History Is Shaped by Germs Not By Humans

 
   

In his new book  Pathogenesis Dr Jonathan Kennedy argues that Infectious diseases have been the driving forces of human history.  Diseases have shaped humanity, from the development of agriculture to the global rise of religion, he says. Dr Kennedy is a visiting fellow at Queen Mary University, London where he teaches in global health policy.
 
The dominance of homo sapiens and extinction of Neanderthals was likely the result of disease, he told Kim Hill.
 
“I always went along with the dominant view that homo sapiens survived, whereas Neanderthals became extinct, because we were more intelligent.
 
“This is such a dominant argument that it's even inherent in the name that we give to ourselves, homo sapiens or wise humans, whereas the Neanderthals, in the 19th century were sometimes even referred to as homo stupidness. Stupid man or stupid humans.”
 
Over the last 20 years there's been an increasing amount of evidence that shows Neanderthals weren't that different to us, he says.
 
“They painted on cave walls, they used medicinal herbs to treat various illnesses, they buried their dead, they talked to one another.”
 
So why did they disappear 50,000 years ago? Most likely homo sapiens gave them diseases for which they had no resistance, he says.
 
“We had been separated from Neanderthals for over half a million years, we'd been living in tropical Africa, and they'd been in western Eurasia.
 
“We'd been living in totally different disease environments. And when we started to push out of Africa 60,000 years ago, we were carrying diseases that the Neanderthals hadn't developed any resistance to.”
 
When we met with the Neanderthals in the eastern Mediterranean, they died out, and we survived as homo sapiens came from a more tropical; microbe rich environment, he says.
 
Thousands of years later in the 14th century infectious disease wiped out two thirds of the world’s population, but the cataclysm of the Black Death also unleashed a period of extraordinary innovation and social change, he says.
 
“It basically kickstarted a series of events that over decades, and even hundreds of years created the world in which we now live, a world in which it's no longer a feudal society where you have these warring Lords a bit like Game of Thrones, and then at the bottom of the social pyramid, you have serfs who are working on their, on their little strips of land and just trying to try to scratch a living.”
 
Feudal society couldn’t function without plenty of serfs to exploit, he says.
 
“The serfs realised that suddenly labour was in great demand. And cultivatable land was really, really plentiful, so they struggled for the better terms.
 
“And certainly, in England, this led to a situation where 100 years after the Black Death, the vast majority of serfs have won their freedom.”
 
Human history from the adoption of agriculture about 12,000 years ago is punctuated by these devastating pandemics, he says.
 
“Infectious diseases have been one of the real driving forces of human history. And I think this is an interesting way to think about the world because often when we think of history, we focus on the role of great men and great women in really kind of rushing historical change.
 
“But actually, when we look at history through this perspective, we see that in many ways, infectious diseases, are the real tidal force that's pushing the past forward.”
 
Just as disease has shaped human society, so too has human collaboration, he says. Overcoming the squalor that accompanied the industrial revolution in England is an example.
 
“The industrial revolution reaches its height in the middle of the 19th century and you have unprecedented economic growth, you have this massive creation of wealth.
 
“But at the same time, health among the majority of the population, in Liverpool and Manchester, which are the centres of the Industrial Revolution, life expectancy for factory workers falls to 15 in Liverpool and 17 in Manchester. This is really, really catastrophic.”
 
The only way to overcome this massive public health crisis was through democratisation, he says.
 
“These new local politicians that were really driven by an ethos of public service. And they directly tax the middle classes and indirectly taxed the lower classes, the factory workers, and they spent enormous amounts of money on sanitation systems and drinking water, and then later improving health systems.
 
“And this is what enabled the UK to kind of have this massive transformation in life expectancy at the end of the 19th. And the first half of the 20th century, this this massive investment in public health and wellbeing.”
 
Covid reminds us, he says, that collaboration on that scale will be needed in the future with scientists predicting another Covid-like pandemic could emerge in the next 50 years.
 
“I'm certainly not the first person to say it but we need to rethink the focus that we have on economic growth and think about how that economic growth can be used to improve the health and wellbeing of the majority of the population because money in and of itself is of no use. If you're dying at a young age or living a very unhealthy life.”

 Listen to the full conversation  on the podcast.

 
Jonathan Kennedy: how germs made history. By Kim Hill. Radio New Zealand, May 6, 2023.
 

Instant Genius is a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. And in this episode, we're exploring how human diseases have shaped global history.

Over time, we have become infected with various viruses, bacteria and other microorganisms, which have had a huge impact on our evolution. Dr Jonathan Kennedy, a reader in politics and global health, tells us about the close links between disease and colonialism, how infection shaped the migration of humans out of Africa, and what we can all learn from the COVID pandemic.

 Instant Genius Podcast: How human disease changed history, with Dr Jonathan Kennedy. By Alice Lipscombe-Southwell.  BBC Science Focus,   April 3, 2023

Forget ‘great men’ – infection and disease are the really important forces in the development of humankind, believes public health specialist Jonathan Kennedy
 
Barts pathology museum is usually open to the public only by special appointment. But today, I’m in luck. I find myself with an unexpected open sesame in the form of Dr Jonathan Kennedy, the director of the MSc and iBSc global public health programmes at Barts and the London Medical School, and while he has his photograph taken up on one of its mezzanine floors, I’m free to wander around alone. (At least, I think I’m alone; the museum is nothing if not ghostly.)
 
On the same site as the hospital in the City of London, this purpose-built, glass-roofed Victorian building is home to about 4,000 medical specimens, the majority of them displayed on open shelves. Every part of the body is represented and every kind of illness and injury – though tracking down a particular condition can be tricky for the non-medical. When I finally find the gnarled, yellow spine of a patient who suffered from tuberculosis – I was after something that speaks to Kennedy’s new book, which is about infectious disease and its effect on human civilisation – it’s largely down to luck. The vertebrae in question just happen to be next to the museum’s most famous exhibit: the skull of John Bellingham, who assassinated the British prime minister, Spencer Perceval, in 1812.
 
In Pathogenesis: How Germs Made History, there is no mention of Perceval. But Bellingham’s skull, preserved after the dissection of his body that followed his hanging, inevitably brings to mind Kennedy’s chapter on the Industrial Revolution – a period when previously uncommon pathogens such as TB and cholera began to thrive in our cities (cholera did not appear in Europe until the 1830s, having hitched a lift in both the guts and the linen of travellers from south-east Asia). Not only did infectious diseases then account for 55% of deaths in London; cholera epidemics in particular also led to a rise in the public’s distrust of doctors, who were sometimes attacked as they transported suspected sufferers to hospital for isolation.

 
Murderers’ bodies were sent for dissection by law, as Bellingham’s had been; the medical profession was hungry for cadavers and this ensured a supply line. However, as Kennedy notes, the 1828 murders committed by William Burke and William Hare, who sold their victims’ bodies to Edinburgh University’s medical school, caused people to believe that cholera patients, removed from their communities by doctors, were about to be similarly dispatched. The “anatomists”, of course, were absolutely right to compel isolation, but most of their patients would indeed die, even if they didn’t kill them personally. So far as treatments went, doctors were clueless. One of their more bizarre cures involved injecting turpentine and mutton stew into the patient’s intestines via the anus.
 
Kennedy’s book, which aims to show how infectious disease has shaped us from the time of the Neanderthals to the era of Covid-19, is full of amazing facts like these. For days after I read it, I kept thinking of Pope Clement VI who, when the Black Death reached 14th-century Avignon (where he was exiled), retired on the advice of his physician to his chamber, seeing nobody, and spending all day and all night between two great fires – the flames of which kept the rats that were carrying the disease at bay. Clement did very well to survive. It’s estimated that somewhere in the region of 60% of the population of Europe (about 50 million out of 80 million people) died from the plague between 1346 and 1353. Meanwhile, the economy more or less ground to a halt.
 
Kennedy is a sociologist who somehow ended up – he describes “a meandering intellectual journey” – in public health. “Before coronavirus, I published a paper looking at the links between populism and vaccine confidence,” he says. “So when the outbreak started, the rational thing to do as an academic might have been to get my hands dirty working on Covid-19. But actually, I struggled with the way my work was suddenly the news and so I went in a slightly different direction.
 
“With Pathogenesis, I wanted to broaden [the discussion] out. In the pandemic, most experts stopped saying ‘this is an aberration’ pretty early on, for the simple reason that if you look back, you can see that it really isn’t exceptional. Over the course of human history, it has been normal to have these pandemics that not only kill a lot of people and bring civilisations crashing down, but which also, sometimes, create space for new kinds of societies to emerge. The book is an intellectual response to the slightly myopic way some people viewed the pandemic. It’s a long view, one that we couldn’t perhaps take at the time because everyone was in such a panic.”
 
It’s hard to overstate the role that infectious diseases played in the foundation of the Spanish empire
Pathogenesis doesn’t only cover thousands of years of history – it seeks radically to alter the way the reader views many of the (often very well-known) events it describes. Having read recent research by scientists, archaeologists and anthropologists, for instance, Kennedy suggests that Homo sapiens became the dominant species of human not as a result of any inherent intellectual superiority over Neanderthals, but because our immune system was better suited to adapting to pathogens as we migrated north from Africa. He also looks at the role disease played in colonisers’ ability (or not) to govern their empires.
 
It’s generally accepted that Rome fell partly because of plague (probably smallpox), its armies weakened by illness. But by his telling, had it not been for an Ebola-like pandemic in the second century, Christianity would never have become so widespread – a slightly more surprising analysis. What part, he asks, did pathogens play in the near-miraculous victories of conquistadors such as Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro in Central and South America in the early 16th century? Kennedy, as you will have gathered, doesn’t believe in the so-called great man theory of history. He believes in the sick man theory of history, for no soldier can march if he is dying and no king can rule who is weakened by infection.
 
With this book, he set himself a mammoth task. Where on earth did he start? “Well, I guess my starting point was microbes,” he tells me (we’re in a seminar room now, far away from all the pickled lungs and hearts). “Within us, there are 40 trillion bacteria. They’ve evolved over millions of years and we now know they’re playing all sorts of roles in our lives. This blows my mind and the question I wanted to ask as a sociologist was: if these tiny things have such an influence on our bodies, what kind of effect might they have on the body politic, the body social, the body economic? Humans make history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing. Microbes are a huge force in creating those circumstances.”

 
Together, we roam haphazardly over some of the history in his book. I want to know what he found most mind-boggling. “One thing that really came out of the whole project was the absolute baselessness of white ideology,” he says. “Obviously, that comes to the fore when we’re discussing colonialism. It seems bizarre to me now that people would put down Pizarro’s conquering of the Inca empire with only 168 troops to the fact that he had superior weapons. It’s hard to overstate the role that infectious diseases played in the foundation of the Spanish empire.” The Spanish brought smallpox with them, among other diseases, which devastated the Indigenous population. This was followed by measles, an infection now thought to have been similar to salmonella, and flu. Local populations fell by 90%. The Spanish invaders interpreted all this as a sign that God supported them.
 
Yet we cling to assumptions about superiority. “Ever since we discovered the Neanderthals were a separate species, we have dehumanised them, seeing them as these brutish cave men,” Kennedy goes on. “But it seems like they were just as smart as us. They could talk, they created cave art. They buried their dead and observed rituals. To realise that Homo sapiens were migrating out of a tropical region, and that they were carrying more microbes, and that the Neanderthals further north struggled to deal with those… it’s a neat reflection of the arguments about colonialism.”
 
In the context of our own times, Neanderthal man is particularly interesting to him. We now know that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals interbred, with the result that we carry their genes. The Neanderthal genome has, moreover, been sequenced (by Prof Svante Pääbo, the winner of the 2022 Nobel prize for physiology), and papers published since have shown that Neanderthal gene variants in the contemporary population have had an impact on responses to Covid (those carrying one such variant were 22% less likely to end up in intensive care compared with infected people of the same age). “It’s crazy to think that something that happened 60,000 years ago impacts on whether or not we have a really terrible reaction to Covid,” says Kennedy.
 
But if he is fascinated by the past, he’s also concerned about the future. “We’re living in a golden age for microbes. Population densities are increasing, people are moving more quickly around the world, the climate is changing. We’ve seen the emergence not just of Covid, but of HIV/Aids, Zika, Dengue fever, Sars and Ebola. It seems now that we won’t be able to conquer infectious diseases. Rather, we’re going to have to learn to deal with the new diseases that periodically arrive to threaten us.” If history teaches us anything, he believes, it’s that things will only change in terms of health if we stick together: “These are global societal issues. If one rich country tries to save itself, it’ll still be doomed.”
 
Has writing Pathogenesis made him feel pessimistic? On balance, it hasn’t. While antibiotics may soon cease to be effective in treating some illnesses, a prospect he finds frightening and “hard to fathom”, in the future microbes may themselves provide the solution: “Viruses might be the new antibiotics. They kill about half the bacteria in the world every day. It’s about finding the right one to target the right bacteria.”

 
He thinks of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the 17th-century Delft haberdasher who pioneered the microscope. “No more pleasant sight has ever come before my eyes,” wrote Van Leeuwenhoek, enraptured by the teeming new world he saw beneath his lens. There is, Kennedy says, still so much to discover. “We’re incredibly vulnerable as a species, but we’re also incredibly ingenious. A hundred and fifty years ago, we didn’t even know that microbes cause infectious diseases. Now we’re analysing Neanderthal DNA.”
 
 
‘We’re in a golden age for microbes’: the man rewriting history from the perspective of germs. By Rachel Cooke. The Guardian, April 2, 2023.

Penguin

The evangelical right is always waiting for the Apocalypse, counting the days, charting signs and wonders, making calculations as to the time and hour of the end times. One would think that in 2020, when the world was faced with a global catastrophe and a complete breakdown in the normal order of things, they would seize on Covid-19 as a sure sign that those days had come. But for the most part, they chose to deny rather than embrace the coronavirus: Their president and their pastors downplayed its severity and its impact, claimed numbers of deaths were exaggerated, and ridiculed those taking it seriously. Rather than embrace the end of days, they demanded a return to the way things were.
 
Perhaps this has to do with the realization that many of us faced in those early months of 2020: that we were suddenly and radically living on the virus’s terms, not our own. Instead of a grand battle of good and evil with humans at the center of the action, we were obligated to learn and adapt our behavior to a nonhuman organism whose motives and purpose were incomprehensible to us. How was it possible, in such an ordeal, to maintain the supposed truth of Genesis 1:26, that God intended humanity to have dominion over livestock and all of nature? Perhaps the coronavirus had dominion over us, and we were the livestock?
 
Jonathan Kennedy’s Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues takes this idea as its inspiration, asking us to rethink our relationship to the bacteria and viruses that drive pandemics. Perhaps, Kennedy suggests, we are not the grand protagonists to our story; perhaps we are just bit players in a larger drama. He retells the story of human civilization from its earliest prehistoric roots to the current decade, not from the perspective of its Great Men so much as its Great Diseases—the bacteria and viruses that have dogged us since Homo sapiens emerged as a species. For Kennedy, it is smallpox, yellow fever, and malaria that matter far more than Charlemagne, Cortes, or Napoleon; he argues not only that “humans have a far less significant place in the world than we used to think” but also that “microbes play a much more important role than we would have believed just a few years ago.”
 
Quoting Stephen Jay Gould, who wrote that “on any possible, reasonable, or fair criterion, bacteria are—and always have been—the dominant form of life on earth,” Kennedy argues that we are as much a product of disease as we are of any conscious decisions. “Outbreaks of infectious diseases have destroyed millions of lives and decimated whole civilizations,” he writes in his introduction, “but the devastation has created opportunities for new societies and ideas to emerge and thrive. In this way, pathogens have been the protagonists in many of the most important social, political, and economic transformations in history.” A radical thought: What if we, for all our hopes, dreams, and best laid plans, are nothing more than the raw material used by bacteria and viruses to shape the world in their image?
 
Kennedy lays this argument out through reframing well-known historical events in terms of the diseases and epidemics that led to them. The rise and fall of empires, the brutal conquests of colonial powers, the map as we now know it—all this has depended far more on disease than we may have thought. Some of this may sound familiar: for example, the fact that European settlers in North America, both intentionally and unintentionally, used smallpox to wipe out Indigenous populations, to make the work of colonizing easier. Entirely new to North America, smallpox “raced ahead of the Spanish,” in Kennedy’s words, devastating whole communities. The disease proved decisive: “Without the help of Old World pathogens,” he argues, “early efforts to colonize the American mainland foundered.” Take, for example, the Spanish conquistadors’ attempts to take Tenochtitlan. The first try failed, but a second expeditionary force arriving a year later brought with it smallpox, which devastated the city and brought the Spanish victory.
 
More subtle was the arrival of the Puritans and the settlement of Plymouth Colony. Earlier attempts to build colonies in New England had faced fierce resistance from the Indigenous peoples already living there. The Popham Colony in southern Maine failed after 14 months; the French trading post near Cape Cod also fell to Native attacks. But these earlier attempts laid the groundwork for the Puritans by spreading disease; when the Pilgrims got there, they found abandoned villages with grain and beans that they used to get through their first winter, the remnants of Native communities destroyed by smallpox. While these Europeans claimed this food as “God’s good providence,” Kennedy suggests instead that “their gratitude at Thanksgiving should be directed to the Old World pathogens that made the settlement of Plymouth Colony possible.” The rest, unfortunately, is history—crucially, in Kennedy’s version of events, the real colonizer of the Americas was the variola virus, with the Spanish and English as merely its unwitting hosts.

 
Other examples that Kennedy invokes may be more surprising. Despite the Roman Empire’s vaunted aqueduct and sewer systems, he explains, Romans’ lack of any understanding of germ theory meant that their water infrastructure festered with disease, hastening the empire’s downfall. Citing Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome, Kennedy argues that “pandemics caused immense damage and played a crucial role in weakening the Roman Empire,” far more so, he claims, than the “Barbarians” at the gates.
 
Pathogenesis also convincingly argues that the birth of the nation of Haiti, and perhaps even the rise of the United States in its current shape, can be traced to yellow fever and the humble mosquito, Aedes aegypti, its primary host. In 1802, about a decade after the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution, Napoleon sent an expeditionary force of some 30,000 troops to its former colony Saint-Domingue, hoping to retake the land and reimpose slavery. The freed Haitians, however, defeated them not with military might but with disease. As the rebels’ commander, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, told his troops in March 1802, “The whites from France cannot hold out against us here in Saint-Domingue. They will fight well at first, but soon they will fall sick and die like flies.” Dessalines’s army used the island’s yellow fever against the invading French: It avoided a straightforward conflict when Napoleon’s troops first arrived in spring, drawing them into a quagmire that lasted until summer, when the rains came. With the rains came standing water, the perfect breeding ground for Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that carried yellow fever and proved a crucial ally against the French. According to one historian’s estimate, of the 65,000 French soldiers sent to recapture the colony, more than 50,000 died, overwhelmingly from yellow fever.
 
Unable to maintain their Caribbean outpost, the French ultimately sold the sprawling Louisiana territory to the United States; a fact that leads to Kennedy’s conclusion that the U.S. as it exists today owes a great debt of gratitude to Haiti’s mosquito population.
 
Again and again, Pathogenesis suggests that the course of history has less to do with our own volition and more to do with the ways in which different diseases fared in different climates. In places where Europeans were less susceptible to disease, such as North America, colonizers brought families and established settlements that eventually became wealthy democracies. In places were Europeans were more susceptible to pathogens, such as sub-Saharan Africa, they built rapacious, extractive industries meant to maximize profit with minimal exposure to the environment, men plundering all they could before returning to their families in Europe healthy and wealthy. What they left behind were landscapes ripped of natural resources and countries that, decades later, still struggle to achieve any kind of remote economic parity with former colonial powers.
 
At times, the thesis seems stretched a little thin—Kennedy argues that the rise of Christianity over Roman pagan religions can be traced to its version of the afterlife, an afterlife that became attractive in the face of repeated plagues and pandemics. But it would seem that if the issue here is simply mortality, the Roman Empire’s ceaseless warfare might drive soldiers into embracing Christianity’s afterlife as well. At other times, Kennedy’s desire to offer pandemics as the key behind all of human history means Pathogenesis can veer into the same territory as the kinds of books he critiques—Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens and Stephen Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, among them—books that offer “this one weird trick” to explain all of human history.
 
But this quibble doesn’t detract from the main idea that drives Pathogenesis. What the book reveals is the plain fact that humans are often not the only actors on the great stage of history that we assume we are, and that we may not even be the most important. We have used and been used by diseases so repeatedly that, by the end of Kennedy’s book, one begins to wonder if we may exist primarily to spread and promulgate microscopic organisms and viruses. And if that isn’t our main purpose, it certainly remains something we are exceedingly good at—a true calling, you could say.
 
Our diseases, ourselves. For pathogens need us as much as we need them; the story here is of the interdependence of us and the microbes inside us. Rather than showing how insignificant humans are in the grand scheme of the universe, the true effect of Kennedy’s Pathogenesis may be to invite us to further rethink our long held binary that attempts to separate the human from the rest of the living organisms on this planet.
 
It also helps to put the last few years in greater context. If one sees human history as more or less constantly engaged in a complicated dynamic with microbes, creating and responding to pandemics, then the Covid-19 outbreak is less of an apocalyptic interruption in the world, heralding the end times, and instead the latest way in which humans have played hosts to yet another player on the world stage.
 
Are Germs the Main Characters in History? Outbreaks of disease may have had a greater effect on the course of events than the actions and plans of humans. By Colin Dickey. The New Republic  ,May 3, 2023. 

Most accounts of humanity’s origins, and our evolution since, have understandably put Homo sapiens center stage. It was our ingenuity, our tools, our cultural savvy that enabled our species to survive long past others—that allowed wars to be won, religions to blossom, and empires to rise and expand while others crumbled and fell. But despite what the schoolbooks tell us, humans might not be the main protagonists in our own history. As Jonathan Kennedy argues in his new book, Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues, the microscopic agents behind our deadliest infectious diseases should be taking center stage instead. Germs and pestilence—and not merely the people who bore them—have shaped inflection point after inflection point in our species’ timeline, from our first major successful foray out of Africa to the rise of Christianity, to even the United States’ bloody bid for independence.
 
Three years after the outbreak of a devastating infectious disease with a staggering death toll, spending time with a book that vividly details the microbial richness of human history might not rank high on most people’s must-do lists. But those with enough of an epidemiological appetite to pick up Kennedy’s new book will be gratifyingly—if not necessarily cheerfully—rewarded with the knowledge that their read was at least well timed. Epidemics, Kennedy reminds us, are not aberrations in our overstuffed, interconnected, climate-change-fractured world. And when the next one arrives, as it surely will, our response to it will be better if we remember, and avoid, the many mistakes of the past.
 
Kennedy’s book isn’t meant as revisionism; the broad strokes of history remain intact. But it gently sidelines humans—and, in doing so, humbles them. In the grand scheme of things, he writes, we have far less influence over the fate of our own species than we might like to think: “Very often we don’t make history in circumstances of our own choosing, but in circumstances created by microbes.” Humans aren’t alone, even in their own tale. We’re constantly being puppeteered by our viral, bacterial, and parasitic passengers—simply riding a narrative arc that’s been constantly bent by our bugs.
 
Consider, for instance, the vanishing of the Neanderthals, one of the early human species that lived alongside and interbred with ours. Neanderthals were once perceived as brutish and dumb—intellectual inferiors who whimpered out after our ultra-brainy species spread over the globe. Decades of scientific findings now exist to refute that notion, showing that Neanderthals were extraordinarily sophisticated—painting caves, lighting fires, even making use of medicinal plants. What snuffed them out wasn’t their lack of smarts but a lack of immunity to the (likely viral) diseases that Homo sapiens introduced to them as the two species mingled.
 
That same tragic motif plays out repeatedly over some 60,000 years, as Kennedy points to the cast of microbes that played startlingly prominent roles in several otherwise-familiar chapters of our history. Neolithic farmers may have edged out their hunter-gatherer predecessors with the help of hepatitis B, tuberculosis, measles, and a bevy of mosquito-borne viruses; diseases such as typhus and smallpox may have helped turn the tide against Athens in the Peloponnesian War. Spanish conquistadors appear to have been aided in their obliteration of the native populations by smallpox—an inadvertent weapon at least as powerful as any tool forged by hand. And although it’s clear that various sociopolitical factors were key to the ultimate founding of the United States, it’s also a bit fun to cheekily consider malaria-carrying mosquitoes as among the “founding mothers of the United States,” as the historian John McNeill once put it. The parasitic disease—which established itself in the American South prior to the Revolution—killed eight times more British troops than did American guns, potentially enough to substantially tilt the odds.
 
Other societal forces such as religion and politics have infectious roots too. Horrific bouts of plague, Kennedy writes, were major catalysts for the global spread of both Islam and Christianity—religions that were able to find massive audiences only after large sectors of the global population had died off, and survivors had begun to lose faith in the efficacy of local religious practices. Perhaps Christianity offered a more soothing balm for mortality than paganism at a time when painful deaths were terrifyingly common. And maybe “the lethal effects of Yersinia pestis,” the bacterial pathogen behind the plague, truly were what helped Islam develop into “a major religion practiced by almost a quarter of the world’s population.”
 
There was little awareness of the deus ex microbe as these events unfolded—which is understandable, given that it took until the end of the 19th century for germ theory to gain traction among leading scientists. But Kennedy makes a compelling case that historical ignorance has left behind some pretty sinister vestiges. Neanderthals, ravaged by disease, are still regularly cast in modern terms as dumb brutes; the native peoples of South America, technologically advanced but beaten down by foreign epidemics, imagined themselves disfavored in the eyes of the gods, who instead took the side of the colonizers who ravaged them with diseases.
 
Pathogenesis even implicates infectious disease in the reinforcement of—maybe even the genesis of—certain racial stereotypes. West Africans trafficked to the Americas initially labored alongside white slaves and indentured servants. But when diseases ferried over from Africa began to obliterate those lighter-skinned people, the darker-skinned people who’d already built up immunity were spared—leaving a population of almost entirely Black slaves. Abruptly, the region’s conceptions of slavery became linked to melanin, a stereotype that has insidiously stuck. It was a horrible irony: The movement of pathogens put a premium on protection against them—but ended up saddling survivors with horrific consequences. Our notion of superiority over certain groups, Kennedy suggests, is at least as misguided as our smugness about our supremacy as a species in this world.
 
Kennedy’s point isn’t that we’re powerless against infectious disease. (Nor are microbes unilateral villains: The opening to Pathogenesis painstakingly details the many ways in which the benign ones have benefited us—including aiding the evolution of the placenta, a vital mammalian organ that is thought to have co-opted genetic material from an ancient virus that infected our ancestors.) But, he suggests, humans will remain vulnerable to pathogens’ formidable powers if we continue to ignore them and not learn from the past responses of people in similar circumstances. The ongoing coronavirus pandemic, after all, is not the first time that people have concertedly pushed back against calls for face masks; nor is it the first time the public has bought into lethal misinformation. As Kennedy writes, the cholera outbreaks in 19th-century Europe sparked rumors that the public-health officials and doctors trying to enforce quarantines, travel restrictions, and isolation for the sick were a front—a plot to “poison the urban poor.” Locals rebelled, and governments capitulated, abandoning the very interventions that might have saved countless more lives.
 
Those missteps are important to keep in mind as we look ahead. Our modern habits are technologically advanced but epidemiologically dangerous. As the globe’s population has grown, infections have gotten easier to spread; as we’ve domesticated animals, we’ve carved new conduits for microbes to travel across species lines. Climate change is also pushing wild creatures into new habitats, where they’re more likely to encounter us. Disease spillovers into humans will keep happening; in just the past two decades, three have occurred with coronaviruses alone. That’s a grim fact to consider. And yet, Kennedy’s book manages to end on a somewhat hopeful note. Yes, our trajectory is defined by microbes. But it’s also influenced by our reactions to them—and our acknowledgment of their power. This current pandemic may be tilting toward a slow end. As much as we may want the crisis to disappear in the rearview, the coda of one outbreak is an ideal time to prepare for the next, inevitably on its way.

A History of Humanity in Which Humans Are Secondary.  A new book tells the story of our past from the perspective of the bugs that have shaped it. By Katherine J. Wu. The Atlantic, April 18, 2023. 

In the first chapter of Jonathan Kennedy’s Pathogenesis, he singles out Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens as a history that strays too far from scientific facts in service of a grand narrative. This is before Kennedy, a sociologist and lecturer in public health, has even begun constructing his own scientific-historical case: that germs — bacteria, viruses, and other communicable pathogens — have been a powerful and yet-unrecognised driver of human history. Later, he takes Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel to task for giving insufficient credit to the germ part of the triad — suggesting that “germs, germs, germs” is closer to the truth.
 
In an era in which authors tend to offer nothing but unreserved praise of each other via book cover blurbs, it’s refreshing to see a first-time writer take aim at what he sees as the failings of two of the best-read popular history titles of the past 30 years. It also draws the battle lines for Kennedy’s project. Germs, he contends, are a very big deal.
 
His basic thesis is that our intentions (or rather, those of any “great men” of history) mattered less than they or we ever thought. A true “history from deep below” should recognise, as he puts it, that “the modern world has been shaped by microbes as much as by women and men”. This isn’t an entirely new idea — many histories consider the powerful effects of disease — but the perspective is novel. To Kennedy, pathogens aren’t understood simply as catastrophes visiting destruction upon us but as complex living beings with their own history irrevocably intertwined with our own.
 
Kennedy argues this in chapters clustered roughly by era, where he revisits familiar events armed with a microscopic lens. He suggests that 8,000-9,000 years ago, as farming spread into Europe from what is now Turkey, hunter-gatherers weren’t supplanted via conquest or culture, but by farmers incubating novel diseases such as tuberculosis in their densely packed, settled communities. After centuries, farmers finally emerged with stable immunity — which their hunting and gathering cousins didn’t have once they began encountering those same diseases.
 
The book shines when it brings cutting-edge science to bear on these questions, something that Kennedy treats with great care. There are studies emerging that swab ancient tooth pulp and sequence the genes of bacterial fragments within them, showing which Neanderthal or homo sapiens ancestor died by which bug, where, and at what time. Like a map of temperatures or ancient waterways, we may come to see cycles of disease and immunity as equally strong shapers of early human settlement.
 
When the book fails, it is usually because the germ explanation becomes stale. Kennedy labours to prove that the bubonic plague, which probably arrived in Europe in the mid-1300s via Eurasian trade routes, is responsible for everything from capitalism, to Protestantism, to the modern university system. The death of more than 50mn people clearly threw the continent into turmoil, but extrapolating out from it in too many directions causes the book to lose its focus.
 
In the strongest sections, like those covering colonialism and slavery, germs feel powerfully alive and at work in history. Yellow fever and malaria kept colonisers out of much of Africa for centuries. But when mosquitoes carried yellow fever across the colonised Caribbean, and malaria to the American South in the 17th century, they disproportionately struck down the indentured European labourers. Plantations’ horrific embrace of African slave labour, Kennedy suggests, was partly a question of finding labourers immune to specific diseases. By mining the grim statistics of colonial bureaucracies, the book convincingly traces the ways cycles of disease and immunity shaped the outcomes of expeditions, trade, wars and ultimately entire civilisations.
 
Microbes existed well before humans. And their domain extends from parts of Earth we have never reached to the inside of our own bodies. Despite this, they often appear in circumscribed form in our histories — plagues arising and receding from some outside place, almost at random. Pathogenesis shows a microbial world that is as complex, dynamic, and alive as the human one, and just as consequential.
 
Pathogenesis — a history of microbes and men.  Jonathan Kennedy argues that germs have shaped our world more than humankind has — and it’s time we took notice. By Stephen Buranyi. Financial Times, April 12, 2023. 

On Tuesday afternoons, pathology teaching at medical school required me to peer down a microscope for two hours, screwing my inactive eye ever more tightly shut as if that would make the looking eye suddenly see clearly. Each eosin-stained slide with its pink and purple lines and splodges of diseased cells was as legible to me as a barcode. The tiny world beneath my lens created an illusion of human supremacy, a world where the truth was small, immobilised and bored of itself.
 
Pathogenesis – the cause of disease, its development and the impact it has on cells and organisms – is thankfully not what Pathogenesis is about. Jonathan Kennedy is a sociologist, not a microbiologist, and his unit of interest is the epidemic event, not the single bacterium. Where tales of great white men, great inventions and great power once populated the history books, Kennedy argues that great plagues are what really matter. Immunity has been the unifying asset of survivors and victors. The historical sweep of his pen could not be wider, from pre-history to post-Covid. Three hundred-odd pages roam through 50,000 years, and by the last it’s almost impossible to disagree that infectious diseases are our permanent companion and ultimate adversary.
 
Humans are not always in competition with pathogens, though. In fact our existence is indebted to them. A viral infection hundreds of millions of years ago might have enabled our brains to form memories, because of the insertion of a heritable piece of DNA that codes for ‘tiny protein bubbles’ to assist information transmission between neurons. Moreover, the fact that we’re not nibbling at the shells of our mothers’ eggs is because ‘a shrew-like creature developed the capacity to gestate her young inside her own body’. Thanks to a retrovirus, mammals were gifted the placenta and the relative safety of pregnancy.
 
As possibly the only person not to have read the 2014 mega-hit Sapiens, I was intrigued by the more speculative sections of deep history on different human species. For 250,000 years, Homo sapiens lived alongside other humans, including Homo erectus, Neanderthals and Denisovans. It was only 40,000 years ago that Homo sapiens spread across the world while fellow species became extinct. Emerging evidence suggests Homo sapiens in fact reproduced with other human species, and today approximately 2 per cent of our genes comes from Neanderthals. We know about these meet-cutes because of archaea found in calcified plaque on Neanderthal teeth, which could speculatively have been transmitted through kissing, and this same archaeon is a cause of modern gum disease. The evolutionary advantage of genetic mixing of the two species’ microorganisms gave Homo sapiens resistance to unfamiliar diseases and a lifeline for survival and dominance.
 
The fluency of Kennedy’s narration is remarkable, weaving Tolkien, Game of Thrones and Monty Python into memorable and accessible explanations of genetics, evolutionary biology and demography. Whether looking at hunter gatherers overwhelmed by new zoonotic diseases, Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War and the role of plague in Sparta’s victory, or the 60 per cent decline in Europe’s population from 1348 due to the Black Death, each era in history seems to hinge on infectious disease as a ‘devastating weapon of mass destruction’. The result of recurrent infections and exterminations is that ‘contemporary Europeans are neither genetically “pure” nor are they the region’s indigenous people. Even white Europeans are mongrel immigrants.’
 
Events across the Atlantic further strengthen Kennedy’s point. When the Spanish arrived in the New World, their exposure to domesticated animals and denser populations back home gave them the upper hand in encounters with natives who didn’t enjoy such immunity. Kennedy perhaps oversimplifies this ‘virgin soil hypothesis’, as historians of medicine have emphasised the role of social factors and living standards too. But Old World pathogens did result in a 90 per cent fall in the population across the Americas, far outranking damage from imperial force. Smallpox, malaria, yellow fever and measles were the true, though unconscious, armamentarium of the colonisers. African immunity to malaria went on to fuel the racist ideology used to justify human trafficking across the Atlantic during the slave trade and became the foundation for economic arguments to exploit their labour.
 
Kennedy wears his politics on his sleeve, as well as his despondency. The idealism that inspired the WHO, established in 1948, was corroded when the US and UK in the 1980s, under Reagan and Thatcher, reduced their contributions to addressing the global burden of disease. Today, ‘vaccine colonialism’ means that antiretroviral drugs are stockpiled in wealthy nations, but are relatively scarce in poorer ones. Inequality also thrives at home, where a man’s life expectancy in Blackpool is 27 years less than a man living in Kensington and Chelsea – the same difference between the UK and the most deprived countries in Africa. However, the West’s big killers are cardiovascular disease, cancer and Type 2 diabetes. Although not transmitted like a virus, these noncommunicable conditions are socially contagious.
 
As impressive and enjoyable as Pathogenesis is, Kennedy openly concedes that his argument is not new. Historiographically, the idea of pathogenic supremacy has had several outings, most notably in William McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples (1976), which offered a radically novel interpretation of world history through the impact of disease. A new edition in the 1980s was prompted by Aids, just as Kennedy rightly justifies the need for his book with the impact of Covid, discoveries about the microbiome and the new technologies available for recovering the pathogenic signatures of the past. What is recurrently appealing and somewhat horrifying to new audiences about this strain of history is the way it destabilises human agency to such an extent that the purpose of our endeavours is thrown into question. If the bugs write the script, what chance do we have? A microbe-centric approach tends towards biological determinism and nihilism, carrying the risk, once again, of dismissing and underfunding the social determinants of health.
 
Ironically, we have reached the Anthropocene, when human action is finally changing the course of our planet’s history. Emissions in the atmosphere and the misuse of antibiotics have introduced the two urgent threats of global heating and antimicrobial resistance. The pair also interact. Warmer climates invite new pathogenic dangers, as anyone who has watched the trailer for HBO’s The Last of Us will know.
 
Small changes can lead to massive storms, but this could also be a reason for optimism. Pathogenesis might perhaps be read as an invitation to refocus on the minute particulars of our actions, and the billions of encounters between the human and natural world that occur every day. There is an opacity and unpredictability to both evolution and history that can never be fully recovered in our accounts of either. The famous Darwinian tree of descent, which Kennedy describes, is in fact more like a wild root system. As Deleuze and Guattari wrote in 1987: ‘We no longer follow models of arborescent descent going from the least to the most differentiated, but instead a rhizome.’ These tangled interactions show that while Pathogenesis is a humbling story for humankind, it is also one of radical contingency.
 
Great men don’t shape history – but tiny microbes do. By Kate Womerlsy. The Spectator, April 8, 2023. 

The Covid-19 pandemic has wreaked extraordinary destruction and misery, killing nearly 7 million people worldwide thus far and devastating the lives of many more. And yet, viewed through the long lens of human history, writes the public health sociologist Jonathan Kennedy, “there is little about it that is new or remarkable”. Previous pandemics have killed many more, both in absolute numbers and as proportions of populations, and so may future ones. Covid should be a wakeup call that helps us manage deadlier plagues in the future. But will we heed it?

 
Our very existence and success as a species, Kennedy argues in this fascinating book, has been shaped by bacteria and viruses. Where, for example, did all the other species of humans go? At one time, early Homo sapiens shared the Earth (and interbred with) the stronger, larger-brained and equally artistic Neanderthals, as well as the hobbit-like Denisovans. What happened to them? It could be, as some argue, that we simply killed them all, or that they were somehow less well able to adapt to climate change. But Kennedy explores the possibility that roving Homo sapiens from Africa, who had acquired strong immune systems on their travels, might have simply infected the already settled Neanderthals of Europe with a novel pathogen that they couldn’t fight off – just as the colonising Spanish, tens of thousands of years later, decimated the Aztec population with smallpox as much as with weapons.
 
A similar dynamic repeats itself over and over in human history, in Kennedy’s telling, even if some of the details remain speculative. Why, for example, were dark-skinned Neolithic hunter-gatherers such as the celebrated “Cheddar Man”, who first settled the British Isles after the last ice age, replaced throughout Europe by light-skinned farmers of Mediterranean origin? “The most likely answer,” the author suggests, is that the farmers carried infectious diseases to which they had, over time, become immune, but which devastated the indigenous populations. Those farmers were in turn almost completely replaced by another wave of migrants, shepherds from the Eurasian steppe – thanks, perhaps, to a Neolithic wave of bubonic plague in Europe. Kennedy does not shy away from emphasising the point most relevant to modern politics: “Contemporary Europeans are neither genetically ‘pure’ nor are they the region’s indigenous people.” Modern genetic analysis shows that even the people who built Stonehenge were completely wiped out and replaced by a new wave of migration. As Spinal Tap so clairvoyantly put it: “The druids. No one knows who they were, or what they were doing.”
 
We can be more confident, at least, about the geopolitical effects of disease once we enter the era of written history. An epidemic of either typhus or smallpox devastated Athens from BC430, which “undermined Athens’s capacity to fight against the Spartans and had a profound impact on the course and outcome of the Peloponnesian War”. A series of plagues beginning in 65AD, meanwhile, might have weakened the Roman empire to an extent that contributed to its eventual fall. Medieval waves of the Black Death, it is salutary to be reminded, killed astonishing numbers of people – as much as 60% of the entire population of Europe succumbed in a single decade of the 14th century.
 
The subsequent introduction of rules of quarantine and cordons sanitaires, Kennedy argues, can be seen as marking the beginnings of the modern state, extending as they did its power into ordinary human life in unprecedented ways. Meanwhile, the shortage of agricultural labour caused by devastating recurrences of the plague was perhaps instrumental in the collapse of feudalism in favour of a capitalist system of flexible employment. Later on, the susceptibility to malaria of northern soldiers in the American civil war “probably delayed victory by months or even years”, possibly giving Lincoln time to come round to the idea of abolishing slavery.
 
The book thus performs that satisfying trick of encouraging the reader to think differently about familiar topics, though its ideas are inevitably variable in their persuasiveness. Among the most conjectural, for example, is the suggestion that the rise of Christianity in the imperial Roman era might itself have depended on the prevalence of disease, because of its consoling message. “The Christian faith skyrocketed because it provided a more appealing and assuring guide to life and death than paganism during the devastating pandemics that struck the Roman empire in the second and third centuries CE,” Kennedy suggests. Well, maybe. But the conversion of Constantine, briefly mentioned on the same page, was surely the nearer and sufficient cause.
 
There is, too, occasionally a slightly po-faced attitude to Kennedy’s discussions, as when he cites the “What have the Romans ever done for us riff” from Life of Brian. (There is “something unsettling about a group of white, Oxford- and Cambridge-educated men extolling the virtues of colonialism, albeit for comedic effect,” he complains piously.) And the depredations of “capitalism” come to figure, in this story, as a villain as evil as any virus. The economic growth driven by the Industrial Revolution, Kennedy claims, did not, as is usually thought, increase welfare through improved living standards, though here his disagreement seems to be merely about timescales. (It didn’t overall at first because many of the new cities and working environments were filthy and unsanitary, but it sure did in the long run.)
 
The author seems to approve considerably more of capitalism with Chinese characteristics, celebrating the undoubted improvement in living standards of many millions of people in China over the last few decades. He is also curiously happy to accept the official Chinese figures on Covid death rates in order to argue that the US and “liberal democracy” in general are not obviously superior systems.
 
Kennedy is convincing, though, in his emphasis on the way that disease can intersect and interact with social inequality, both globally – most sub-Saharan Africans remain unvaccinated for Sars-Cov-2, the rich countries having kept multiple doses for their own citizens – and within countries, where health outcomes are shockingly dependent on socioeconomic status. What is sometimes called “shit life syndrome” will harm you as surely as many infectious diseases, and “pathogens thrive on inequality and injustice”.
 
So what will we do now? Perhaps, as Kennedy suggests, the recent, comparatively mild pandemic will cause us to rethink “how humans see their place in the world”, to stop creating super-pathogens with our incontinent use of antibiotics, and to realise that “if we Homo sapiens don’t strive to live in balance with the other living things on our planet, we face a very bleak future”. That, however, is a tall order, and not just politically. Bacteria alone make up an estimated 13% of the biomass of Earth, while humans represent a mere 0.01%. In the war against disease, we are massively outnumbered.
 
Pathogenesis by Jonathan Kennedy review – in sickness and in health. By Steven Poole. The Guardian, April 6, 2023.

Black Death Quarantine

Fear. It’s running rampant right now. Palpable, but invisible, like the coronavirus that’s brought us to our knees. Across the ages, however, fear has been a recurring part of the human experience. Can history offer clues on how to cope? What made things worse? What helped?

Looking back—way back—medieval historian and Professor of History Larissa Taylor turns to the Middle Ages, and to the plague of 1347-50 specifically, for answers. Her conclusion isn’t overly comforting. “I’m not sure that we’ve learned so many lessons,” Taylor said. “Or at least I think there are more lessons to be learned.”

COVID-19 gives us another chance to learn those lessons. Lessons about prejudice. Lessons in leadership. Lessons in humility.

Since 2010, Taylor has taught a course titled the History of Fear. She’s also researching and writing a book on the topic from antiquity to 1888. She loves teaching about the plague, she confesses—and admits to having a morbid sense of humor. But right now, it’s no laughing matter. “It’s okay to talk about something that happened six hundred years ago,” she said, “but when it’s happening in the present, and there are a lot of resemblances, it gets a little different.”

Like the coronavirus, the plague, also called the Black Death, probably started in the central steppes of Asia before spreading first to Italy, the most densely populated European country in the 1300s, then following 14th-century trade routes to France, England, and Scandinavia. Death rates in Venice topped 600 a day, Taylor said, while 60 percent of the population of Florence perished. Eerily, on March 20, 2020, Italy reported more than 600 COVID-19 deaths in a 24-hour period.

Medieval people had no idea what had hit them. They looked to the University of Paris and other institutions for answers, Taylor said. They consulted the Pope, who had left a chaotic Rome in 1309 and established a papal palace in Avignon, an enclave in what is now France. They turned to astrology, wondering if the great planetary conjunction of 1345—when Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn aligned in the constellation Aquarius—was to blame. They speculated the invisible enemy came from a miasma floating over the subcontinent of India.

No matter the cause, people were terrified. They shuttered themselves indoors in self-isolation. Those who could afford to fled the cities for the country, Taylor explained. Still others, like today’s spring break revelers, threw caution to the wind, opting to eat, drink, and be merry.

Medieval governing bodies locked the gates to the city. They restricted market days. They quarantined citizens—Venice was the first, forcing citizens to spend 40 days in ships offshore. Today, countries have closed their borders. Grocery stores have special hours for the elderly. Cruise ships search for harbors to dock.

“The parallels are really stunning,” said Taylor, who is most interested in people’s psychological responses then and now. Why do people react differently in these situations? “I think ultimately that it comes down to human psychology. Our own experience shapes how we respond.” Taylor, who minored in psychology as an undergraduate at Harvard and worked for three years in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, points to differences in education, varying levels of wealth, and knowledge of others as underlying factors. One of the biggest factors? “Prejudice,” Taylor punctuated.

The fear of others, and the need for scapegoats, is a common thread throughout humanity. In the Middle Ages, Taylor said, Jews were frequent targets and were blamed for poisoning wells during the plague. In 1321 the kings of France were convinced that lepers were planning to overthrow Christendom and that the plot was being funded by Muslims. Women accused of witchcraft; homosexuals; ghosts, vampires, and creatures from fairy tales—all have suffered the pointed fingers of blame. Today, President Trump has called COVID-19 the “Chinese virus,” while Iran blames the United States for the virus.

Homophobia. Xenophobia. Misogyny. Religious fear and hatred. Will we ever learn?

“Unless we want to repeat brutal human history, we cannot turn our emotional stress towards a scapegoat, such as an ethnic or minority group,” wrote Kristen Watts ’10, now a corporate counsel for Capcom in San Francisco. Watts recently revisited her senior thesis from Taylor’s class and posted it on LinkedIn. “In many cases, preventing a disease also means controlling certain groups within society and preventative measures. … We must integrate the mandate to live with a consciousness of the effects of our actions on others.”

Taylor argues that such a mandate must come from the top down, from strong leaders “who can urge people to be their best,” she stressed. She fears, however, that a lack of leadership—and a lack of preparedness—may make the COVID-19 pandemic worse.

Could leaders do better if they studied history?

“You bet. I think any leader in their right mind should know something about the pandemics of the past, whether it’s the 1918 flu or further back in history,” she said. But with the emphasis on technology and STEM fields in the last 20 or so years, the study of history and other humanities fields have been sidelined.

“History allows us to think critically about the past and what it means for us. We always hear the maxim that history repeats itself,” Taylor said. “Most historians will tell you that’s not true. It never repeats itself. But you can learn from history.”

Will we learn? Can lessons from the past lessen our fears? Taylor hopes so. “I think history is needed more than ever in times like this.”

Much to Fear, Then and Now.  Medieval historian Larissa Taylor on how history can inform action in times of crisis. By Laura Meader. Colby Magazine, April,  2020

A plague of serious proportions is ravaging the world. But not for the first time.

From 1347-51, the Black Death killed anywhere from one-tenth to one-half (or more) of Europe’s population.

One English chronicler, Thomas Walsingham, noted how this “great mortality” transformed the known world: “Towns once packed with people were emptied of their inhabitants, and the plague spread so thickly that the living were hardly able to bury the dead.” As death tolls rose at exponential rates, rents dwindled, and swaths of land fell to waste “for want of the tenants who used to cultivate it….”

As a medieval historian, I’ve been teaching the subject of plague for many years. If nothing else, the feelings of panic between the Black Death and the COVID-19 pandemic are reminiscent.

Like today’s crisis, medieval writers struggled to make sense of the disease; theories on its origins and transmission abounded, some more convincing than others. Whatever the result, “… so much misery ensued,” wrote another English author, it was feared that the world would “hardly be able to regain its previous condition.”

Medieval writers produced a variety of answers for the plague’s origins. Gabriele de Mussis’ Historia de Morbo attributed the cause to “the mire of manifold wickedness,” the “numberless vices,” and the “limitless capacity for evil” exhibited by an entire human race no longer fearing the judgement of God.

Describing its eastern origins, he further noted how the Genoese and Venetians had imported the disease to western Europe from Caffa (modern-day Ukraine); “carrying the darts of death,” disembarking sailors at these Italian port-cities unwittingly spread the “poison” to their relations, kinsmen and neighbours.

Containing the disease seemed nearly impossible. As Giovanni Boccaccio wrote about Florence, the outcome was all the more severe as those suffering from the disease “mixed with people who were still unaffected …” Like a “fire racing through dry or oily substances,” healthy persons became ill.

Possessing the power to “kill large numbers by air alone,” through breath or conversation, it was thought, the plague “could not be avoided.”

Scholars worked tirelessly to find a cure. The Paris Medical Faculty devoted its energies to discovering the causes of these amazing events, which even “the most gifted intellects” were struggling to comprehend. They turned to experts on astrology and medicine about the causes of the epidemic.

On the pope’s orders, anatomical examinations were carried out in many Italian cities “to discover the origins of the disease.” When the corpses were opened up, all victims were found to have “infected lungs.”

Not content with lingering uncertainty, Parisian masters turned towards ancient wisdom and compiled a book of existing philosophical and medical knowledge. Yet they also acknowledged the limitations in finding a “sure explanation and perfect understanding,” quoting Pliny to the effect that “some accidental causes of storms are still uncertain, or cannot be explained.”

Prevention was critical. Quarantine and self-isolation were necessary measures.

In 1348, to prevent the illness from spreading through the Tuscan region of Pistoia, strict fines were enforced against the movement of peoples. Guards were placed at the city’s gates to prevent travellers entering or leaving.

These civic ordinances stipulated against importing linen or woollen cloths that might carry the disease. Demonstrating similar sanitation concerns, bodies of the dead were to remain in place until properly enclosed in a wooden box “to avoid the foul stench which comes from dead bodies”; moreover, graves were dug “two and a half arms-lengths deep.”

Butchers and retailers nevertheless remained open. And yet a number of regulations were imposed so that “the living are not made ill by rotten and corrupt food,” with further bans to minimize the “stink and corruption” considered harmful to Pistoia’s citizens.

Authorities responded in different ways to the outbreak. Recognizing the plague’s arrival by ship, the people of Messina “expelled the Genoese from the city and harbour with all speed.” In central Europe, foreigners and merchants were banished from the inns and “compelled to leave the area immediately.”

These were severe measures, but seemingly necessary given the varied social reaction to plague. As Boccaccio famously recounted in his Decameron, the whole spectrum of human behaviour ensued: from extreme religious devotion, sober living, self-isolation and a restricted diet to warding off evil through heavy drinking, singing and merrymaking.

The fear of contagion eroded social customs. The number of dead grew so high in many regions that proper burials and religious services became impossible to perform: new religious customs emerged pertaining to preparing for and presiding over death.

Families were changed. An account from Padua mentions how “wife fled the embrace of a dear husband, the father that of a son and the brother that of a brother.”

Ultimately, there is a human element to plague too often lost in the historical record. Its influence should not be underestimated or forgotten. The modern response to pandemic evokes a similar community response. Different in scope and scale, and indeed in medical practice, administrative and public health actions remain critical.

But in 2020, we are not, as Boccaccio lamented, seeing the law and social order break down. Essential duties and responsibilities are still being carried out. Against our own 21st-century plague, wisdom and ingenuity are prevailing; citizens hang on “the advice of physicians and all the power of medicine,” which unlike the 14th century, is anything but “profitless and unavailing.”

How medieval writers struggled to make sense of the Black Death. By Kriston R. Rennie. The Conversation , March 31 , 2020.

In the autumn of 1348 a ship glided into the port of Southampton in England, carrying a disease from the east that had already ravaged the western world. It had killed men, women and children in their thousands quickly and mercilessly. This was the bubonic plague, identified by the blackening ‘buboes’ that formed within the joint area of an infected person – the groin or armpit were the most common places. These were accompanied by bodily aches, cold, lethargy and a high fever. When the infection got into the blood stream it effectively poisoned the blood, leading to probable death. Some survived the infection but most people died within days, sometimes hours. This wave of bubonic plague became known then as the Pestilence – or later, the Black Death.

By November 1348 the disease had reached London, and by New Year’s Day 1349 around 200 bodies a day were being piled into mass graves outside the city. Henry Knighton, an Augustinian monk, witnessed the devastation of the Black Death in England: “there was a general mortality throughout the world… sheep and oxen strayed through the fields and among the crops and there was none to drive them off or collect them, but they perished in uncounted numbers… for lack of shepherds… After the Pestilence many buildings fell into total ruin for lack of inhabitants; similarly many small villages and hamlets became desolate and no homes were left in them, for all those who had dwelt anthem (sic) were dead.”

The countryside went to ruin, with crops, livestock and produce dying for lack of people to tend to them. Towns were abandoned, left only with the dead to occupy them, and war with France – the first part of the later-named Hundred Years’ War – was put on hold. England and the rest of Europe was forced to come to terms with an epidemic of an apocalyptic nature that drastically changed the landscape of society.

In a bid to take control of the epidemic, Edward III, king of England as the time, was forced to turn his attention to domestic matters. Before the outbreak in England, his daughter Princess Joan had contracted plague after her ship docked in Bordeaux. She was on her way to marry Peter of Castile as part of a diplomatic marriage alliance between the two kingdoms. She never reached Castile and, upon discovery that the plague had taken hold of Bordeaux, she took refuge in a small village called Loremo, where she died alongside a large part of her entourage.

The king was devastated by the news and acted quickly and decisively to try to curb the outbreak in England. The 1349 January parliament was postponed until Easter (however, when spring came parliament was still empty.) Officials fled to their homes in the country and sheriffs refused to conduct their business for fear of their lives. The country was in lockdown and the people looked to the king to support them in the crisis.

Edward’s response was rational: he suspected that poor public hygiene was responsible for the epidemic. In a bid to tackle the spread of infection, he opposed the idea of digging a burial pit for the plague victims in East Smithfield – it being in close proximity to the Tower of London and surrounding residential areas. Pits were dug further away, the largest one in Smithfield. In 1349 Edward III wrote to the Mayor of London directing him to have the streets thoroughly cleaned, for they were “foul with human faeces, and the air of the city poisioned (sic) to the great danger of men passing, especially in this time of infectious disease”.

Overseas, further precautions were taken. In Italy in 1347, almost a year before the plague reached England, ports began to turn away ships, fearful that they carried the deadly disease. By March 1348, these protective measures were formalised and Venice became the first city to close its ports to incoming vessels. Those they did admit were subjected to 30 days of isolation, later raised to 40, which eventually lead to the birth of the term ‘quarantine’, for ships were forced to wait in the middle of the Venetian lagoon before they were permitted to disembark. Remote cemeteries were dug and in a later outbreak, the Venetians even went as far as establishing a quarantine island on Lazzaretto Vecchio, a small island in the Venetian Lagoon. An excavation in 2007 revealed more than 1,500 skeletons, all supposedly victims of bubonic plague. Thousands more are believed to remain below ground on the island.

However, these measures were too little too late. Plague still took hold in Venice – as it did globally – killing an estimated 100,000 people, a catastrophic proportion of the Venetian population.

England shared the same fate. In 1300 the population had reached around five million, and by 1377 this was reduced to 2.5 million. Plague had claimed half of the population, wiping out entire families, villages and even towns such as Bristol. The measures that were taken to hinder the spread of the first Black Death epidemic were powerless, but there were contingency plans for future outbreaks later in history.

In 1563, when plague struck again (as the disease did most years, although some outbreaks were more severe than others), the lord mayor ordered that blue crosses should be attached to doors of houses that held anyone infected with plague over the past week. Inhabitants were to stay indoors for one month after the death or infection of anyone in the building. Only one uninfected person was allowed out of the house, in order to buy provisions for the sick or healing. To mark their health they were meant to carry a white rod, which if they forgot would incur a fine or even imprisonment. In 1539 plague struck London again and houses were to be incarcerated for 40 days – the typical quarantine period stipulated in 14th-century Venice. By 1580 shipping was heavily monitored, and crews and passengers were quarantined either on board their vessels or in the port where they had disembarked. Merchants were kept at the port of Rye and were prohibited from entering the city, and all goods were to be aired in order not to transport infection. Movement was also monitored within the country – travellers into London from outside counties were prohibited if there was known to be plague in their area.

Outbreaks of plague continued into the 17th century, the most savage and famous being the 1665–56 epidemic. In 1630, quarantine measures were taken in London, with the Privy Council ordering that again houses were shut up when those inside were infected. However, to enforce the order, guards were to be stationed outside the infected house. This was soon replaced with the order that the people inside were to be sent to the Pest House (an enclosed hospital for those suffering from the plague) while the house was closed up. More famously, the village of Eyam in Derbyshire bravely imposed a self-quarantine in order to prevent the spread of infection into other villages, losing 260 villagers in the process.

Over four centuries, plague devastated the lives of millions, and despite the best efforts of the authorities, there was little to be done in order to control the spread of such virulent infection. People blamed themselves, usually in the belief that they were being punished by God for their sins – some even believed that the epidemic was an apocalypse.

Although today plague has generally ceased to exist, there was an outbreak in the US in 1924, and in India as late as 1994, killing 52 people and causing mass panic as people fled out of fear of infection. However, we do not tend to experience the rate of mortality seen in the 14th, 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. With the advancement of modern medicine and practical contingency, we hope that bio-medical disaster remains as history.

Black Death quarantine: how did we try to contain the most deadly disease in history? By Helen Carr.

History Extra, March 30, 2020.

The pandemic of COVID-19 is often called “unprecedented” – and for many people cooped up in their homes in different countries, the experience is both unparalleled and challenging. But in late-medieval Europe, individuals self-isolated professionally. Some people – women particularly – permanently withdrew from society to live walled in, alone in a room attached to a church.

Guides for, and texts written by, these female “anchorites” – as the women were known – from Britain and continental Europe give us descriptions of their way of living and recount their reflections. So what can these medieval women teach us about how to cope with self-isolation?

These anchorites chose to be confined in these cramped cells for many reasons. According to medieval religious culture, a life of prayer on behalf of others vitally supported society. Isolation empowered women to express their love for Christ, and minister to their fellow believers through their prayers and counsel. Anchorites were even presented as possessing “super powers” of interceding for the deceased in purgatory.

Furthermore, in the late Middle Ages, devotion among laypeople – people who are not clergy – flourished. Life as an anchorite offered laywomen an option to express this piety, but offered more freedom for individual contemplation (and solitude) than a nun’s life.

Warnings in guides for anchorites also hint at less spiritual motives. Life as a recluse, paradoxically, situated anchorites at the heart of their communities and could transform them into religious celebrities. Their cells often faced busy roads in bustling cities and doubled as a bank, teacher’s cubicle, and storehouse of local gossip.

The 13th-century, medieval English guide for female anchorites, Ancrene Wisse, warns recluses not to look for comfort. Instead, the anchorite should remind herself that she was enclosed not just for her own benefit, but for the sake of others too.

She is told to “gather into your heart all those who are ill or wretched” and “feel compassion”. By self-isolating, the anchorite “holds [all fellow believers] up” with her prayers. Now, nurses and doctors are urgently calling for a similar commitment from the public, when begging “Stay home for us.”

The Wisse’s advice has a flavour that feels equally relevant today. Self-isolation may be easier to bear if instead of seeing it as a stretch of boring but comfy nights in, you recognise it as an unpleasant, stressful experience – but also visualise all the people whose health you are protecting by staying home.

The earliest-known English woman writer, Julian of Norwich (c.1343–c.1416) – an anchorite – likewise encouraged readers to acknowledge their own vulnerability, but suggested perceiving it as a strength. She assured readers in her late 14th-century or early 15th-century text, A Revelation of Love, that suffering and difficulties will not defeat them:

        ‘ Christ did not say, ‘You shall not be perturbed, you shall not be troubled, you shall not be distressed,’ but he said, ‘You shall not be overcome.’

Julian promises that readers will experience emotional turmoil during any crisis but will ultimately conquer it. This promise parallels modern survival psychology. When adapting to life during a crisis, acknowledging the challenging circumstances as forming one’s real life now is essential. Yet one should simultaneously remember that one is doing one’s utmost to return to a better, pre-crisis style of living. Only by acknowledging our vulnerability – both physical and mental – and consequently taking action to protect and care for others and ourselves, will we make it through.

According to manuals for anchorites, they should guard their metaphorical windows (their five senses) and actual cell windows, to prevent falling into temptation and being distracted from their prayers and meditation. The Wisse declares: “disturbance only enters the heart through something … either seen or heard, tasted or smelt, or felt externally.”

The external world can upset one’s interior world. Dutch anchorite Sister Bertken (1427-1514) recounts this confusion in a poem:

‘The world held me in its power

with its manifold snares

it deprived me of my strength.’

Yet this nervousness about the effect of sensory input can also be understood as a medieval analogue to a warning against fake news or anxious over-consumption of news. Several guides recommend having a female friend scrupulously guarding the anchorite’s window, refusing to allow access to visitors who spread gossip and lies. Social media today can be a little like such visitors.

Anchorites and writers of manuals for anchorites also reflected upon how to keep sane. Keeping occupied prevents one from climbing the walls. British Cistercian monk, Abbot Aelred of Rievaulx (1110-1167), tells his sister, an anchorite, in A Rule of Life for a Recluse that: “Idleness … breeds distaste for quiet and disgust for the cell.”

Routines are key. Anchorites recited sequences of prayers, psalms and other Bible readings at fixed points of the day. According to modern survival psychology, dividing a problem or stretch of time into manageable steps is crucial when faced with a crisis. Equally important is performing each step one by one, never looking further ahead than the next step.

Mentally absorbing hobbies, such as crafts, gardening or reading, are another time-honoured strategy for dealing with self-isolation. After recommending sewing clothes for the poor and church vestments, the Wisse assures anchorites that keeping occupied will shield their minds against temptation:

        ‘For while [the devil] sees her busy, he thinks like this: ‘It would be useless to approach her now; she can’t concentrate on listening to my advice.’

These suggestions are easily translatable to today. After all, according to survival psychology, performing manageable, directed actions with a purpose is crucial in crises. Incidentally, the Wisse also recommends keeping a cat.

On the one hand, self-isolation can feel limiting – Julian of Norwich also felt that: “This place is prison,” she said, referring either to earthly life or her cell. But the cell’s cramped space also granted medieval women a paradoxical, spiritual freedom. In his letter to the anchorite Eve of Wilton, the 11th-century monk Goscelin of St Bertin exclaims: “'My cell is so narrow,’ you may say, but oh, how wide is the sky!”

Coronavirus: advice from the Middle Ages for how to cope with self-isolation. By  Godelinde Gertrude Perk. The Conversation , March 27, 2020.

In the fields between the Derbyshire villages of Eyam and Stoney Middleton sits a gritstone boulder known as the “boundary stone”.

During the bubonic plague outbreak of 1665-6, the inhabitants of Eyam quarantined themselves, in a famous act of self-sacrifice, to prevent the spread of the plague. Villagers would come to place money in six holes drilled into the top of the boundary stone to pay for food and medicine left by their anxious neighbours.

By the end of the outbreak, more than a quarter of the village’s population of almost 1,000 were dead. The plague, however, was contained.

For residents of Eyam today, in the midst of the escalating coronavirus pandemic, which has already touched a nearby village, the lessons of that self-imposed isolation have powerful echoes.

Standing by the boundary stone, Ian Smith, who volunteers at the local museum, describes how the village had adopted a process that has become familiar around the world in the last few weeks – “social distancing”.

“In some respects,” says Smith, “the villagers were well ahead of their time. They didn’t know what the affliction was, but they reasoned that close contact with other people was how the illness was passing from one to another.” (In fact, infected fleas had been brought into the village in a bundle of cloth.) “They recognised the necessary business of keeping apart from other people.”

He applies the lesson to the current crisis. “We should be very aware that mass movement of people from one community to another is not a good thing. Like football matches, where you take fans from one area to mix with others quite closely. It’s mad.”

Even as Smith is ruminating on this fact, English football, perhaps belatedly, is in the process of being suspended.

On Friday, the day after prime minister Boris Johnson’s press conference, the stories of two pandemics, one historical and one current, were colliding in Eyam. The green tourist information placards outside homes with names like “Plague Cottage” have been joined in recent weeks by a prominent new poster in the village centre giving information on coronavirus and its symptoms.

At one point a middle-aged couple walk past, discussing an acquaintance facing self-isolation. And villagers wonder what will happen when their popular museum reopens next weekend after the winter closure; whether the thousands of schoolchildren who annually visit will appear this year.

What is clear to many, however, is that Eyam’s story remains a powerful example not only of how diseases are transmitted – then as now via trade routes and centres – but also of how successful social immobilisation can contain outbreaks.

For the Derbyshire villagers in the mid-1660s, the trade that brought the plague was cloth, and the source of it was London, where thousands were already dying.

Confronted by mounting deaths, the village’s newly arrived priest, William Mompesson, was able – in an uneasy alliance with his ejected Puritan predecessor Thomas Stanley – to convince villagers that the right thing to do was quarantine the village, and face a high probability of death, rather than spread the plague.

And in 17th-century Eyam, “social distancing” in the midst of a plague outbreak meant not only isolation – as Francine Clifford, the local historian, points out – but also open-air funeral services that reduced physical proximity, and families burying their own dead in fields and gardens rather than the village graveyard.

As Clifford explains, Eyam’s quarantine was finally imposed after a month-long lull in plague deaths that had first begun in the autumn of 1665.

“It was June [1666] and the deaths started to go up again,” she explains. “It was then William Mompesson realised that it was going to get a heck of a lot worse before it got better. He knew if he didn’t stop people leaving the village in panic, it would spread to the villages and the towns. If it got to Sheffield or Manchester, it would be back to the London proportions.”

The experience of those villagers has become pertinent again as families, communities, towns and even countries engage with the concept of quarantine. The word is derived from the Italian quaranta giorni, in reference to the practice during the 14th century of requiring plague-infected ships from Venice to sit at anchor for 40 days before landing.

Ironically, perhaps, it was a quarantine in China – once again for plague, in Harbin in 1910 – that would inform most modern approaches, not least in China, where, like Eyam, it became embedded in myth.

The 1910 Harbin outbreak, in a centre of the fur trade, saw 95% of infected patients die. The quarantine was managed by a celebrated doctor named Wu Lien-teh, dispatched to Harbin from what is now Malaysia.

In Harbin he implemented not just a strict lockdown, including the suspension of transport links with Russia and Japan, but introduced measures still used today, including dedicated quarantine centres and hygienic burials, with his approach recorded meticulously in his notes.

Eugenia Tognotti, a historian of quarantine who wrote an essay on the subject for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, believes we still have much to learn from quarantines of the past.

Currently under lockdown herself in Italy, the European country worst hit by coronavirus, she emphasises that successful quarantines like Eyam’s require “social acceptance” and other conditions that vary according to geography and political context, pointing out that they are rarely uncontroversial. “Let’s not forget that quarantine measures raise many ethical issues,” she says, referring to the Sars outbreak in 2002, an even more deadly if less widespread coronavirus than the one causing the current pandemic.

She adds: “In China, compared to other affected countries, there was stronger control of the social strata at risk”; village-level governments were empowered to isolate travellers from Sars-infected areas, and enforce quarantines on people suspected of having contact with Sars patients.

“That raised many questions regarding the impact of isolation and quarantine measures, and possible discrimination against certain social categories and minorities. The present emergency and the rigid measures adopted pending the Covid-19 epidemic will give us more lessons.”

And Tognotti poses the question that has been troubling many political leaders and commentators. “Can the kind of quarantines applied in China – with the rigid measures – work in the western democratic countries?”

She answers her own question with a big “if” – one that is becoming increasingly apparent. “Only if countries were not caught unprepared and if they recognised the enormous importance of planning.”

She adds: “We can learn from the past. In time of plague and cholera, well-trained and experienced public health officials were quick to recognise the crisis and launch an emergency public health response to contain outbreaks. A well-organised educational campaign to inform and calm a panicking and frightened public, and combat misinformation and fake news, is extremely important. It’s the effort that Italy is making right now with some success.”

And it was exactly that which Mompesson – who lost his wife in the outbreak – and Stanley achieved: communicating the difficult necessity of social immobilisation to a village of poor miners.

On a hill above the village, overlooking the boundary stone, are the so-called “Riley graves”, named after the local farm where Elizabeth Hancock buried her husband and six children in a field. It’s a poignant reminder of Mompesson’s success as a public health leader.

Tourists Karen and Paul Senior are visiting the village from Newcastle. “Everyone is going into a panic because of the coronavirus and we’re actually in a plague village where everyone voluntarily self-isolated,” says Karen.

“The timing’s been a bit bizarre,” says Paul. “We planned this visit before the coronavirus. Maybe we’re being taught an existential lesson.”

Asked what thoughts the visit has inspired, he replies: “It’s a question of humanity.

“There’s the juxtaposition of looking after your own family,” he adds, referring to the fact that Mompesson sent his children away. “Wanting to save your own skin and the bigger picture. If they left Eyam, they could have spread the disease. You want to do the best for the community, but there’s a strong desire to survive.”

Eyam recalls lessons from 1665 battle with plague. By Peter Beaumont. The Guardian. March 15, 2020. 

Aachen Cathedral, in Western Germany may be able to claim a special spiritual connection with the global COVID-19/coronavirus crisis: The cathedral, one of Europe’s oldest, is said to house the relics of Saint Corona herself. What’s more, Saint Corona is believed to be the patron saint of protection against plague—depending who you ask, that is.

The cathedral, in fact, had begun renewing its focus on Saint Corona more than a year ago, well before the novel virus had emerged as a public health threat. Originally, Aachen Cathedral had planned to put the saint’s golden shrine on public view in the summer of 2020, as part of an exhibit on goldsmithery. Ironically, at a time when believers might be more drawn to Saint Corona than ever, the cathedral may have to postpone the exhibit if the crisis has not abated by summer.

Though public interest in Saint Corona has perked up due to the coronavirus, little is ultimately known about her life—or, for that matter, her remains. According to Catholic Online, it’s believed that she lived during the second century, in Roman-occupied Syria, where Christianity was outlawed. When a Roman soldier named Victor was tortured after the discovery of his secret Christian faith, Corona decided to publicly profess her Christianity in an act of solidarity. In this telling, the Roman judge Sebastian ultimately had both of them executed. Catholic Online suggests that their remains may lie in Anzù, in northern Italy, at the 11th-century Basilica Sanctuary of Saints Victor and Corona (not far from one of the areas hit hardest by the pandemic).

Candida Moss, a theologian at the University of Birmingham, in England, recently tweeted that Saint Corona’s remains are, indeed, in Anzù, rather than Aachen—assuming that Saint Corona had ever lived in the first place. In an email, Moss elaborates on the evidence suggesting Corona is an invented figure: The earliest records mentioning her emerged hundreds of years after her purported death, and the Roman legal system described in her story seems rather anachronistic.

Furthermore, according to Moss, Saint Corona is not one of the historic patron saints of infectious disease, contrary to word that has been spreading in the midst of the COVID-19 outbreak. Indeed, according to Catholic Online, “Corona is invoked in connection with superstitions involving money, such as gambling or treasure hunting.” Other traditions hold that Saint Corona is the protector of lumberjacks, since she was martyred while tied to two trees.

Even if these views of Saint Corona have dominated historically, Moss says it’s possible that different groups have viewed the saint in different ways. “The veneration of saints is a very regional affair,” Moss told Artnet. For example, she cites Saint Edmund—another patron saint against plague—who didn’t become associated with disease until 700 years after his death. The reason, Moss says, was an outbreak of plague in the French city of Toulouse, where Edmund’s relics were held, that caused the city’s residents to pray to him for protection.

Meanwhile, a similarly local understanding of Saint Corona seems to have emerged in the town of Kirchberg am Wechsel, in eastern Austria—home to its own Parish Church of St. Corona (Pfarrkirche St. Corona). A version of the church’s website, captured by the Wayback Machine in 2017 (long before COVID-19), states that “Holy Corona serves as an advocate for requests for steadfastness in faith, for requests against storms and crop failures, for averting epidemics and for requests for help in the small needs of everyday life.” Daniela Lövenich, a spokeswoman for the Aachen Cathedral, also told Artnet that Saint Corona’s association with plague “probably” comes from Kirchberg am Wechsel, not from Aachen or Anzù.

The Pfarrkirche also attempts to clarify some of the confusion surrounding Saint Corona’s remains and their whereabouts. They are, according to the church, divided between Italy and Aachen, where Holy Roman Emperor Otto III delivered some of the relics in 997. Charlemagne is also buried at Aachen Cathedral, a historic coronation site for German kings and queens. (The Pfarrkirche was built much later, in the 17th century, on the site of a statue of Saint Corona that was found in a tree—possibly placed there by the area’s lumberjacks.)

So all along, Saint Corona may have only been associated with disease in one small Austrian town, due to a statue in a tree and a specific confluence of local historical events. With the help of a new disease that takes her name—not to mention the internet—Saint Corona may now well become an international symbol of protection from disease. This is how it’s happened, after all, all the way back to Saint Edmund and beyond.

“Saintly traditions have always grown and developed over time as people call upon local saints for assistance in situations of crisis,” Moss wrote in an email, even if that means the saints already associated with an issue are neglected. (In the case of epidemic, that could be Edmund, Barbara, Aloysius Gonzaga, and Roch). Still, she wrote, it’s “surely a good thing” if people can now find comfort in Saint Corona—“[a]s long as they also self-isolate and don’t think Saint Corona can protect them.”

Is Saint Corona a Guardian Against Epidemics? By Matthew Taub.  Atlas Obscura, March 31, 2020