(Electronic music)
-What’s up Wisecrack? Socially-distanced Jared here. Now, if you’re watching this,
chances are your life has recently been turned upside-down by the novel coronavirus. Covid-19
is currently causing mayhem all over the globe.
While biologists, sociologists, all the -ologists really, are going to have plenty to say about
this whole thing in the coming years, it’s impossible to predict the full extent of the
virus’s impact. All we really know is that the world will
most likely look different when this all shakes out. That’s because every epidemic or pandemic
in history, from the black plague to tuberculosis to HIV, has left a sizable mark on humanity.
Obviously, there’s the tragic death toll. But diseases have also altered, shaped and
reshaped the course of social and political history.
Sometimes the connections are very literal: typhoid is speculated to have knocked out
Alexander the Great, the bubonic plague seems to have fast-tracked the downfall of the Byzantine
empire, and measles or smallpox likely did the same to the Roman Empire. But diseases
have also kick-started everything from sexist morality laws to public health infrastructure
to rigorous government surveillance, so much so that it’s not a stretch to say that diseases
created the modern state as we know it. Don’t believe us? We’ve got NOTHING but time to
prove it, so join us on this journey through the nasty microorganisms that have changed
human history in this Wisecrack Edition on How The Plague Created the Modern World
Today, we’re going to focus on the bubonic plague
because of the unique way it shaped the modern world.
Now don’t let the fun name fool you: Bubonic plague is a horrifically lethal disease that
mostly spreads via fleas who hang out on rats until they get the chance to JUMP onto humans
and chow down. The plague has swept various countries and even entire continents throughout
history, from ancient Byzantium to mid-19th century India to twenty-first century Madagascar
but we’re going to focus on the second plague pandemic, known as the Black Death, which
began in the mid-14th century. Like your dramatic roommate’s troubled relationship, it was
on-again off-again for approximately 500 years, except it also killed up to 50% of Europeans
and didn’t end in make-up sex on your shared couch. Naturally, the plague generated terror,
panic, massive violence, and a surge in religiosity. People desperately fled infected cities, under
the prevailing wisdom of the time, which held that plague and other maladies were caused
by miasma, or the “diseased” air and all the gnarly smells that haunted city life.
Societies were unprepared, and physicians were powerless in the face of an ugly-as-hell
disease, often becoming sick themselves. The era’s increased urbanization meant more
people lived in closer, often unhygienic quarters, which made it all the easier for fleas to
jump from rats to humans to spread the disease. Also, increased international trade led to
many rat-infested boats transporting spices, textiles and, of course, bubonic plague from
country to country. Economies were decimated, social order overthrown, the works.
Take Naples, which had nearly half its population wiped out by the plague of 1656. As scholar
Frank Snowden writes in his book Epidemics and Society, “Every activity of normal life
ceased amidst shuttered shops, unemployment and hunger.” Snowden depressingly notes
that, after a while, too few people were left alive to bury all the dead. Throughout Europe,
suspected “sinners,” typically Jews and other religious dissenters, foreigners, accused
witches and sex workers were banished or even murdered by very scared, very dumb vigilantes.
Reeling governmental systems knew they had to act fast. Thus began what Snowden calls
“the first form of institutionalized public health.” In 15th century northern Italian
city-states, that meant drafting “plague regulations” which anointed new “health
magistrates” who were provided with full legislative, judicial and executive powers
in all matters related to public health. By the 16th century, in some cities, these initially
temporary posts had grown into permanent agencies, that is, Boards of Health. These efforts would,
according to Snowden, mark “a vast extension of state power into spheres of human life
that had never before been subject to political authority.” Such extensions ranged from
the regulation of butcher meat to the forced quarantining of entire populations.
In Venice, the Office of Health created two “lazzarettos,” or not-very-mellow islands
where ships coming from the eastern Mediterranean were brought to be disembarked and fumigated,
again, because they thought disease was spread through bad-smelling air. Hundreds of less-than-stoked
passengers were then isolated and guarded for 40 days, which would become known as a
“quarantine,” after the Italian word for 40. (This number, incidentally, was chosen
because in the Christian Scripture, 40 is associated with purification, Moses was on
Mount Sinai for 40 days before receiving the 10 commandments, Christ was tempted for 40
days, Christ stayed with his disciple for 40 days after his resurrection, etc. So basically
super solid science stuff.) As dumb as this was, it also happened to work because the
incubation period of bubonic plague was shorter than 40 days. Once the practice was found
to be apparently effective in quelling the spread in Venice, other European ports followed
suit.
Of course, there was still the threat of plague being spread by travelers on land - which
vigilante groups tried to stem by violently patrolling city walls. This practice eventually
became regulated, with troops being deployed to form “sanitary cordons,” i.e. military
barriers that stopped goods and people from entering and forced them into that adorable
40-day time-out. One cordon in Austria was a thousand miles long, required mandatory
service of basically all male peasants and lasted 161 YEARS.
As scholar Mitchell Hammond summarizes in his book Epidemics and the Modern World, these
kinds of actions became “integral to the modern notion of a functioning state that
assumed responsibility for the protection of borders and the preservation of health
amongst its citizens.” Hammond even argues that concerns about plague began to override
concerns about independence amongst Italian city states, leading to widespread cooperative
efforts to stem the disease.
But of course, it wasn’t just enough to keep people out. There was also the threat
of plague spreading *within* a city, which is where things get fascinatingly bleak. Sanitary
authorities took draconian measures to prevent the disease from spreading. They hired tons
of municipal officials to locate plague victims, transport them to lazarettos, and bring corpses
to plague burial grounds.
-“Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!”
-This was an intense process - picture often-drunk “searchers” and “body-clearers” barging
in to ship your seriously-ill roommate off to some random island. Plus, in Venice, around
two-thirds of lazaretto patients died, so this was, for all intents and purposes, a
likely death sentence. And if you did survive, you’d be charged for the stay.
A litany of other rules dotted various cities - including forcing pet owners to kill their
beloved fluffy friends, who were seen as potential sources of disease, which is the single saddest
fact I’ve ever learned. Other restrictions ranged from forbidding folks from selling
clothes to banning all public gatherings.
Sometimes,“isolation” methods were taken, wherein, the house of a sick person was marked
with a red cross and, in England, wrote the phrase “Lord have Mercy upon us.” Then,
the sick person and their ENTIRE household were forced into confinement without any option
for medical care and left to die.
So salient is the example of plague towns birthing modern power structures that philosopher
Michel Foucault called a town under plague “an exceptional disciplinary model.” In
other words, it was like a laboratory for the government’s exercise of social control.
Citing 17th-century French archives, Foucault details the way local governments separated
each plague-ridden town into districts, and those districts into quarters, those quarters
into roads, in a new process of segmenting public space. Then there was the literal organization
and segmenting of people: Every person in town was required to “register” themselves
in centralized records. Then, they had to go get provisions and head into “lock up,”
which meant basically never leaving the house, not even to walk your dog.
Long before CCTV or the NSA, Foucault argues that it was here that government surveillance
was born. In each town, a road supervisor, called a syndic, would collect the keys to
every house on his block, and lock the door from the outside like a prison guard. Syndics
would make daily role calls at each house. They’d call out the name of each inhabitant,
who, one by one, went to the window to describe their current health condition. It was best
to be frank because lying about your fever could get you the death penalty. Least chill
of all: Breaking quarantine was, and I can’t stress this enough, punishable by death!
Foucault notes that, under these extraordinary circumstances, “inspection functions ceaselessly.
The gaze is alert everywhere.” Stuck within the four walls of your probably shitty 17th
century home, every move you made was subject to supervision - a tactic that was entirely
unfamiliar. Privacy vanished under these conditions, as every status update about your health went
into the town’s permanent records. As Foucault notes, “The plague is met by order; its
function is to sort out every possible confusion.” In the process, such extreme measures make
each individual subject to an “omnipresent and omniscient power.” Thus, according to
Foucault, public health efforts ultimately were born and sustained as a means of controlling
urban space and the environment, and expanded political power drastically.
Foucault notes that some of the practices employed in plague towns could be related
to the way people with leprosy were treated when they were banished to leper colonies.
The big difference though is that rather than persecuting a select unfortunate few, fighting
the bubonic plague meant segmenting ALL of society, which arguably resulted in a much-more
significant proliferation of power, creating what Foucault called “the utopia of the
perfect city,” with perfect here meaning perfectly controlled.
Following these sorts of efforts, by the 18th century, plague did essentially disappear
from Europe. So draconian laws worked right? Well, maybe - Snowden notes that these policies
were probably only one aspect of what stopped the disease (with other aspects including
changes in climate, hygiene, and, hypothetically, genetic mutations.)
However, because these laws were typically heralded as the chief cause of Europe’s
salvation, they have been frequently replicated. Their apparent success has, in more recent
pandemics, resulted in governments behaving objectively shitty by forcibly detaining people,
surveilling them, and otherwise extinguishing their civil liberties and NO we don’t just
mean by closing all the IHOPs. During the third plague wave at the end of the 19th century,
colonial Britain attempted to enforce such measures in plague-ridden Bombay with a draconian
zeal that ignored local religious, cultural and medicinal practices. They divided sick
people from their families and burned infected houses to the ground in what Snowden calls
“public health by eviction and destruction.” So brutal was the effort that it caused half
the population to flee, thus paradoxically SPREADING the disease further because, again,
traveling fleas. Around the same time, over in the states, Chinese-Americans were also
ordered into quarantine with harsh laws that the courts eventually overturned.
So plagues caused intense laws that, when carried out badly, can seriously infringe
on life and liberty. What are we supposed to make of that fact now that many of us are
in complete lockdown? First off, just so we’re clear, stay the eff home. No one is burning
down houses, yet, in which case we’d probably complain.
In times like these, it’s also worth considering the fact that plague didn’t simply consolidate
government powers and enable abuse. They’ve also caused some pretty POSITIVE changes in
society, such as contributing to the lower-class uprising in England that eventually ended
feudalism to fostering a nationalist sentiment in India that would eventually lead to the
country’s independence from colonial control. What’s more, the plague’s role in strengthening
the modern state isn’t all bad either, because that state gives you drinkable water, paved
roads, and is a pretty big player in the whole “not dying of smallpox thing.”
All that said, it’s hard to know what the effect of COVID19 will be. While bubonic plague
is kind of the Woodstock of infectious diseases, other epidemics have also catalyzed their
fair share of social change. Syphillis, once known as “the pox” created huge stigmas
around sex work, and laws to ban it. Small pox introduced by Europeans obliterated indigenous
populations in the Americas, thwarting any successful resistance to colonization. A smattering
of diseases like cholera and typhoid created public health concerns that led to the widespread
adaptation of indoor plumbing in urban areas. And weirdly enough, tuberculosis, which spread
by coughs, provoked fears over hygiene, leading some to speculate that tubercular bacteria
could hang out in a dude’s beard or mustache. As a result, facial hair tragically disappeared
from turn-of-the-century America, for a time at least.
What’s ultimately so fascinating, and also scary, about diseases is the unintended ways
they change our perceptions of society, health, and even our bodies. While we’re plenty
grateful for government-run indoor plumbing, it’s still pretty weird to realize that
much of the way the state gets involved in our day to day lives stems from the terror
and desperation caused by infectious diseases. But what do you think, Wisecrack? Can we blame
bubonic plague for all our issues with authority? What legacy should we expect COVID-19 to leave
in its wake? And above all, when will I be allowed to leave the house again?
Let us know what you think in the comments. Stay safe, healthy, and sane