Saturday, March 28, 2020

How Epidemics Change Civilizations

The plague's violent assaults on European cities in the Middle Ages and Renaissance periods created "Social dislocation in a way we can't imagine," says Mr. Snowden, whose October 2019 book, "Epidemics in Society: From the Black Death to the Present"-a survey of infectious diseases and their social impact-is suddenly timely.

Plague had similar effects, requiring "Military commitment, administration, finance and all the rest of it," Mr. Snowden says.

Mr. Snowden notes that when Napoleon III rebuilt Paris in the mid-19th century, one of his objectives was to protect against cholera: "It was this idea of making broad boulevards, where the sun and light could disperse the miasma." Cholera also prompted expansions of regulatory power over the "Construction of houses, how they had to be built, the cleanliness standards." If respiratory viruses become a more persistent feature of life in the West, changes to public transportation and zoning could also be implemented based on our understanding of science-which, like Napoleon's, is sure to be built upon or superseded in later years.

In ancient literature, from Homer's "Iliad" to the Old Testament, plagues are associated with the idea that man is being punished for his sins, Mr. Snowden observes.

For Europeans who survived the plague, Mr. Snowden says, it impressed the idea that "You could be struck down at any moment without warning," so you should focus on your immortal soul.

Mr. Snowden says that after World War II "There was real confidence that all infectious disease were going to be a thing of the past." Chronic and hereditary diseases would remain, but "The infections, the contagions, the pandemics, would no longer exist because of science." Since the 1990s-in particular the avian flu outbreak of 1997-experts have understood that "There are going to be many more epidemic diseases," especially respiratory infections that jump from animals to humans.

As Mr. Snowden says, "There's much more that isn't known than is known." Yet with a mix of intuition and luck, Renaissance Europeans often kept at bay a gruesome plague whose provenance and mechanisms they didn't understand.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-epidemics-change-civilizations-11585350405?mod=hp_opin_pos_1

No comments: