...and the power of man was baffled and brought to an end. So the plague defied all medicines; the very physicians were seized with it, with their preservatives in their mouths; and men went about prescribing to others and telling them what to do till the tokens were upon them, and they dropped down dead, destroyed by that very enemy they directed others to oppose.
—Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe
Abundance of quacks too died, who had the folly to trust to their own medicines, which they must needs be conscious to themselves were good for nothing, and who rather ought, like other sorts of thieves, to have run away, sensible of their guilt, from the justice that they could not but expect should punish them as they knew they had deserved.
—Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe
Injected Lysol anyone? Hydroxychloroquine?
Well, here are two quotes from Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, a fascinating account under the circumstances (though certainly not a well-written or well-executed novel). Most interesting though are the eerie similarities between the plague of 1665 and our ongoing coronavirus pandemic--different diseases yet similar responses in society and in (so-called) leadership. Here we have, then as now, social distancing and lockdown, paranoia, disbelief, magical cures that were as likely as the disease to kill, pseudo-religious claptrap. Conspiracy theories abounded then as now, unfounded blame-placing, quackery and so on. It is really almost like reading a record of our own time, and an echo through the centuries or how helpless we are in the face of such onslaughts, how sober and at the same time how silly we can be in our efforts to meet and deal with the threat.
What better to do during lockdown than to read books about where we were and where we are.
"That all plays, bear-baitings, games, singing of ballads, bucker-play or such-like causes of assemblies of people be utterly prohibited, and the parties offending severely punished by every alderman in his ward."
--Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe
From the lockdown orders of 1665 (resurgence of the bubonic plague). The more things change, the more they stay the same (although the popular entertainments differ.
—Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe
Abundance of quacks too died, who had the folly to trust to their own medicines, which they must needs be conscious to themselves were good for nothing, and who rather ought, like other sorts of thieves, to have run away, sensible of their guilt, from the justice that they could not but expect should punish them as they knew they had deserved.
—Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe
Injected Lysol anyone? Hydroxychloroquine?
Well, here are two quotes from Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, a fascinating account under the circumstances (though certainly not a well-written or well-executed novel). Most interesting though are the eerie similarities between the plague of 1665 and our ongoing coronavirus pandemic--different diseases yet similar responses in society and in (so-called) leadership. Here we have, then as now, social distancing and lockdown, paranoia, disbelief, magical cures that were as likely as the disease to kill, pseudo-religious claptrap. Conspiracy theories abounded then as now, unfounded blame-placing, quackery and so on. It is really almost like reading a record of our own time, and an echo through the centuries or how helpless we are in the face of such onslaughts, how sober and at the same time how silly we can be in our efforts to meet and deal with the threat.
What better to do during lockdown than to read books about where we were and where we are.
"That all plays, bear-baitings, games, singing of ballads, bucker-play or such-like causes of assemblies of people be utterly prohibited, and the parties offending severely punished by every alderman in his ward."
--Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe
From the lockdown orders of 1665 (resurgence of the bubonic plague). The more things change, the more they stay the same (although the popular entertainments differ.
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