his wife’s death. Examples that found their way into his notebook were not always edifying, but they tended to be heartfelt:

  “I am too old for this shit. I may be killing time, but I’m sure as hell killing myself, too.”

  “Shut up and read.”

  “This isn’t your area. You won’t find anything, you’ll forget what little you know, and you’re wasting your kids’ time. And your kids are busy adults – they’re decades older than kids.”

  “I might find something in what I’m doing, and in what Nat has been teaching me. Plagues keep on coming to people – in America, in Africa and Asia, and around the globe. I bring to the table nosiness and the freshness of extreme ignorance. Didn’t I think that the Athenian plague was probably avian flu? Who know – maybe I was right!”

  “Dan, you aging idiot, you bring to the table a large bottle of mediocre red wine, and then you drink all of it. I am not impressed by the keenness of your mind. Drinking full bottles of wine will not increase that keenness.”

  “The bitch of a book that I’m reading now is 750 pages long and, judging by the book’s long table of contents, discusses about 20 different life-threatening ailments. What to do? Nat says fights between vaccines and pharmaceuticals, on one side, and viruses, on the other, go back and forth like a basketball game. Maybe I should be watching a basketball game. That’s not easy for me, because I hate watching a basketball game. And the worst of it is that the woman who wrote this huge tome of a book clearly knew what she was writing about, and sh
e writes well, so I’m reading the whole damned book.”

  At 10:30 Rockinam time, 7:30 Pacific Time, Dan called Nat and spliced in Michael. “Thanks for picking up the phone,” Dan said. “I don’t mean to bust up your dinner. I just want some guidance on pandemics and what we should do about them. I’ve been doing my homework, along the lines Nat suggested. I’ve read old descriptions of lethal plagues, like the Thucydides descriptions of the Athenian plague – translated into English in the 1620s by Thomas Hobbes.”

  “Who the hell is Thomas Hobbes?” Michael said.

  “You had him at school,” Nat said.

  “I didn’t have any boys at school,” Michael said, putting on his wise guy voice. “I was, and still am, a lady’s man. I have women, not men. Pretty droll, aren’t I, Dad?”

  “I bet you’ve heard the line about men’s life outside of civil society being ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,’ ” Dan said.

  “‘Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’ Sounds familiar,” Michael said. “I’m saying it’s the name of one of the larger law firms in New York. Am I right? Am I right?”

  “You’re not even close. The line came from a book by Hobbes called The Leviathan. Listen for a while, Michael,” Dan said, “and let me get some guidance from your brother the doctor.”