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Get Well Soon: History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them
Get Well Soon: History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them
Get Well Soon: History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them
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Get Well Soon: History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them

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A witty, irreverent tour of history's worst plagues—from the Antonine Plague, to leprosy, to polio—and a celebration of the heroes who fought them

In 1518, in a small town in Alsace, Frau Troffea began dancing and didn’t stop. She danced until she was carried away six days later, and soon thirty-four more villagers joined her. Then more. In a month more than 400 people had been stricken by the mysterious dancing plague. In late-seventeenth-century England an eccentric gentleman founded the No Nose Club in his gracious townhome—a social club for those who had lost their noses, and other body parts, to the plague of syphilis for which there was then no cure. And in turn-of-the-century New York, an Irish cook caused two lethal outbreaks of typhoid fever, a case that transformed her into the notorious Typhoid Mary.

Throughout time, humans have been terrified and fascinated by the diseases history and circumstance have dropped on them. Some of their responses to those outbreaks are almost too strange to believe in hindsight. Get Well Soon delivers the gruesome, morbid details of some of the worst plagues we’ve suffered as a species, as well as stories of the heroic figures who selflessly fought to ease the suffering of their fellow man. With her signature mix of in-depth research and storytelling, and not a little dark humor, Jennifer Wright explores history’s most gripping and deadly outbreaks, and ultimately looks at the surprising ways they’ve shaped history and humanity for almost as long as anyone can remember.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateFeb 7, 2017
ISBN9781627797474
Get Well Soon: History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them
Author

Jennifer Wright

Jennifer Wright is the author of six pop history books, most recently Madame Restell: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York's Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist. She has written for the New York Times, the New York Post and the New York Observer. Despite that, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Daniel Kibblesmith, and daughter. Her break-up days are hopefully behind her, but she would still split a pint of ice cream with you.

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Rating: 4.068807359633027 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book is an interesting read. The author shares the back story of the various plagues that have decimated various areas of the world. I learned all sorts of tidbits including how to cure the Bubonic Plague by putting pigeons on the sores to draw out the disease. The author did some serious research to put this tome together.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Plagues through the centuries. While this nonfiction book should be informative, I didn't know how funny it would be. No, we probably shouldn't laugh at plagues. Unless you have a rather flippant and dark sense of humor, which the author apparently does and which I appreciate.This book is very informative but never dull. I knew about all the plagues except Encephalitis Lethartica, but I learned details I would never have known otherwise. In the introduction, the author writes:“...my interest lies more with the kind of plague where you break out in sores all over your body and countless people you know and love die, rapidly, within a few months of each other, in the prime of their lives. And there is nothing you can do, and everyone is dead, and everything is death, and all of earth seems to be a vast wasteland of corpses, and, wait, here, allow me to show you some absolutely horrific pictures.”How can you not love that?The author has a decidedly liberal bent, which I'm just fine with. It is obvious that she is beyond annoyed at the special snowflakes who won't vaccinate their children because of unfactual rumors, and therefore put others at risk. She lists our (as in humanity's) successes as well as failures. Despite the flippancy, the author is both sympathetic and empathetic, and this shows through as well. “Do not do the same stupid stuff people did before! We know what works and what doesn't! Be smarter, please, please, be smarter, be kinder, be kinder and smarter, I am begging you.”And in the epilogue:“When we fight plagues, not each other, we will not only defeat diseases but preserve our humanity in the process.”I really love this book.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I received this work through the Early Reviewer program and requested it on the basis of what I felt was a potentially fascinating subject. I was very disappointed with the book, both with respect to its content, but more importantly, the writing style of the author.The tone of the author in this work is unbelievably informal and “snarky”. Given that the subject matter of the work is quite serious, it is jarringly inappropriate. The writing style employed by the author would be appropriate in a comedian’s autobiography or a celebrity tell-all, not a review of the worst plagues in world history. Putting aside the tone and style, the writing is simply not very good in any case, somewhat of a surprise, given the author’s background. Bottom line, it was terribly annoying and made it impossible for me to appreciate the subject matter.In addition, the book contains so many misspellings, punctuation and grammar errors that whoever edited the book should be fired. While this was a “reader’s copy”, and many of the errors may be corrected before final publication, numerous proofs and drafts are approved prior to bound publication. If I were associated with this work, I would be highly embarrassed. The photographs included in the book were of VERY poor quality and were uniformly accompanied by what I can only assume the author thought to be witty and pithy comments. She was wrong. I could find very little of value in this work.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Get Well Soon by Jennifer Wright looks at many of the plagues and disease epidemics that swept the world in the past. While very enlightening and entertaining in its presentation I found I didn't enjoy this book as much as I thought I might. I felt the chatty almost blog style of writing a bit annoying and made me question the validity of the content even though it is evident Wright did quite a bit of research.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A very well researched an interesting book on the dominant plagues that have dogged and doomed mankind in history. Wright's sense of humor was also entertaining as she kept up a pratter of commentary quips throughout.I had heard of many of these plagues but never understood a great deal of what they were about other than killing a lot of people. So I was educated on that sure enough. I found the most intriguing and scary knowledge was that the great pandemic influenza of 1918 could not only come back but may run rampant again without much we can do to combat it. Now in its dormant stage the thought of that is rather sobering. So despite our miraculous medical system we are not quite out of the woods yet so to speak.She concludes the book on something of a political rant on the AIDS epidemic that she blames primarily those in the Reagan administration for not taking serious and in fact basically ignoring. An informative book overall with the link to history and the many dramas and heroes that stepped forward to conquer some of these, primarily polio.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Alrighty, here we go. I received this book through Early Reviewers, meaning that my copy was one that will, likely undergo further edits before it is published. With that in mind, I'm not going to dwell on any of the grammatical/spelling edits that still need to take place. They weren't particularly distracting anyway.There were two elements that I did find distracting: the pictures and, initially, the tone. However, I am never a huge fan of pictures, so I will chalk that up to taste. As for the author's tone, I'm not quite sure how I feel now that I've finished the book. Folks to whom I read portions of the book seemed to enjoy it and since the author wasn't flippant when drilling home her chosen points I have a hard time judging her for it. I suppose it was a device which worked in her favor on some occasions and did not on others.As far as the content is concerned, I found it interesting. Particularly the chapters on the dancing plague, tuberculosis, and syphilis. This is not an in depth discussion of any of these plagues, but it certainly acts as a good introduction, particularly for laymen like me, and I would recommend it in that capacity.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The book was well-written, especially considering the difficult subject matter. Some of humanity's earliest mass outbreaks of diseases I was not familiar with, so those were educational. Others I did not realize lingered so long. I certainly was not aware of the more ridiculous curative attempts!The author did have an idiosyncratic style of writing, but she is not Mary Roach (as the reviewer I read wrote), and it does neither of them credit to compare them. True, they are both women writing in an engaging way about science. But the same can be said of Phyllis George and Agatha Christie of their genre.I was quite surprised to hear (this was an audible.com book. Buy a print version! The narration was not pleasant), "...in Fox's[ Book of Miracles]..." with no other lead-in or explanation. George Fox was a principle founder of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), ca 1650.To be clear about Zackman's narration, I think it was a production issue. Suddenly her voice would go flat as do nasal, right in the middle of a sentence. Sometimes it seemed as that quality was indicative of a quotation, but not always.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    'Get Well Soon' by Jennifer Wright is a brief history of the world's plagues and humanities attempts to deal with them, through the onset of 12 plagues and 1 badly handled medical procedure. Wright attempts to add humor to a very dark subject and show how mankind has attempted to handle these biological disasters, through politics, medicine, folklore and it's own humanity. Like many of the other reviewers, I really wanted to enjoy this book. I enjoy the subjects of history and medicine, and looked forward to a book that focused on both. Unfortunately, I was disappointed with the results. Wright hits on a few well known diseases such as Bubonic plague, small pox and tuberculosis; as well as a few lesser known such as the Antonine plague, dancing plague and Encephalitis Lethargica. A positive point of this book, for me, was the fact that I learned about a couple diseases I was not familiar with and a little more about some that I was. Unfortunately, that wasn't enough to make this a particularly good read. I got the impression from the start, that Wright was having trouble deciding whether this should be a study of interesting medical issues in history, society's ability or inability to positively help it's most afflicted, or both. Unfortunately, in attempting to address all of this, it was somewhat disjointed, lacking in any real depth, and unable to latch onto my interest and keep it through to the end. To add to the issues, Wright's use of humor was not especially successful, and she seemed more interested in trying to use the book as a soapbox for her own social and political beliefs, although even this was a bit disjointed at times. With a couple isolated instances, like Marcus Aurelius's approach to the Antonine plague, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt's handling of Polio; Wright seems to feel that politicians have added to the devastation caused by these diseases either by ignoring them, or inappropriate actions. She also seems to feel that society has been either unable or unwilling to assist those in greatest need, unless they have a strong leader who can show them the way. Unfortunately, in the end, I just wasn't sure what I was supposed to take away from the book. As a last, possibly unintended, slap in the face to her readers, Wright includes a section of photographs in the final section, that shows the manifestation of these diseases on it's victims. The section is called "Absolutely Horrific Pictures of the Effects of the Diseases (for Those Who Want Them)". I wasn't sure if Wright had some type of historical or medical background. There were just parts of the book that seemed incomplete, even though it isn't intended as an exhaustive study. For instance, Wright felt it necessary to include the lobotomy in a book about historical plagues. After blasting the practice of lobotomies (rightly or wrongly), and Walter Freeman's questionable approach to them, she never pointed out that this practice is still carried out. The Stereotactic Cingulotomy and the Lobectomy are both very precise, very advanced, descendants of the old style lobotomy. Wright's previous book, 'It Ended Badly: Thirteen of the Worst Break-Ups in History', also led me to believe medical history was not something Wright had specialized education in, or experience with. If you have read books by Richard Preston or Laurie Garrett, you will be greatly disappointed by 'Get Well Soon'. I would advise people interested in history and medical science read books by these authors, or even those who Wright mentions in her sources. Unfortunately, I got the impression that the extent of the research Wright did was reading books by other authors and adding her own commentary to them. I'm sorry to say I can't recommend this title to others.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I found this book to be fairly interesting and rather entertaining. The author's humor and personal opinions, while amusing, occasionally got in the way at times. The writing seemed more suited to amusing blog posts and articles on humor sites. I mostly enjoyed it, though, and I would recommend it to people who might want a light-hearted take on a serious subject.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I thought the premise for this book sounded really interesting. However, I got about 150 pages into it, and found that it just was not holding my interest. While the author's commentary was humorous at times, for the most part I didn't care for it. Also, I realize that this was an Advance Reading Copy, but truly, it was the worst-edited ARC I've ever read - and I've read more than 100. It was so poorly edited that it was distracting - sentences didn't make sense, words were missing. Maybe that had something to do with my disinclination to continue reading. Bottom line: I have too many books on my TBR list to continue reading one that doesn't hold my interest.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I found this book thoroughly enjoyable. Wright manages to give gritty, historically factual details about some of the world's worst plagues while maintaining a sense of humor - a feat in itself. I would compare this favorably with works by Mary Roach ("Stiff"; "Gulp").
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Jennifer Wright traces 14 major plagues throughout history. Beginning with Antonine Plague and ending with AIDS she covers the spread, effect, cause and cure, of each of these plagues. With a great sense of humor she makes this a good read. Her writing style is much like Mary Roach which makes tough subjects easier to read and learn. She does not gloss over the effects of these diseases and her research is sound. She also gives credit to strong leaders in the time of peril such as Antonio of the Roman empire and FDR and Eisenhower with polio. Recommended also for young adult collections. Young people need to understand the history and impact of of disease on other events in history. Serious subject but an easy to read and enjoy book that will leave you much to think about. Due for release in Feb. 2017
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Not everyone enjoys books about the history of plagues. I don't know why.

    Well, all right, I do know. But I've always found them fascinating.

    This is an overview of some of the greatest plagues in the recorded history of the world, starting with the Antonine plague in Rome under Marcus Aurelius, and ending with AIDS. What Wright is focused on is less the medical details than the way both people generally and government and social leadership responded.

    Plagues are always terrifying, and in the absence of effective medical treatment, the natural human response is fear. Believing that disease was spread by miasma, i.e., bad-smelling air, wholly ineffective and sometimes really damaging methods are used in useless efforts to stop it.

    What Wright finds is that strong leadership, whether pragmatic or compassionate, makes a huge difference. Marcus Aurelius subsidized the cost of funerals, so that people could dispose of their family members with dignity--and so that bodies didn't pile up in the streets, spreading both panic and more disease. In contrast, in response to the emergence of AIDS in the 1980s, the Reagan administration laughed at it when they didn't completely ignore it. They blamed the victims, and weren't interested in seriously funding the search for the infectious agent that caused it. Of course, this was in the late 20th century, and unlike during the Roman Empire, we had far more developed ways of dealing with the dead whose families either couldn't afford, or refused to bury them. Yet many of the sick found themselves rejected by their families, blocked from attending school, shunned by the people who should have helped them. Elected politicians suggested AIDS sufferers should be quarantined in camps, or even killed.

    And this is not just a difference between ancient Rome and modern America. Both patterns of response have been shown in different places at different times. Franklin Delano Roosevelt helped lead, even in the midst of depression and war, huge advances in the care of polio patients and in research into polio. Dwight Eisenhower, when the Salk vaccine was developed, took immediate steps to ensure no child would miss out on being vaccinated because their families couldn't afford it. I remember, as a young child, standing in a school gymnasium to line up for the free distribution of the polio vaccine. In the 19th century, the then Kingdom of Hawaii quarantined leprosy patients in a colony without even the most basic social and infrastructure supports, and conditions were horrific until the arrival of a Belgian Roman Catholic missionary, Father Damian.

    In the course of this examination of the history of plagues, Wright gives us stories that are terrifying, heartwarming, and more often than you might expect, funny. It's interesting, enlightening, and compelling.

    Highly recommended.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This was an interesting book about plagues , diseases and medical procedures throughout time and what was done by medical personnel throughout time to combat the maladies. The book was well researched and included cultural treatment of the disease's victims throughout time. However, the editorial comments made throughout the book, though humorous, were a little distracting. Despite this, I would recommend this book for its information and cultural history.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Can a book about diseases be utterly charming and often hilarious? It turns out that if the author is Jennifer Wright, the answer is yes.This compilation of short histories of some of the worst plagues in history is punctuated (literally) by lots of italics, exclamation points, jokes, contemporary references, sarcasm, and humorous epigraphs before each chapter. But the subject matter is deadly.Topics include the Bubonic plague, smallpox, polio, the great influenza epidemic of 1918, and the “man-made” plague of lobotomies, inter alia.Wright also includes information on how these diseases impacted history. For example, it is estimated that smallpox killed around 90 percent of the native people of the Americas, clearing the path for the great land grab by Europeans.It is not so well known that during World War I, forty thousand American soldiers were killed by what was called the “Spanish flu” (she explains how it got this name). For perspective, she points out, “that’s only seven thousand fewer American soldiers than were killed in combat in Vietnam.” In one month alone, October of 1918, 195,000 people died of the Spanish flu. It was the deadliest month in U.S. history. Why did it get so bad so fast? She explains that too. She comes back several times in her book to the subject of vaccination, stating:“Vaccination is one of the best things that has happened to civilization. Empires toppled like sandcastles in the wake of diseases we do not give a second thought to today.”She addresses current fears about vaccines, which she considers to be not only scientifically baseless but dangerous - explaining:“. . . some vaccines contain an extremely diluted amount of formaldehyde, which sounds scary, as formaldehyde in large doses is linked to cancer. However, formaldehyde also occurs naturally in your body and helps you metabolize food. The amount you would find in a vaccine. . . [is less than you would find in an average apple.]”It is shocking to learn that Zimbabwe now has a higher immunization rate for one-year-olds against measles than the United States does. So do 112 other countries, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). The U.S. is down to 91 percent vaccination rate for measles, which, according to the WHO, makes us much more vulnerable to outbreaks:“Refusing to vaccinate puts at risk not just your children but the people in our communities who most require our protection.”But does a “cure” ever cause more harm than good? She does explore when that happens in a chapter on lobotomies, which are intentional partial destructions of the brain, and “the scariest procedure that you never want performed.” Approximately 40,000 lobotomies were performed in the United States between the 1930s and the 1970s. As Wrights avers, “. . . this was one of the darkest chapters in American medical history.”She ends with the AIDS crisis, lamenting that we did not learn the lessons of history in fighting it, in particular that the issue of “morals” or “character” has nothing to do with the cause of diseases. She implores us to become wiser after “the horrible mismanagement of the AIDS crisis": “We know what works and what doesn’t! Be smarter, please, please, be smarter, be kinder, be kinder and smarter, I am begging you.”Evaluation: This book is informative and lively, and combines laugh-out-loud moments with important messages. It is an entertaining way to learn a part of history often neglected but more consequential to the rise and fall of civilizations than you would expect.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Reading a book on plagues may not be everyone's idea of a pleasurable way to spend their reading time, but that is exactly what I did. While I can't say it was pleasurable, it was certainly intriguing and informative. Plagues, many times changed the course of history, were used in our nursery rhymes , illnesses, like tuberculosis and EL were prevalent in art and literature. Many artists painted pictures of women dying from consumption, painting them as ethereal and haunting, thought beautiful at the time. Dying of consumption as it was known then was anything but beautiful. The book provides the paths of the diseases, how they were handled at the time, those who fought them, finding cures if possible and what was going on in the world at the time and how circumstances were affected. Loved the set up of this book, each chapter its own illness. She saves the mishandling of the AIDS epidemic for the epilogue, how this was mishandled by the Reagan administration and how so many turned their backs on those dying of this disease.The author attempts to lighten up the gruesome subject matter by inserting pithy comments and commentary. Sometimes these worked for me and I found them mildly humorous, at other times I felt they could have been left out. Actually think the book would have been improved if there would have been less of these. So I am rating this four stars for the well researched information contained within, but making this 3.5 for my persona rating. Definitely worth reading though, I think it is hubris on our part to think that because we have better medicines now, that a plague or epidemic will not strike. Especially since we are being warned about bacteria resistant antibiotics. I was also very surprised to find out that Zimbabwe and fourteen other nations have better inoculation rates against measles, now that many parents are refusing to immunize their children. So scary.ARC from publisher and librarything.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A quirky, delightful book about how microbes can change the world and how societal responses to wide-spread illness can make the medical and social challenges that arise in the face of them much better or much worse. While Wright's approach is humorous and irreverent, she never loses sight of the seriousness of the plagues or the value of kindness and compassion.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a well researched and informative non-fiction book whose author's inserts herself throughout. At first this very much irritated me but as I proceeded I acclimated to her humor and personal comments. The descriptions of the plagues, their spread, and the efforts, effective and not, to combat them was illuminating.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Sort of breezy, given the subject matter, but did include some plagues I hadn’t heard of, such as the Roman plague and the dancing plague of middle ages Germany, as well as a kind of encephalitis that makes people essentially sleep all the time/lack all independent will, and which disappeared for reasons that don’t seem to be very clear. Not very reassuring. Ends with an epilogue on AIDS and what not to do in an epidemic (quarantine people, fail to keep order and to clean the streets).
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Initially I was skeptical about this one due to the author's ill-supported claims that the Antonine Plague caused the Roman Empire to fall (“was a very significant contributor to the decline” would have made me less uncomfortable), but, as it turned out, that first chapter was the only one where her “history” struck me as noticeably iffy. Telling the stories of various plagues throughout history, Wright explores each plague (she includes fourteen of them) from the level of bacteria to that of governmental response. She tells of individual sufferers, heroic (and not-so-heroic) doctors, politicians, and public health officials, describing how each plague destroyed lives, and how the responses of physicians and bureaucrats helped or hindered the treatment of the disease. She reminds readers frequently of the importance of compassion in dealing with victims of plagues, occasionally to the point of excessive preachiness, but mostly, given the history of human responses to contagious diseases, very reasonably. As she notes repeatedly, blaming the victims is never an effective response to illness. Even in the case of a Typhoid Mary, who, she agrees, showed monstrous irresponsibility in her disregard for disease control, public health officials would have behaved far more usefully if they had provided her with training for a new career rather than simply releasing her back on an unsuspecting public with nothing but her cooking skills with which to support herself.Wright certainly doesn't gloss over the horrors of the plagues she chronicles, but where there are heroes – Father Damiens and Jonas Salks – she dwells on them. Among the most horrific chapters were those on lobotomies (the only “non-disease” plague she includes) and AIDS, where the extent of the suffering was, to an inexcusable extent, caused by the heartlessness of people who truly should have known better, and, conversely, the most inspiring was that on polio, where human intelligence, decency, and public spiritedness combined to defeat a devastating disease. Wright finishes on a note of optimism, convinced that the better angels of our nature will generally triumph over fear and narrow-mindedness. While her efforts at humor occasionally fall flat and I could have done with fewer pop culture references, this was mostly enjoyable and surprisingly uplifting.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Wow. Just, wow. I think this book officially marks the first time I've checked out a book from the library entirely on a whim from the title, and then ended up buying the book while reading it. This is a fascinating, entertaining, and highly educational account, all at the same time. People who know me know I'm somewhat picky about my nonfiction. I LOVE learning new stuff, but can't stand spending voluntary time on anything dry or not engaging. But, dang, was this book a winner of a pick. Each chapter is dedicated to a different historical plague, detailing the illness, the toll it took, and the efforts taken to combat it, all in a casual narrative style. It definitely feels more like being told a story at the dinner table (albeit a somewhat disturbing one) than exploring an academic work, while also highlighting several important figures that you won't have heard of who worked tirelessly in the often thankless work of saving lives during times when medical knowledge or public views might well consist of little more than a conviction that the ill were cursed or somehow deserving. This is thus not just a trip through the history of the world's great plagues, but also a commentary on the treatment of the sick and dying, an overview of both our ignorance and our compassion, and a condemnation of human apathy and disregard. Overall, this is definitely an author who I will now be watching, and I look forward to hunting down her other works.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A book on plagues through the ages seems like it would, by its very nature, be incredibly depressing (and/or dry), but Jennifer Wright made every chapter absolutely fascinating, and her tone is such that I found myself laughing on multiple occasions. She never mocks the victims of the plagues, but she does poke at human foibles and failings, as well as highlighting the amazing things that people did when confronted with these various diseases. I really enjoyed the audio, and I am very glad to have modern medicine, clean water, and a knowledge that neither onions nor crushed emeralds are effective cures for what ails you.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Very interesting book! My only disappointment is that we didn’t get much description of the diseases but to be fair that wasn’t really the purpose of the book.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The author’s labeling of herpes as a nondeadly skin disease is irresponsible. I am a perinatal nurse and have seen newborns die of herpetic encephalitis transmitted in utero even when the mother was not aware she had herpes.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A sense of humor takes the ugly out of the horrible plagues.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Entertaining overview of historic plagues.Regardless of how much general medical knowledge history you may know there is bound to be something here that you've never heard before and that will surprise or even shock you.The inclusion of lobotomies as a "plague", albeit a human created one, was a stretch. But the grotesque story of Walter J. Freeman lobotomizing thousands of hapless patients across America in the 1940's and 1950's certainly explains why it was included.Mass hysteria plagues such as the Dancing Plague of 1518 also did not seem to qualify as genuine medical plague history, but were fascinating none the less.I listened to the Audiobook edition narrated by Gabra Zackman and her performance alone earned an extra star or two, putting this solidly as a 5 out of 5.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    THIS WAS SO GOOD. I've always had an in interest in plagues and reading about so when I saw this book (I believe it was a nominee for the Goodreads Choice Awards one year?) it was like all of my dreams had come true. I learned so much while reading this and I found new topics that I did not expect to find interesting super intriguing and things that I thought would be more interesting less than I thought they would be. If that sentence is even comprehend-able. 90% of the time I was reading this, I was stopping every few pages to tell my dad's girlfriend about some other insane fact or statistic. It was so fun and I had so much fun talking about it to multiple people in my life. I really enjoyed the humor and tone of the book. I highlighted SO MUCH while I was reading, some of it being insane facts and some of it just being funny things from the author. I did read this as on ebook on Scribd so I don't think it's possible to share my highlights like with a Kindle book which is sad. In addition to the humor, the author made so many valid points on how people with diseased are just people and deserve to be treated as such and not outcast as monsters. One of my favorite quotes that really capsulated something I never even thought of prior to this is "It's easy to forgot that people from the past weren't the two-dimensional black-and-white photos or line drawings you might encounter in some dry textbooks. They weren't just gray-faced guys in top hats. They were living, breathing, joking, burping people, who could be happy or sad, funny, or boring, cool or the lamest people you ever met in your life. They had no idea they were living in the past. They all thought they were living in the present." The author also urged readers to not just brush off these ideals of "Oh how insane and stupid people were back then" and instead to consider how people actually thought in those times, when the medical system we have today didn't exist. That being said, there were some INSANE things that people did or believed. One of my favorites was the people who thought the spirit of the illness could fly out a sick person's eyes and infect anyone who made eye contact with them. I also really enjoyed learning more about the plague doctor getups and what went into the masks and how they actually did serve a purpose other than just looking generally terrifying. My favorite chapters were surprisingly on syphilis and lobotomies. I've always known lobotomies are nuts but I had no idea syphilis had such an insane past and how severe it could really get without treatment. It's wild how people died of syphilis all because it was an STD and NO ONE WOULD TALK ABOUT IT. Shout out to the No-Nose Club. I learned about things I had never even heard of such as cholera and encephalitis lethargica and I learned about things I knew of but didn't know any details about like polio or the Spanish flu. I also learned some things I thought I knew, but were myths for other reasons, like how people who have leprosy's limbs don't just fall off for no reason. I learned so much and I really enjoyed my time with this book. I was never big into nonfiction prior to this but this really opened my eyes to just how fun it is to learn again when you're not doing it for a grade or for anyone else.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A fine piece of medical history that, from some of the reviews I've read, is obscured by reaction to its casual, first-person, snarky presentation. As a 72-year-old youngster, let me say that I get this book in the way that you don't. This is a book that you should give to your teenager to tell them about things that they will never be taught in school About heroism, about stupidity, about negligence, about victory and defeat. It may not be written in a style that you're comfortable with, but it's one that many can relate to.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This likely would have been funnier had I read it at publication, 2017, instead of after COVID-19 came into our lives. With that said, it is at least snarky and, unexpectedly, hopeful. As it turns out, we have in the past managed to rise to the challenge when faced with a plague, but we have also failed spectacularly. This books shows both and, in doing so, outlines how we can be truly successful when the next one comes.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I finally finished this one. The delay was a combination of being on holiday, and needing to put some space between my experience of this book and the experience of others, as I was starting to feel like I was losing my objectivity regarding my feelings about this book. So, my feelings: Get Well Soon was poorly sub-titled and marketed. As a popular science book, or a popular history-about-science book, it fails. As an introductory anthropological and cultural survey of how society has historically reacted to epidemics and pandemics, I think its excellent. Furthermore, while I like her writing style a lot, it is polarising. Jennifer Wright is a 30-something author whose voice is informal, irreverent and snarky. She writes the way friends - good friends - talk when they don't have to behave themselves. She uses this no-nonsense voice to sometimes share her thoughts about topics that are themselves, polarising. So this is a book that isn't going to appeal to everyone. It particularly isn't going to appeal - at all - to anyone looking for a more sober, scientifically-focused exploration of the topic. After reading the whole thing, I'm pretty sure it was never meant to, at least, not from the author's perspective. "If you take nothing else away from this book, I hope it's that sick people are not villains." This is a recurring theme from start to finish. Wright's objective seems to be to focus a spotlight on humanity's reaction to mass illness throughout history, whether good or bad. Her hope in doing so is that perhaps those who read this book will learn from history rather than doom themselves to repeat it. She does this is the frankest, bluntest possible way, with a lot of snarky humor. In this objective, I believe she succeeds. I think those of us who could be labeled as 'prolific readers' or those who voraciously devour their favorite subjects, might lose perspective on how well-informed, or not, most people today are. Society today is at least as divided as it's been at almost any other time in history, and a good deal of opinion is shaped via the internet, a source we all know can be about as accurate as a round of the telephone game. In this context, I think the book is fantastic. Jennifer Wright seems to be a popular author of columns in various newspapers and magazines; if even a handful of her fans from Harper's Bazaar, et al, read this book simply because she wrote it, and they come away having learned something they didn't know before they started, or thinking harder about their responsibility in society, then Wright will have succeeded where others have failed. (And yes, I'm generally pessimistic about the world I live in - my country is being run by an orange lunatic; I think I'm entitled to a bit of pessimism.) I'm not one of her magazine/newspaper fans. In fact it wasn't until after I'd started this that I realised I'd ever read anything by her before. I'm also quantitatively better read, if not qualitatively (some would argue), and I can say that not only did I enjoy this book a great deal, but I learned more than I expected to. For example, I had no idea that the Spanish Flu wasn't actually Spanish, but probably American, and I had no idea that it killed so many Americans. Granted, most of my knowledge of the Spanish Flu comes from British fiction, but it's a testament to the horrifying effectiveness of government censorship during WWI that you still don't read about it in American fiction, and this is a disease that killed in one month more Americans than the US Civil War. I'd also never heard of Encephalitis Lethargica, and sort of wish I never had. Even on the diseases I knew more about, Wright managed to impart something new for me, and in at least 2 chapters, left me misty eyed over the power people have when they choose to be selfless. As a popular science book meant to tackle a complicated topic in a palatable way, this book is a fail; there's not nearly enough scientific discussion or data here to qualify this as such a book. But as a popular, cultural overview of the way societies throughout history have succeeded or failed to handle epidemics when they happened and the importance of rational, humane leaders and populace in times of crises, I think Wright succeeds very well. The tragedy of this book is that it's marketed to the very people who are bound to be disappointed by it and likely don't need its message, and the people who might gain the most from it are likely to pass it by because they think it'll be too boring and dry. I read this for The Flat Book Society's September read, but it also qualifies for the Doomsday square in Halloween Bingo.

Book preview

Get Well Soon - Jennifer Wright

Introduction

When I tell people that I am writing a book on plagues, well-meaning acquaintances suggest I add a modern twist. Specifically: You know, like how we’re all on our cell phones all the time. Or selfies. A chapter on selfies.

Then I reply, No, my interest lies more with the kind of plague where you break out in sores all over your body and countless people you know and love die, rapidly, within a few months of each other, in the prime of their lives. And there is nothing you can do, and everyone is dead, and everything is death, and all of earth seems to be a vast wasteland of corpses, and, wait, here, allow me to show you some absolutely horrific pictures.

And then they say, Excuse me, I’m just going to get another drink.

I am so happy you picked up this book because often, when I’m out chatting with people, no one really likes to hear about diseases of the past. I suspect that disinclination is largely due to plagues seeming both very grim and very remote. It’s generally better just to say that I like selfies. I think they’re fun. I like seeing pictures of my friends’ smiling faces. I like how alive they all are.

It does appear that we are living in a world where the word plague has shockingly little meaning for many. To the extent that they think about plagues at all, many associate them with muddy huts, textbooks they had to read in sixth grade, and, if they are film buffs, a death figure who has a truly bewildering interest in chess. People in core countries seem to expect to die at age ninety in a nursing home. They do so with good reason: if conditions continue uninterrupted, 50 percent of the children born in the year 2000 will live to be a hundred years old.

If conditions continue uninterrupted.

We have been living in an age of improbable luck. We have experienced nearly thirty years without a disease—that we do not know how to combat—killing upward of thousands of otherwise healthy young people in those core countries. I can’t say whether this good fortune will run out—I hope it won’t—but it always has in the past. We just like to forget this disagreeable fact. Forgetting is soothing and probably in our nature. But disregarding, and being ignorant of, plagues of the past makes us more, rather than less, vulnerable to inevitable ones in the future.

Because when plagues erupt, some people behave amazingly well. They minimize the level of death and destruction around them. They are kind. They are courageous. They showcase the best of our nature.

Other people behave like superstitious lunatics and add to the death toll.

I wish I had the scientific knowledge to talk about how to make vaccines or cures that might eradicate illness, but I don’t. This book isn’t just for future Nobel Prize winners, as much as I am impressed by and rooting for them. Because whether plagues are managed quickly doesn’t just depend on hardworking doctors and scientists. It depends on people who like to sleep in on weekends and watch movies and eat French fries and do the fantastic common things in life, which is to say, it depends on all of us. Whether a civilization fares well during a crisis has a great deal to do with how the ordinary, nonscientist citizen responds. A lot of the measures taken against the plagues discussed in this book will seem stunningly obvious. You should not, for instance, decide diseased people are sinners and burn them at a literal or metaphorical stake, because it is both morally monstrous and entirely ineffective. Everyone would probably theoretically agree with this statement. But then a new plague crops up, and we make precisely the same mistakes we should have learned from three hundred years ago.

I recently read in a history book that you ought not view the past through a modern-day lens. It supposed that instead you should consider different eras as entirely separate, like, I imagine, sausage links. I thought the writer seemed to show a fundamental lack of understanding of how time works. The past does not exist under a bell jar. Moments, ideas, and tragedies of the past bleed into the present. Alas, some of the ideas that make it into the present consciousness are not the best. I found, for instance, that some people still feel justified hating Jews because they think they started the bubonic plague by dumping diseased material into wells. (This is, as we’ll examine, impossible.) Worrying whether people preparing your food are washing their hands thoroughly has a lot to do with the contagious disease-carrying cook Mary Mallon, aka Typhoid Mary. If moments from the past seep so seamlessly into the present, maybe moments from the present can help us relate to the past. After all, the past was no less ridiculous than the present. Both eras were made up of humans.

One of my great wishes is that people of the present will see those of the past as friendly (or irritating) acquaintances they can look to for advice. It’s easy to forget that people from the past weren’t the two-dimensional black-and-white photos or line drawings you might encounter in some dry textbooks. They weren’t just gray-faced guys in top hats. They were living, breathing, joking, burping people, who could be happy or sad, funny or boring, cool or the lamest people you ever met in your life. They had no idea they were living in the past. They all thought they were living in the present. Accordingly, like any person, past or present, could be, some of them were smart and kind and geniuses about medicine and also completely dull on a personal level. (I’m trying to come to terms with loving John Snow’s deductive brilliance and being absolutely certain I would never want to spend more than ten minutes talking to him.) Others were charismatic and charming and total sociopathic maniacs. (That description gives Walter Jackson Freeman II too much credit for charm, but people liked him. He was gross, and he wore a weird penis ring on his neck. People should not have liked him for numerous reasons.)

You should regard everyone in this book as human, not inanimate historical figures. We can have personal opinions about them; we’re not all that different from them. And despite what some breathtakingly stupid intellectuals would have you believe, the people and interests of the past weren’t necessarily smart and serious any more than the people and interests of the present are dumb and frivolous. Knowing about pop culture doesn’t make you dumb; it makes you a person who is interested in the world you live in. Besides, it is impossible to believe that everyone in the past was a serious figure meriting great respect once you learn that one guy thought tubercular patients should take up new careers as alligator hunters.

I am always hopeful that the more we demystify the past—and the more we laugh about it and toss around information about it with the same enthusiasm we have for discussing our favorite TV shows—the better off we will be. Because if or when the next plague comes, I hate the idea that the only people who are familiar with Paracelsus (loved mercury, hated women) are going to be elderly academics in tweed coats who discuss him with pseudo-British accents. When the next outbreak comes—and I lack the optimism to believe it won’t—so many of our challenges will remain the same. We will be so much better off if the absolute maximum number of present-day and future people handle the disease with the aplomb of some of the best figures in this book. And let’s be honest, that guy in the tweed coat with the on-again-off-again accent is going to die first.

I’m invested in this study of diseases because I think knowing how diseases have been combatted in the past will be helpful in the future. If you’re someone who intends on living into the future, I hope you will be, too.

And don’t worry. You don’t need to flee for another drink. I’ll keep the horrific pictures to a minimum. Despite the considerable odds against it, I’ll try to make reading and learning about these dark times in human history a lot of fun.

Antonine Plague

When you arise in the morning,

think of what a precious privilege it

is to be alive—to breathe, to think, to

enjoy, to love.

—MARCUS AURELIUS

Every so often—frequently when consenting adults are reported to be having sex in some manner that would have been banned in the Victorian age—a TV commentator will shake his head and discuss how this behavior led to Rome’s final days. Often it seems those pundits have a poor understanding of kindness, compassion for one’s fellow man, and the progressive flow of social mores. And we can absolutely say they always have a poor grasp of Rome’s final days.

To be clear, the Roman Empire didn’t end because everybody was having sex. No civilization was ever toppled by too much sexy time—except for Bavaria in 1848, but that is an unrelated (if delightful) story.

The beginning of the final days of Rome wasn’t caused by heartwarming weddings between gay people. It began with a plague that erupted in the 160s. At that very time Romans were at the height of their power and their massive empire stretched from Scotland to Syria.

They were able to conquer and defend such a huge empire because the Roman army was a massive force. During the period around 160, the army consisted of twenty-eight legions composed of 5,120 men each. The legionnaires volunteered to serve for twenty-five years, after which time they could retire with a generous pension of about fourteen years’ pay. And in case 143,360 men in the army seems a little light—for comparison there are currently approximately 520,000 active duty soldiers in the United States—there were additional auxiliary armies that made up about another 60 percent of the force. Those were often composed of noncitizens who, if they survived their years of service, were granted Roman citizenship.

Now, you may wonder, Yes, but who would survive twenty-five years in the military? If you were a Roman soldier, your chances of staying alive during the period 135 to 160 were actually comparatively reasonable. While the exact statistics are unknown, it was a time of relatively few battles. You might not even have to fight. Walter Scheidel, a professor at Stanford University, writes: For all we can tell, the 239 veterans (representing two years’ worth of releases) who were discharged from legio[n] VII Claudia around AD 160 had not experienced substantial combat operations during their twenty-five or twenty-six years of service.¹

Those troops didn’t see action in twenty-five years. I bet they were laughingstocks. But that’s a good thing! They did not have to fight, ever!

If they did see battle, the Roman troops were stunningly, perhaps even unnecessarily, well equipped. The legionnaires were outfitted with lorica segmentata, an extremely flexible armor made of metal strips. The first-century historian Josephus described the impressively arrayed Roman army: They march forward, everyone silent and in correct order, each man maintaining his particular position in the ranks, just as he would in battle. The infantry are equipped with breastplates and helmets and carry a sword on both sides. The infantry chosen to guard the general carry a javelin and an oblong sword. However, they also carry a saw, a basket, a shovel, and an ax, as well as a leather strap, a scythe, a chain, and three days’ food rations.² They were like the Swiss army knives of soldiers.

So the Roman army had great armor, great numbers, great training, and in some cases at least three days of food on them at all times. Shortly after this, they’d begin losing battles and cities to the Germanic tribes.

I initially thought that the Germanic tribes must have had some fairly cool equipment to successfully combat the Imperial Roman army. Fortunately, Tacitus was there to set me straight. The Germanic tribes fighting them were pretty much naked. The historian wrote of at least one Germanic tribe: They are either naked, or lightly covered with a small mantle; and have no pride in equipage: their shields only are ornamented with the choicest colors. Few are provided with a coat of mail and scarcely here and there one with a casque or helmet.³ I especially like that Tacitus took time to scoff that the German shields were artistically weak. The Encyclopedia Britannica, in an instance of unusually helpful specificity, backs up Tacitus, explaining that the Germanic tribes would all be horribly ill equipped until the sixth century:

Their chief weapon was a long lance, and few carried swords. Helmets and breastplates were almost unknown. A light wooden or wicker shield, sometimes fitted with an iron rim and sometimes strengthened with leather, was the only defensive weapon. This lack of adequate equipment explains the swift, fierce rush with which the Germans would charge the ranks of the heavily armed Romans. If they became entangled in a prolonged, hand-to-hand grapple, where their light shields and thrusting spears were confronted with Roman swords and armour, they had little hope of success.

In spite of their inferior equipment the tribes were incredibly courageous. Women fought alongside men, sometimes with their children. For many, their greatest wish was to die a glorious death in battle. The nineteenth-century historian John George Sheppard describes the German tribes: Though often defeated, they were never conquered; a wave might roll back, but the tide advanced; they held firmly to their purpose till it was attained; they wrested the ball and sceptre from Roman hands, and have kept them until now.⁵ The Germanic tribes were willing to continually attack the Roman Empire despite being outnumbered and possessing inferior armor and weaponry. They were ready. They lived for battle. They had been threatening, though failing to penetrate, the empire’s borders since being defeated by the Roman general Gaius Marius in 101 BC. I’m not saying that it was surprising that they attacked. I am saying they never should have won. The best army in the world still, logically, shouldn’t have been defeated by a bunch of nearly naked people with presumably taupe-colored shields.

But the tribes had the strongest ally in the world on their side. It wasn’t human. It was the Antonine plague.

The expanse of territory the Roman troops covered would prove to be their undoing This plague came to Rome from Mesopotamia around AD 165–66. It was carried home by Roman troops who had been fighting in that region. And when it arrived in Rome it was a nightmare. A nightmare even by the standards of people who were used to disease.

Although we may rave about how technologically advanced Rome seemed compared to the Dark Ages following Roman civilization’s collapse, it was imperfect. There were public latrines, but few private houses were connected to public sewers; many people dumped their waste directly onto the streets. The Tiber River was also prone to flooding, which meant (forgive this description but there’s no other clear way to say it) that a river of shit would occasionally flow through the streets. And though people used bathhouses, the water they bathed in wasn’t disinfected and frequently contained bacteria. As you might expect, malaria, typhoid, dysentery, hepatitis, and cholera all thrived during the period, yet the historian Edward Gibbon claimed this was the age during which, the human race was most happy and prosperous. I should cut Gibbon a little slack here—he published his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire beginning in 1776—but pretending any historical age before proper indoor plumbing was a glorious epoch is a ludicrous delusion. Frank McLynn, a modern-day historian, writes in Marcus Aurelius, A Life: Horrific as malaria and all the other deadly diseases were, Romans absorbed them as part of daily existence; slaves and other wretched of the Earth were already living a death-in-life, so they may not have been unduly perturbed by the approach of the Reaper. But the ‘plague’ that hit Rome under Marcus Aurelius was entirely different, both in degree and kind, from anything Romans had experienced before.

Much of what we know about the nature of this plague is taken from the writings of Marcus Aurelius’s physician, Galen. In fact, the Antonine plague is even sometimes called the Plague of Galen.

Although Galen was a great physician, he was not a terribly courageous man. Galen was a self-promoter above anything else. According to McLynn, he consistently claimed to be a self-made man, casually downplaying the fact that he came from an extremely wealthy family and had inherited numerous estates as well as a stellar list of contacts. He employed underhanded tactics to win debates, and he constantly aggrandized his own achievements. Personality-wise, you could think of him as the Donald Trump of ancient Rome. He was also something of a coward when it came to disease. Now, I don’t think cowardice is an abnormal reaction in life-or-death situations; it can be very similar to intelligent self-preservation. I fully expect that I would be weak and spineless in a plague. However, it’s not a great trait in a physician.

Tiny little hands not pictured.

Galen came very close to not recording this plague at all. When the disease began breaking out in 166, he fled Rome for the less disease-ridden countryside. He claimed he was leaving Rome not because he was understandably scared, but because all the other physicians were so jealous of him and his awesome skills that Rome just wasn’t a cool place to be anymore. We don’t know exactly where he was from 166 to 168, only that he was summoned back to join Marcus Aurelius in Aquileia (today northern Adriatic Italy) in 168. One year later, when the outbreak worsened in that region, Galen told Marcus Aurelius that the Greco-Roman god of medicine Asclepius had come to him in a dream and said that Galen should go home to Rome for sure. Galen claimed the god regularly chatted with him in his dreams and gave him advice on a number of medical matters. I don’t put it past Galen to use an a god told me to do it excuse to remove himself from danger, but it’s also possible that he did believe these messages. Marcus Aurelius mercifully allowed Galen to return to Rome, where he spent the rest of his life as the private physician to the future emperor Commodus. He lived, seemingly very happily, into his eighties—a major accomplishment considering the generally shortened life spans of his era.

Fortunately for us, despite his best efforts, Galen didn’t succeed in avoiding the pestilence entirely. Instead, he studied and wrote extensively about the Antonine plague. From his records we know specifics about the symptoms and progression of the disease. We know that the plague caused victims to break out, very suddenly, in small red spots all over their bodies, and after one or two days, the spots would turn into a rash. Fever blisters would then swell for the next two weeks, before scabbing over and breaking off, leaving an ashy appearance all over the body. We also know that victims would develop a fever, though perhaps not one that was immediately obvious. Galen wrote: Those afflicted with the plague appear neither warm nor burning to those who touch them, although they are raging with fever inside, just as Thucydides describes.

Galen’s remarks upon Thucydides’s description are most likely in reference to the latter’s devastating account of the Plague of Athens in 430 BC, which wiped out around two-thirds of Athens’s population. Galen might have understandably thought the two afflictions were one and the same. I love that Galen was just casually familiar with a text written six hundred years before his time! Reading history books is great! However, the two plagues don’t have much in common other than victims developing a high fever and then dying. Today, the Plague of Athens is usually thought to have been bubonic plague or possibly the ebola virus, whereas modern physicians suspect the Antonine plague was smallpox.

Still, it is interesting that Thucydides is referenced, because the Plague of Athens was regarded as an apocalyptic event. Thucydides writes:

Mortality raged without restraint. The bodies of dying men lay one upon another, and half-dead creatures reeled about the streets and gathered round all the fountains in their longing for water. The sacred places also in which they had quartered themselves were full of corpses of persons that had died there, just as they were; for as the disaster passed all bounds, men, not knowing what was to become of them, became utterly careless of everything, whether sacred or profane.

By comparing the two, Galen gives a sense of the magnitude of the Antonine plague—unless he is wildly hyperbolic. Given his personality, I can see how that might give one pause. But although Galen was a showboater, he wasn’t deliberately inaccurate about anything except the greatness of his own skills.

Galen is less interested in the historical and societal impact of his plague than Thucydides was. His writings focus instead on how certain ailments progressed and what factors might indicate a patient’s potential survival. Galen writes: Black excrement was a symptom of those who had the disease, whether they survived or perished of it … if the stool was not black, the exanthem always appeared. All those who excreted black stool died of it.⁹ This kind of writing is great. This is one of the first times in the historical record that a figure writes about a disease as a physician rather than as a historian. Doubtless that information was of great interest to anyone who was tending to a loved one, insofar as if their feces turned black, you would know to start making funeral arrangements.

Today, experts turn to Galen’s writings to determine the precise nature of the plague. Through the precision of his descriptions, we know that about two weeks after the first symptoms of the Antonine plague (the blisters), a rash would begin to coat the tongue and throat of the afflicted. Galen also noted that many victims coughed up blood. He describes one man as vomiting up scabs, which is maybe the foulest image I can give you.

As horrible as the disease sounds, not everyone died from it. If you had what Galen called black exanthema (which means a breaking out or a widespread rash), you had a good likelihood of surviving. Galen even tells, happily, of a man rising from his bed on the twelfth day of the disease. He claims:

On those who would survive who had diarrhea, a black exanthema appeared on the whole body. Due to a remnant of blood, which had putrefied in the fever blisters, like some ash that nature had deposited on the body. Of some of those who became ulcerated, the part of the surface called the scab fell away and then the remaining part nearby was healthy and after one or two days became scarred over. In those places where it was not ulcerated the exanthema was rough and scabby and fell away like some husk and hence all became healthy.¹⁰

There’s debate today over whether the plague that led to Rome’s fall was typhus or measles or smallpox. I am on Team Smallpox!

However, no matter which disease it was, the debate would have made no difference to anyone at the time. There was no medicine that would come close to treating any of them. Before 1600, people would have difficulty differentiating any type of disease from another; any quickly spreading epidemic would simply be referred to as a plague.

Scholars also continue to debate over the total death toll from the Antonine plague. Frank McLynn notes, Even if we split the difference between the most impressive scholarly studies, we can’t get lower than a total mortality of 10 million.¹¹ It was probably higher! McLynn himself estimates the total death toll as around 18 million. At the height of the outbreak, slightly later in 189, Cassius Dio claimed it caused around two thousand deaths a day in Rome. There’s certainly no estimate that makes the death toll from this plague anything short of overwhelming.

I’d love to tell you about how the disease was treated, cured, or even prevented with any degree of effectiveness. But I can’t! It was the year 166, and that optimism is reserved for future chapters in history. The Roman people may have prayed for a cure, but the best they could hope for was someone who was able to keep society minimally functional. Because if you are a citizen of any time, you really don’t want a repeat of the Plague of Athens, where corpses were piling up in the temples. In almost every plague throughout history, it takes a remarkably strong leader just to keep the bodies out of the streets.

Rome was fortunate. That leader was Marcus Aurelius, the last of those described by Machiavelli as the Five Good Emperors. Beyond being the emperor who employed Galen, Marcus Aurelius practiced a philosophy you’re probably familiar with: Stoicism. If not, some freshman taking Philosophy 101 is going to tell you about it with great excitement one of these days. I will preempt that student by saying that the basic tenet of Stoicism is to exercise reason and employ restraint over emotions, especially the negative ones like anger and greed. One should attempt to behave in accordance with nature, accepting and being prepared for the unchangeable aspects of existence, such as death. The philosophy is beautifully summarized by Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations: Say to yourself in the early morning: I shall meet today inquisitive, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men. All of these things have come upon them through ignorance of real good and ill. But, because I have seen the nature of what is good and right, I can neither be harmed by any of them, for no man will involve me in wrong, nor can I be angry with my kinsman or hate him; for we have come into the world to work together.¹²

Stoics attempted to be guided by logic and reason rather than fleeting worldly pleasures. The practice of Stoicism supposedly allowed people to lead more peaceful, rational lives. Some citizens thought this philosophy made Marcus Aurelius hard to relate to, but, on the whole, Stoicism is straightforward and sensible, and the philosophy was popular. Certainly, it seems like it would be extremely useful in crisis situations.

I like to think that, across the ages, the Roman people considered this endorsement of Stoicism, collectively shook their heads, and responded, Nah. As soon as the plague broke out, the population almost immediately abandoned calm, rational Stoicism in favor of believing in magic and killing

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