Pandemics then & Now
Professor Ginger Smoak and Professor Nadja Durbach discuss similarities between past pandemics and COVID-19 and what we should takeaway
Looking back to the 14th century perhaps one similarity would be the fact that if
you were poor or marginalized, you continued to work and live your life, putting you
directly at risk of getting sick. If you were noble and had the means to go live
out on an estate in the countryside for a while and wait it out, you did. That's
what is happening in Giovanni Boccaccio's 1353 book The Decameron, for example. A
wonderfully transgressive book in many ways, it tells the story of 10 young noble
adults sheltering in the Italian countryside to wait out a bout of plague in Florence,
and passing the time by telling stories that are often bawdy, sometimes moral, always
entertaining. Perhaps this is akin to celebrities and the super wealthy like David
Geffen admonishing people to "safe safe" from the deck of their mega yachts floating
in the waters of Caribbean.
What I learn from historical pandemics is that people will adjust to the new normal
and, while there will be a paradigm shift politically, economically, and socially,
we will eventually recalibrate and figure out how to live a life in the shadow of
disease. Human society is good at adaptation so that we can continue to get our needs
met.
As for myself, I'm motivated to keep going knowing that one day we will be back together
again. In the meantime, I feel thankful to have support to do so from the University.
- Ginger Smoak, Assistant Professor, Honors College
There are lots of continuities between past and present. I have worked on nineteenth
century smallpox epidemics and resistance to compulsory vaccination. I can see lots
of parallels between the general public's distrust of the government and government-associated
scientists during the nineteenth century and today. How many of us will be willing
to get the first coronavirus vaccine? Do we trust that the science is good? Do we
trust that our government has our best interests at heart? These were the questions
that stimulated the first anti-vaccination campaign in Britain that erupted in the
1850s. They are still the questions that we are asking today. Unfortunately, the racism
directed at people of Asian descent is also a continuity. There was a great deal of
racism during previous epidemics: in general immigrants and foreigners have consistently
blamed for disease. When President Trump calls the coronavirus "the China virus,"
he is deploying the same kind of discourses used during earlier pandemics when Asians,
Jews, Italians and other "foreigners" were blamed for importing disease into the United
States.
As a cultural historian I believe that we learn much from the anxieties and fears
of the past. With hindsight, it is easier to see that when people express fears that
seem irrational, these can usually be traced to something much more comprehensible.
When people refuse to wear a mask, they are not engaging in rational debates over
public health and how disease is spread: instead they are making a statement about
their identities as Americans. When people refuse to get vaccinated they are often
expressing concerns about the relationship between the individual and the state. Thus
instead of just dismissing anti-vaccinationists and anti-mask activists, we should
seek to understand what it is that they are afraid of and how those fears should be
addressed. I think that we can also learn that trust in government is essential to
recovering from a pandemic. In terms of successful vaccination campaigns, persuasion
and education is usually a better route to public health outcomes than compulsion.
I like structure and so I impose that on myself in order to be productive. But I also
like to bake and so I have been making bread, cookies, pastries, pies, cakes, scones,
muffins and other gluten-packed products. I have used 50 pounds of flour since we
went into lockdown in March!
- Nadja Durbach, Professor, Department of History