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Excerps
Pestilenz
copyrighted material
Excerp: Pestilence
“Diseases travel back and forth as far as the world is and do not stay in one place. If someone wants to recognize many illnesses, he also wanders - if he wanders far, he experiences a lot and gets to know a lot."
Paracelsus (1493-1541)
Prologue
In the icy loft, a pale girl shivers violently and even her audience shudders in sympathy. Her lover has to support her while cooing that her beauty reminds him of the dawn of a new day. The compliment is over the top and his sweetheart retorts in lyrical soprano that he must mean a sunset. It transpires this fading heroine is dying…Music buffs will recognise the duet of Mimi and her swain Rodolpho in which they exchange a tearful farewell. Thanks to Giaccomo Puccini’s divine music for his opera La Bohéme the ill-fated embroiderer became immortal even if she dies according to the Libretto. Partly because Puccini and many fellow artists romanticised consumption by painting an aesthetically pleasing picture of it’s victims wasting away, we underestimate the grief this infection causes. Each year 1,5 million humans succumb to Tuberculosis, eaten up from their insides by the terrible bacterium, and yet no soundtrack graces their demise. Puccini’s masterpiece resoundingly illustrates why the impact of infectious diseases can’t be reduced to pathogens, courses and symptoms. That is exactly what my book is about, I illuminate the age old trauma of plagues and pandemics in a comprehensive way, taking into account medical, ecological, historical and cultural aspects. As an anthropologist I borderline natural science and the humanities. My kind refers to many disciplines to reconstruct the everyday life of mankind in historical and prehistorical times. Furthermore, we focus on human environmental interactions, highlighting the way people reshaped their habitats and how on the other hand their fate has been railroaded by biogeographical settings. A case in point are Infectious diseases, which have been a strong selective force during the early days of human evolution. Expect a time traveller’s guide which takes You on a journey through the long history of plagues and pandemics. Like every guide this one points out important places, useful facts and key personalities to enhance Your understanding of the phenomenon pandemic. To lighten up the somewhat unwieldy topic I add in anecdotes and micro biographies of influential figures of the time honoured fight against plagues. One of them Sir Arthur Conan Doyle talks to us sometimes as physician sometime in disguise of his alter ego Sherlock Holmes. At first glance plagues and pandemics are rather off-putting destinations, but on closer inspection You will find them fascinating objectives, a force of nature which coined humanity right up into the 21th century. I want to arouse Your curiosity about the way ancient societies dealt with infectious diseases. Unfortunately, Zeitgeist and lifestyle of historic –never mind prehistoric- communities are only sparsely documented. Only royals and other celebrities left some traces in old chronicles and accounts. Everyday life and the fate of everyday people has to be pieced together out of paleontological and archeologic findings as well as from church registers and some passing remarks in ancient tomes. What effect had pandemics on our ancestors? How did they cope with traumatic plagues which killed up to four quarters of their communities? Has our perception of infectious diseases changed during the last century? You will find some parallels but also differences between historic pandemics and the recent COVID-19 outbreak. Kurt Tucholsky suggests to escape Your era’s tyranny through the study of history, just as travellers can only understand their homelands confinement when they watch it from afar. SARS-CoV-2 is still very much on our minds, to put the vicious virus on it’s place we should compare this last pandemic to previous ones. This may even put some some conspiracy theories into perspective. Even better, after our historical sightseeing tour we will understand the inter-dependencies between environments, infections and our own actions,which form an ecological framework for other pathogens to spread all over the world. Thus my book looks as well into the future, asking how we might prevent the next pandemic, which according to experts is already in the making.
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