Just Finished Reading: Plague – A Very Short Introduction by Paul Slack (FP: 2012)

Yes, its VSI time again – AKA holiday time a few weeks ago and the VSI books are thin and easy to carry in groups without breaking my shoulder carrying them home!

Plague is interesting – except of course when you’re living through it and have no clear idea of what’s going on. This was, until frightening recently, the way of things. From the historical record, going back as far as Ancient Greece, periodic plagues ravaged Europe, East Asia and India, much to the consternation of the people living there. With little idea of how germs work and are transmitted they had little clue how to fight the disease or how to cope with the devastation it left behind. Plague arguably transformed the entire history of Europe and may have even given rise to modern society itself by tipping the Feudal system over the edge by accelerating its decline and sowing the foundations for early Capitalism.

The Black Death is the most well-known, and one of the best recorded of the European plagues but there is still some controversy over what disease this actually represented. The historical record is unclear and there is some evidence that the disease might indeed have been several different, if complimentary, diseases working concurrently – possibly mutating as the moved across the globe in pulses. Before the advent of antibiotics the only certain way to prevent the spread of plague was isolation and quarantine. This worked time and again in small hamlets and larger towns across Europe and sometimes failed spectacularly when a single infected person was allowed across the barrier – whole villages are recorded to have died that way.

Plague, of course, is back in the news again with the recent major Ebola outbreak in Africa. It looks like it’s going to get much worse before it gets better. The possibility of millions of deaths was mentioned on the news this morning. Imagine now if we lived in a world without modern hospitals, drugs and 24 hour care. Imagine if we lived in a world where we had no clear idea what disease was, how it was transmitted or how to react if we or a loved one contracted it. This is what it was like when plague moved across the world killing millions in a matter of months before disappearing as inexplicably as it arrived only to reappear again months or years later in a different place or, more frightening still, in the same place with the same mortality rate again, and again, and again. The horror hardly bares thinking about.

Pandemics are an important part of human history and might play an important part in our future with emergent diseases coupled with antibiotic resistance. It is not a nice feeling to think that we might be slipping back into a world easily recognised by our 17th or even 14th century ancestors. To get an idea of what that future world could look like you could do a lot worse than read this fascinating little volume. But be warned, it has an excellent bibliography and you might find yourself digging deeper into the plague pits of centuries gone by.