In the end I was able to pick up the prescription the following afternoon, and when I did so, the woman behind the counter pointed at me and said, “It’s the perfect world guy.” Indeed. It’s me, the perfect world guy, here to regale you with a plague story—the only kind I find myself able to tell at the moment.
* * *
In 2020, I read about almost nothing except pandemics. We often hear that we live in unprecedented times. But what worries me is that these times feel quite precedented. For humans, being in uncharted territory is often good news, because our charted territory is so riddled with disease, injustice, and violence.
Reading about cholera in the nineteenth century, for instance, one finds many precedents. Amid fear of the disease, misinformation was widespread and common: Cholera riots broke out in Liverpool as rumors spread that hospitalized patients were being killed so that doctors could have corpses to dissect.
Then, as in 2020, opposition to public health measures was rampant. One American observer wrote in the nineteenth century that isolation measures “embarrass with unnecessary restrictions the commerce and industry of the country.”
Then, as in 2020, the rich abandoned cities en masse: As the wealthy fled New York amid the cholera outbreak of 1832, one newspaper wrote, “The roads, in all directions, were lined with well-filled stage coaches . . . all panic struck, fleeing from the city.”
Then, as in 2020, outsiders and marginalized groups were blamed for spreading the illness. “By means of Irish vagrants from Sunderland, the cholera has been twice brought among us,” read one English account.
Then, as in 2020, the poor were vastly more likely to die. In nineteenth-century Hamburg, the poorest people were nineteen times more likely to die of cholera than the richest people. This statistic has only worsened: In the twenty-first century, poor people are thousands of times more likely to die of cholera than rich people. Cholera kills at least ninety thousand people every year, even though there is a safe and effective vaccine and the disease is almost always survivable with proper fluid replenishment. Cholera continues to spread and kill not because we lack the tools to understand or treat the disease as we did two hundred years ago, but because each day, as a human community, we decide not to prioritize the health of people living in poverty. Like tuberculosis,* malaria, and many other infectious diseases, cholera is only successful in the twenty-first century because the rich world doesn’t feel threatened by it. As Tina Rosenberg has written, “Probably the worst thing that ever happened to malaria in poor nations was its eradication in rich ones.”
Disease only treats humans equally when our social orders treat humans equally. That, too, is precedented. After plague, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, swept through England in the fourteenth century, one chronicler noted, “Virtually none of the lords and great men died in this pestilence.”
* * *
In that pestilence, perhaps half of all humans living in Europe died between the years of 1347 and 1351. What was then usually called “the pestilence” or “the mortality” is now known as the Black Death, and this torrent of plague also devastated Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. As the Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi noted, the plague “did not distinguish between one region and another.”
Al-Maqrizi’s hometown of Cairo was the world’s largest city outside of China in 1340, with a population of around six hundred thousand. But at least a third of Cairo’s residents died in an eight-month period beginning in the summer of 1348. The famous world traveler Ibn Battuta reported that at the height of the pestilence in the city of Damascus, 2,400 people died every day.
To many, it felt like the end of humanity had arrived. The historian Ibn Khaldūn wrote that it felt “as if the voice of existence in the world had called out for oblivion.” In Christian communities, the devastation was seen as more final and total than even the Great Flood. The chroniclers of Padua wrote that at least “in the days of Noah, God did not destroy all living souls and it was possible for the human race to recover.”
It’s hard even to fathom the scope of the loss. Cities from Paris to London to Hamburg saw most of their residents die from the plague and resulting systemic collapses. In Dubrovnik, the death was so unrelenting that the government ordered every citizen to fill out a will. In Florence, a city of more than one hundred thousand people, one recent estimate concluded that about 80 percent of the city’s population died in a four-month period. In Ireland, a Franciscan friar named John Clyn described life as “waiting amid death for death to come.”
Near the end of his plague journal, Clyn wrote, “So that the writing does not perish with the writer, or the work fail with the workman, I leave [extra] parchment for continuing the work, in case anyone should still be alive in the future.” Beneath that paragraph, a brief coda appears in different handwriting: “Here, it seems, the author died.”
In Florence, Giovanni Villani wrote of the pestilence, “Many lands and cities were made desolate. And the plague lasted until . . .” and then he left a blank space that was never filled in, because he died of the plague before the plague ended.
To read about the Black Death is to glimpse how it may end with our species—in longing and despair and panic and also ineradicable hope, the kind of hope that makes you leave sentences unfinished and extra parchment in your book, in case anyone should still be alive in the future. As William Faulkner once put it, “It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.” Faulkner went on to argue that humans will not merely endure but will prevail, which these days feels a bit ambitious to me. I, for one, would be delighted to merely endure.
* * *
The historian Rosemary Horrox wrote of the Black Death, “The very enormity of the disaster drove chroniclers to take refuge in clichés. . . . The same comments appear in chronicle after chronicle,” and indeed, around the plague world, the stories become repetitive. We read, for instance, that corpses lay in the streets of Florence and overwhelmed the graveyards of France and choked the Nile River in Egypt. Chroniclers also focus on the suddenness of it all. One day, a single nun is sick; within a week, her whole community is dead. And the rituals around death must be changed. The bells are no longer tolled for the dead, because they would toll without ceasing. And as one writer put it, “the sick hated to hear them and it discouraged the healthy as well.”
But for me, the most gutting repetition in plague accounts is the abandonment of the ill, who were often left to die alone due to fear of contagion, especially in Europe. After the poet Joy Davidman died in 1960, her widower C. S. Lewis wrote, “Nobody ever told me grief felt so like fear.” But to grieve in a pandemic is to both grieve and fear. “For fear of infection,” one writer noted, “no doctor will visit the sick, nor will the father visit the son, the mother the daughter, [or] the brother the brother. . . . And thus an unaccountable number of people died without any mark of affection, piety, or charity.” In the Byzantine capital of Constantinople, Demetrios Kydones wrote, “Fathers do not dare to bury their own sons.”