“A plague o’ both your houses”
—William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act 3,1 scene 1“[W]hen into the distinguished city of Florence, more noble than any other Italian city, there came the deadly pestilence. It started in the East, either because of the influence of the heavenly bodies or because of God’s just wrath as a punishment to mortals for our wicked deeds, and it killed an infinite number of people. Without pause it spread from one place and it stretched its miserable length over the West. And against this pestilence no human wisdom or foresight was of any avail. . . . This pestilence was so powerful that it was communicated to the healthy by contact with the sick, the way a fire close to dry or oily things will set them aflame.
—Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, 1353.
“To the miseries of constant war, political and social disintegration, there was added the dreadful affliction of inescapable, mysterious, and deadly disease. Mankind stood helpless as though trapped in a world of terror and peril against which there was no defense. . . . In some parts of Europe the World War was followed by famine, disease, and hopelessness not incomparable to the conditions which prevailed in the Middle Ages. For obvious reasons, in the reactions of our own day, economic and political hysterias are substituted for the religious ones of earlier times.”
—Hans Zinsser, Rat, Lice and History (The Atlantic Monthly Press/Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1934.
The history of our time will be marked by recurrent eruptions of newly discovered diseases (most recently, hantavirus in the American West); epidemics of diseases migrating to new areas (for example, cholera in Latin America); diseases which become important through human technologies (as certain menstrual tampons favored toxic shock syndrome and water cooling towers provided an opportunity for Legionnaires’ Disease); and diseases which spring from insects and animals to humans, through man-made disruptions in local habitats.”
—Laurie Garrett, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance (Penguin Books, New York, 1994.)
“However, there’s one thing I must tell you: there’s no question of heroism in all this. It’s a matter of common decency. That’s an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is—common decency.” “What do you mean by ‘common decency’?”. . . ”I don’t know what it means for other people. But in my case I know that it consists in doing my job.”
—Dr. Rieux and Rambert the journalist conversing in The Plague by Albert Camus (Vintage Books, Random House, New York, 1972. Original publication by Librairie Gallimard, Paris, 1947.)
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-Joseph S. Alpert, MD
