Get Well Soon

by Jennifer Wright

  I find the forgetfulness of people, especially in true matters of life and death, so frustrating. Sometimes I look at these histories and think, People are just going to keep making the same dumb mistakes every single time. And one day those mistakes will doom us all.

  And I feel sad and furious and frightened for what will happen next.

  But then I think about how polio is almost eradicated. Or that penicillin exists. And I remember that we are progressing, always, even if that progress is sometimes slower and more uneven than we might wish. I remind myself, too, of all the ways people have persevered and survived in conditions that are surely as bad as anything that is to come.

  Whenever I am most disillusioned, I look to one of my favorite quotes from The World of Yesterday (1942) by Stefan Zweig. When Zweig was fleeing from the Nazis and living in exile he wrote: “Even from the abyss of horror in which we try to find our way today, half-blind, our hearts distraught and shattered, I look up again to the ancient constellations of my childhood, comforting myself that, some day, this relapse will appear only an interval in the eternal rhythm of progress onward and upward.”13 I have to believe that the missteps are only intermittent relapses as we grow stronger and smarter and better. We do get better. At everything. Combatting diseases fits somewhere among “everything.”

  I believe there will be a day when we will see diseases as what they are—an enemy of all of humanity. Not of perceived sinners, not of people who are poor or have a different sexual orientation, not of those who we somehow decided “have it coming” because they’re “not like us.” Diseases are at war with all of us. Diseases don’t care about any of the labels, so it makes no sense for us to.

  I believe we will become more compassionate. I believe we will fight smarter. I believe that in the deepest place of our souls, we are not cowardly or hateful or cruel to our neighbors. I believe we are kind and smart and brave. I believe that as long as we follow those instincts and do not give in to terror and blame, we can triumph over diseases and the stigmas attached to them. When we fight plagues, not each other, we will not only defeat diseases but preserve our humanity in the process.

  Onward and upward.

  Absolutely Horrific Pictures (for Those Who Want Them) of the Effects of the Diseases

  A man suffering from bubonic plague

  A bubo from bubonic plague

  A man with smallpox

  A child with smallpox

  A woman with syphilis

  A child with tuberculosis

  A man with leprosy

  A man with typhoid

  Nurses at work during the Spanish Flu

  Children exercising their limbs after polio

  The tool inserted into patients’ skulls during a lobotomy

  Notes

  Please note that some of the links referenced throughout this work are no longer active.

  Antonine Plague

    1.  Walter Scheidel, “Marriage, Families, and Survival in the Roman Imperial Army: Demographic Aspects,” Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics, Stanford University, 2005, https://www.princeton.edu/~pswpc/pdfs/scheidel/110509.pdf.

    2.  Kathryn Hinds, Everyday Life in the Roman Empire (New York: Cavendish Square, 2009), p. 114.

    3.  Oliver J. Thatcher, The Library of Original Sources, vol. 4, Early Mediaeval Age (1901); reprint, Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2004), p. 168.

    4.  “Germanic Peoples,” Encyclopedia Britannica, http://www.britannica.com/topic/Germanic-peoples.

    5.  John George Sheppard, The Fall of Rome and the Rise of the New Nationalities: A Series of Lectures on the Connections Between Ancient and Modern History (1892), University of Toronto, Robarts Library archives, p. 173, https://archive.org/details/fallofromeriseof00shepuoft.

    6.  Frank McLynn, Marcus Aurelius: A Life (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2009), p. 459.

    7.  Dideri Raoult and Michael Drancourt, eds., Paleomicrobiology: Past Human Infections (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2008), p. 11.

    8.  Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, translated by Richard Crawley (New York: Dutton, 1910), p. 132.

    9.  Raoult, Paleomicrobiology, p. 11.

  10.  Ibid., p. 10.

  11.  McLynn, Marcus Aurelius, p. 467.

  12.  Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, edited by A. S. L. Farquharson (Oxford: Oxford University Press [Oxford World’s Classics], 2008), p. 10.

  13.  Brigitte Maire, ed., “Greek” and “Roman” in Latin Medical Texts: Studies in Cultural Change and Exchange in Ancient Medicine (Leiden: Brill, 2014), p. 235.

  14.  William Byron Forbush, ed., Foxe’s Book of Martyrs: A History of the Lives, Sufferings and Triumphant Deaths of the Early Christian and Protestant Martyrs (Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1926), “The Fourth Persecution.”

  15.  Anthony R. Birley, Marcus Aurelius: A Biography (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 159.

  16.  Arthur Edward Romilly Boak, A History of Rome to 565 AD (New York: Macmillan, 1921), Kindle edition, p. 299.

  17.  Marcus Tullius Cicero, The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, translated by C. D. Young (1851), University of Toronto, Robarts Library archives, p. 162.

  18.  McLynn, Marcus Aurelius, p. 349.

  19.  Barthold Georg Niebuhr, Lectures on the History of Rome: From the First Punic War to the Death of Constantine (1844), e-source courtesy of Getty Research Institute, p. 253, https://archive.org/details/historyofrome01nieb.

  20.  George Childs Kohn, ed., Encyclopedia of Plague and Pestilence: From Ancient Times to the Present, 3rd ed. (New York: Facts on File, 2008), p. 10.

  21.  Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (New York: Dutton, 1910), p. 134.

  22.  Cassius Dio, Roman History, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1911), p. 73.

  23.  Ibid.

  Bubonic Plague

    1.  John Aberth, From the Brink of the Apocalypse: Confronting Famine, War, Plague and Death in the Later Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 112.

  Robert S. Gottfried, The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe (New York: Free Press, 1983), p. 115.

    2.  Terry Deary, Horrible History: The Measly Middle Ages (New York: Scholastic, 2015), p. 36.

    3.  “Newcomers Facts,” National Geographic Channel, October 25, 2013, http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/meltdown/articles/newcomers-facts/.

    4.  Gottfried, The Black Death, p. 135.

    5.  Aberth, From the Brink of the Apocalypse, p. 121.

    6.  “Myths About Onion,” National Onion Association website, http://www.onions-usa.org/faqs/onion-flu-cut-myths.

    7.  Aberth, From the Brink of the Apocalypse, p. 116; Stuart A. Kallen, Prophecies and Soothsayers (The Mysterious & Unknown) (San Diego: Reference Point Press, 2011), p. 40.

    8.  John Kelly, The Great Mortality (New York: Harper Collins, 2005), Kindle edition, Kindle location 3791.

    9.  Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, translated by John Payne (New York: Walter J. Black, 2007), Project Gutenberg e-book, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/23700/23700-h/23700-h.htm, p. 2.

  10.  Ibid.

  11.  Louise Chipley Slavicek, Great Historic Disasters: The Black Death (New York: Chelsea House, 2008), p. 62.

  12.  Kelly, The Great Mortality, Kindle location 2975.

  13.  Ibid., Kindle location 1832.

  14.  Ibid., Kindle location 1835.

  15.  Ibid., Kindle location 1826.

  16.  Slavicek, Great Historic Disasters, p. 51.

  17.  Boccaccio, The Decameron, p. 17.

  18.  “Medieval British History in Honor of Barbara Hannawalt,” History: The Journal of the Historical Association, 96, no. 324 (September 9, 2011): 281, http://onl
inelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-229X.2011.00531_2.x/abstract.

  19.  Ibid.

  20.  Kelly, The Great Mortality, Kindle location 2981–83.

  21.  Slavicek, Great Historic Disasters, p. 51.

  22.  Francis Gasquet, The Black Death of 1348 and 1349 (London: George Bell and Sons, 1908), p. 33.

  23.  Terry Haydn and Christine Counsell, eds., History, ICT and Learning in the Secondary School (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 247.

  24.  James Leasor, The Plague and the Fire (Thirsk: House of Stratus, 2001), p. 112.

  25.  Ibid.

  26.  Ronald Hans Pahl, Creative Ways to Teach the Mysteries of History, vol. 1 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Education, 2005), p. 40.

  27.  Ian Wilson, Nostradamus: The Man Behind the Prophecies (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002), p. 45.

  28.  “Nostradamus Biography,” the Biography.com website, http://www.biography.com/people/nostradamus-9425407#studies.

  29.  Boccaccio, “Day: The First,” paragraph 3.

  30.  “Nostradamus,” Encyclopedia of World Biography, http://www.notablebiographies.com/Ni-Pe/Nostradamus.html.

  31.  Diane Bailey, The Plague (Epidemics and Society) (New York: Rosen, 2010), p. 6; Kallen, Prophecies and Soothsayers, p. 45; Scarlett Ross, Nostradamus for Dummies (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2005), p. 47.

  32.  Kallen, Prophecies and Soothsayers, p. 40; Russell Roberts, The Life and Times of Nostradamus (Hockessin, IN: Mitchell Lane, 2008), p. 22.

  33.  Kallen, Prophecies and Soothsayers, p. 40; Ross, Nostradamus for Dummies, p. 47.

  34.  Wilson, Nostradamus, p. 80.

  35.  “Plague—Fact Sheet No. 267,” World Health Organization media website, November 2014, http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs267/en/.

  36.  “Rat-Shit-Covered Physicians Baffled by Spread of Black Plague,” Onion, December 15, 2009, http://www.theonion.com/article/rat-shit-covered-physicians-baffled-by-spread-of-b-2876.

  37.  Kelly, The Great Mortality, Kindle location 1775.

  Dancing Plague

    1.  John Waller, The Dancing Plague: The Strange, True Story of an Extraordinary Illness (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2009), p. 25.

    2.  Ibid.

    3.  E. Louis Backman, Religious Dances, translated by E. Classen (Alton, UK: Dance Books, 2009), p. 25.

    4.  Paracelsus, Essential Theoretical Writings, edited by Wouter J. Hanegraaff, translated by Andrew Weeks (Leiden: Brill, 2008), p. 779, http://selfdefinition.org/magic/Paracelsus-Essential-Theoretical-Writings.pdf.

    5.  Ibid.

    6.  Waller, The Dancing Plague, p. 17.

    7.  Scott Mendelson, “Conversion Disorder and Mass Hysteria,” Huffpost Healthy Living, February 2, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-mendelson-md/mass-hysteria_b_1239012.html.

    8.  Fred K. Berger, “Conversion Disorder,” Medline Plus, October 31, 2014, https://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/000954.htm.

    9.  Heinrich Kramer and James (Jacob) Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum (1486), translated by Montague Summers (1928; Digireads.com, 2009), pp. 36 and 54.

  10.  Ibid., p. 36.

  11.  Waller, The Dancing Plague, p. 107.

  12.  Ibid.

  13.  John C. Waller, “In a Spin: The Mysterious Dancing Epidemic of 1518,” Science Direct, September 2008, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160932708000379.

  14.  John Waller, “In a Spin, the Mysterious Dancing Epidemic of 1518,” Department of History, Michigan State University, East Grand River, East Lansing, MI, July 7, 2008.

  15.  Waller, The Dancing Plague, p. 21.

  16.  Waller, “In a Spin,” http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160932708000379.

  17.  Waller, The Dancing Plague, p. 133.

  18.  Ibid.

  19.  “St. Vitus Dance,” BBC Radio 3, September 7, 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b018h8kv.

  20.  Waller, The Dancing Plague, p. 146.

  21.  H. C. Erik Midelfort, A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 35.

  22.  Ibid.

  23.  Ibid., p. 36.

  24.  Waller, The Dancing Plague, p. 176.

  25.  Ibid., p. 180.

  26.  Lee Siegel, “Cambodians’ Vision Loss Linked to War Trauma,” Los Angeles Times, October 15, 1989, http://articles.latimes.com/1989-10-15/news/mn-232_1_vision-loss.

  27.  Simone Sebastian, “Examining 1962’s ‘Laughter Epidemic,’” Chicago Tribune, July 29, 2003, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2003-07-29/features/0307290281_1_laughing-40th-anniversary-village.

  28.  “Contagious Laughter,” WYNC RadioLab, Season 4, Episode 1, http://www.radiolab.org/story/91595-contagious-laughter/.

  29.  Waller, The Dancing Plague, p. 227.

  30.  Susan Dominus, “What Happened to the Girls in Le Roy,” New York Times Magazine, March 7, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/magazine/teenage-girls-twitching-le-roy.html.

  31.  Ibid.

  32.  Ibid.

  Smallpox

    1.  Jared M. Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: Norton, 1997), p. 70.

    2.  Kim MacQuarrie, The Last Days of the Incas (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007), p. 111.

    3.  Michael Wood, Conquistadors, BBC Digital, 2015, https://books.google.com/books?id=xKqFCAAAQBAJ&pg=PA90&lpg=PA90&dq=%22Cort%C3%A9s+stared+at+him+for+a+moment+and+then+patted+him+on+the+head.%22&source=bl&ots=eTKqshNJKf&sig=gtnbajA3wRSChgmOFWsJgRTdGPc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCYQ6AEwAWoVChMIivn7vODlxgIV1FmICh3E5QPM#v=onepage&q=smallpox&f=false, p. 122.

    4.  Christopher Buckley, But Enough About You (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), p. 101.

    5.  John Campbell, An Account of the Spanish Settlements in America (1762), Hathi Trust Digital Library, http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008394522, p. 30.

    6.  Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel, p. 75.

    7.  Ibid., p. 71.

    8.  Charles C. Mann, “1491,” Atlantic, March 2002, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/302445/.

    9.  Heather Pringle, “Lofty Ambitions of the Inca,” National Geographic, April 2011, http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/04/inca-empire/pringle-text/1.

  10.  Wood, Conquistadors, p. 144.

  11.  Liesl Clark, “The Sacrificial Ceremony,” NOVA, November 24, 1998, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/sacrificial-ceremony.html.

  12.  Paul Jongko, “10 Ancient Cultures That Practiced Ritual Human Sacrifice,” TopTenz website, July 29, 2014, http://www.toptenz.net/10-ancient-cultures-practiced-ritual-human-sacrifice.php.

  13.  Wood, Conquistadors, p. 80.

  14.  Ibid., p. 82.

  15.  Robert I. Rotberg, ed., Health and Disease in Human History, A Journal of Interdisciplinary History Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1953), p. 198.

  16.  “The Story of … Smallpox—and Other Deadly Eurasian Germs,” from Guns, Germs and Steel, PBS.org, http://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/variables/smallpox.html.

  17.  Hanne Jakobsen, “The Epidemic That Was Wiped Out,” ScienceNordic, April 14, 2012, http://sciencenordic.com/epidemic-was-wiped-out.

  18.  Gerald N. Grob, The Deadly Truth: A History of Disease in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 31.

  19.  Noble David Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 66.

  20.  Rotberg, Health and Diseases, p. 198.

  21.  Wood, Conquistadors, p. 127.

  22.  “The Conquest of the Incas—Francisco Pizarro,” PBS.org, http://www.pbs.org/conquistadors/pizarro/pizarro_flat.html.