You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
‘Against other things it is possible to obtain security,’
wrote the Greek philosopher Epicurus in the third century BC,
‘but when it comes to death we human beings all live in an unwalled city’
(pp. 19–20).
Before 2020, I don’t recall ever giving a second thought to the danger infectious diseases pose, either to myself personally, or more widely to the community within which I live. Partly this could be attributed to my wilful ignorance. But it is also true that there is only a limited number of things we can each hold in mind and worry about on a daily basis. Infections were not included on my own list of worries.
So, when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, I was taken by surprise. After the initial, abrupt reorganisation of my work and personal life, which we each had to deal with at the start of spring 2020, I turned to reading, to gain perspective and find my bearings in the situation. I swiftly found out what I should have already known: pandemics have (of course) occurred regularly throughout history. More interestingly, many of the superstitions, passionate debates, conspiracy theories and dilemmas we suddenly found ourselves surrounded by have a long history, threading through all previous pandemics too.
‘Pale Rider’ was published in 2017; it is Laura Spinney’s effort to map out the story of the Spanish Flu of 1918, a flu, it is worth saying, that didn’t originate anywhere near Spain. The Spanish Flu was ‘the most deadly pandemic in human history. It is estimated that five hundred million people contracted it – a third of the global population in 1918 – and that between fifty and a hundred million of them died’ (Francis, 2018). That pandemic, I learnt from ‘Pale Rider’, had significant differences from the current one, not just in terms of the numbers of people affected, but also, crucially, in the fact that children were much more vulnerable to it. Yet surprisingly, Spinney notes: ‘When asked what was the biggest disaster of the twentieth century, almost nobody answer