Posts Tagged ‘plague’
“Oh happy people of the future, who have not known these miseries and perchance will class our testimony with the fables”*…
The Plague of Florence as Described by Boccaccio, an etching (ca. early 19th century) by Luigi Sabatelli of a plague-struck Florence in 1348, as described by Petrarch’s friend Giovanni Boccaccio — Source.
The Italian poet and scholar Francesco Petrarch [see almanac entry here] lived through the most deadly pandemic in recorded history, the Black Death of the 14th century, which saw up to 200 million die from plague across Eurasia and North Africa. Through the unique record of letters and other writings Petrarch left us, Paula Findlen explores how he chronicled, commemorated, and mourned his many loved ones who succumbed, and what he might be able to teach us today…
Love, death, and friendship in a time of pandemic: “Petrarch’s Plague.”
* Petrarch, from a 1347 letter to his brother, who lived in a monastery in Montrieux
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As we learn from history, we might recall that it was on this date in 1986 that the British government banned the slaughter and movement of lambs in parts of Cumbria, Scotland and Wales; heavy rainfall in those areas had showered fallout from the Cernobyl nuclear disaster onto farms there. (The transfer of radionuclides to sheep and goat products is greater than to cattle.) As the ban lifted, animals’ radiation levels were monitored before they were allowed to be sold at market. The number of failing animals peaked in 1992, but some still recorded higher levels of caesium as recently as 2011.
“When it was in the extremity there was no such thing as communication with one another, as before”*…
The island of Lazzaretto Nuovo, shown here, was one of the isles where the city of Venice quarantined plague-stricken individuals in the 15th century
Just beyond the shores of Venice proper—a city comprised of dozens of islands—lie two uninhabited isles with a rich history. Today these landmasses are landscapes of grasses, trees, and worn stone buildings. But once they were among the most important gateways to this storied trading city.
The islands, known as Lazzaretto Vecchio and Lazzaretto Nuovo, are now yielding fascinating insights into Venice’s response to one of the most famous pandemics in history. In the mid-14th century, Venice was struck by the bubonic plague, part of an outbreak, known as the Black Death, that may have killed up to 25 million people, or one-third of the population, in Europe. This spread was just one of several waves of the plague to strike Northern Italy in the centuries that followed.
Venice, as a trading center, was especially vulnerable. “They saw that the only solution was to separate people, to take away the sick people, or suspected sick people,” says Francesca Malagnini, of the University for Foreigners, Perugia, who is herself a Venetian, linguist, and member of an interdisciplinary team researching Lazzaretto Nuovo. “This was the only way to protect everyone’s health and allow the economy to continue.”
Beginning in the early 15th century, the island of Lazzaretto Vecchio was designated for isolating and treating plague-stricken Venetians. Later, Lazzaretto Nuovo became a spot where ships coming from places experiencing the plague, or those with suspected sick passengers or crew, anchored. There, people and goods spent a period of quarantine before being allowed into the heart of the city. (We owe the English word “quarantine” to the Italian term for 40 days, quaranta giorni.)…
Archaeological research is unearthing Venice’s quarantine history to illuminate how the Italian city created a vast public health response 700 years ago and helped lay the modern foundation for coping with pandemics: “Venice’s Black Death and the Dawn of Quarantine.”
* A Journal of the Plague Year
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As we stay safe, we might spare a thought for Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran; he died on this date in 1922. A physician and public health and infectious disease researcher, he served as Chair of Military Diseases and Epidemics at the École de Val-de-Grâce, then joined the Pasteur Institute, then founded the Société de Pathologie Exotique; through his career, he published over 600 papers, journal articles, and books on infectious diseases and their agents. In 1907 he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries of parasitic protozoans as causative agents of diseases like malaria and trypanosomiasis.
“A map is the greatest of all epic poems”*…
A marmot hiding in plain sight in the Swiss Alps
Errors—both accidental and deliberate—are not uncommon in maps (17th-century California as an island, the omission of Seattle in a 1960s AAA map). Military censors have long transformed nuclear bunkers into nondescript warehouses and routinely pixelate satellite images of sensitive sites. Many maps also contain intentional errors to trap would-be copyright violators. The work of recording reality is particularly vulnerable to plagiarism: if a cartographer is suspected of copying another’s work, he can simply claim to be duplicating the real world— ideally, the two should be the same. Mapmakers often rely on fictitious streets, typically no longer than a block, to differentiate their accounts of the truth (Oxygen Street in Edinburgh, for example).
But there is another, less institutional reason to hide something in a map. According to Lorenz Hurni, professor of cartography at ETH Zurich, these illustrations are part inside joke, part coping mechanism. Cartographers are “quite meticulous, really high-precision people,” he says. Their entire professional life is spent at the magnification level of a postage stamp. To sustain this kind of concentration, Hurni suspects that they eventually “look for something to break out of their daily routine.” The satisfaction of these illustrations comes from their transgressive nature— the labor and secrecy required to conceal one of these visual puns…
Slipping one past one of the most rigorous map-making institutions in the world: “For Decades, Cartographers Have Been Hiding Covert Illustrations Inside of Switzerland’s Official Maps.”
* Gilbert H. Grosvenor (President of the National Geographic Society, first editor of the magazine, and champion of cartography [and photojournalism])
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As we hide Easter eggs, we might recall that it was on this date in 1345– according to 14th century scholars at the University of Paris– the Black Death was created… from what they called “a triple conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars in the 40th degree of Aquarius, occurring on the 20th of March, 1345.”
AKA the Pestilence, the Great Bubonic Plague, the Great Plague, the Plague, or less commonly the Great Mortality or Black Plague, the Black Death was actually transmitted by fleas who had fed on diseased rats. It killed an estimated 75 to 200 million people in Eurasia, peaking in Europe from 1347 to 1351.
More on “the greatest catastrophe ever.”
Spread of the Black Death in Europe and the Near East (1346–1353)
“The one way of making people hang together is to give ’em a spell of the plague”*…
Officials in West Africa plan to erect a cordon sanitaire around areas affected by the Ebola virus. The drastic tactic—a strict quarantine encircling an infected area, allowing no residents to exit—has been only rarely used since the end of World War I… and then, as in China, for suspect reasons and of questionable effect (see here and here).
Writing at The Vault, Rebecca Onion recounts the story of Honolulu’s Chinatown inside a cordon sanitaire during an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1899-1900. In December 1899, You Chong, a 22-year-old Chinese bookkeeper, died of the disease, quickly followed by four neighbors. The Honolulu Board of Health isolated 14 blocks of the city, where ten thousand people lived.
Historian Nyan Shah writes that public health officials on the West Coast focused on Chinese and Japanese travelers in investigating the outbreak, “disregarding scientific evidence that rats were the primary conveyors of disease.” Facing the epidemic in Honolulu, officials acted on long-held stereotypes about the dirtiness of Chinese residences, turning to tactics of radical disinfection: spraying homes with carbolic acid; forcing residents to shower at public stations; throwing out belongings.
In Honolulu, officials finally escalated to fire, burning the home of one plague victim. But the blaze spread throughout the district. Historian Joseph Byrne writes that at first, after the fire burned out of control, fleeing citizens were “turned back by the National Guard and white vigilantes maintaining the cordon.” Finally, the cordonopened one exit to let people out. Eight thousand residents were displaced.
“Many bitterly insisted that the government had deliberately allowed the fire to spread,” Byrne writes, “a conviction only strengthened when one local newspaper printed an editorial celebrating the fire for wiping out the plague while simultaneously clearing off valuable real estate.”…
Read the whole– and horrifying– tale, and see more photos at “The Disastrous Cordon Sanitaire Used on Honolulu’s Chinatown in 1900.”
* Albert Camus, The Plague
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As we remember to wash our hands, we might recall that is was on this date in 1619 that slavery arrived in North America, as “20 and Odd” Blacks landed in Jamestown, Virginia on a Dutch man of war, which traded them to settlers for provisions. These first African-Americans were not technically slaves, as slavery hadn’t yet been established as an institution in the Colony. But ownership was clear, and the the custom took hold (as reflected in the wills of original purchasers, who left “Negroes in service” to their children); was enshrined in law in 1662.
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