1. March 13, 2020: wherein Europe starts to understand what ‘pandemic’ feels like.
Taking the advice of another historian on twitter, I am going to start writing down what I see, think, and feel during this pandemic. I don’t generally like producing personal archives (we historians are voyeuristic in nature), but it feels like useful thing regardless. I suspect Medium will soon be chock full of similar if it isn’t already.
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It is generally strange being a professional historian, but it is particularly strange to be one during a global public health crisis. I’m supposed to read about these in books, teach students about them in my special subject maybe (which does cover plague and 18th century medical history at some length), and it is to early modern accounts of plague and smallpox that my mind turns as I survey the latest news about COVID-19.
I think many historians see the world around them always through the reflected light of the vast river of historical content they swim in. Historically ‘underwater’ as it were, things look different to us, and that can be very useful. We make a profession of it. Two books in particular are standing out for me this morning: Ralph Taylor’s Summer by Keith Wrightson, about a scrivener in the city of Newcastle during the plague of the 1630s, who stays in the stricken city and takes down the last wills and testaments of sufferers from their bedroom windows. Wrightson’s account of Taylor moved the historiography of plague considerably, because it showed how individuals responded to the worst mortality crises not only with extreme ‘social distancing’, but also with compassion and with a desire to keep the fabric of their communities bound together. The other book that comes to mind is Angel of Death: The Story of Smallpox by Gareth Williams. The corona-virus is by no means smallpox, thankfully. But it doesn’t have to be in order to cause immense harm. The reason my mind turns to the pox is because there have recently been some really powerful books, including Rotten Bodies by Kevin Siena, which highlight the socially unequal way that diseases are perceived. Poor bodies in the 18th century were seen by elites as deeply contagious vectors best avoided, and I am seeing some echoes of those sorts of unequal sentiment reoccur in real time today.
I’m a historian of poverty, so my mind turns toward that subject always. How will the homeless ‘self-isolate’? How will those on zero-hours contracts cease work? How can they? How likely are the poorest to be able to receive treatments comparable to those that the ultra-rich are currently demanding, currently ensuring they have access to? These are the questions that haunt me. How best to help? Almost certainly the ghost of digital donations, but some interaction will have to continue.
Here is not the place to comment on the choices that national governments have made (most notably the UK, yesterday), I’ll save those thoughts for another day but suffice it to say: early modern cordons sanitaire were much more stringent than the limp advisory guidelines we were given yesterday. When the pre-modern state has policies that went farther and attempted more during a time of crisis than yours did… well, feels like time for some self-assessment in addition to that self-isolation…
