Posted on 04/25/2020 11:26:04 AM PDT by MikelTackNailer
Edited on 04/25/2020 4:21:01 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
In early April, writer Jen Miller urged New York Times readers to start a coronavirus diary.
“Who knows,” she wrote, “maybe one day your diary will provide a valuable window into this period.”
During a different pandemic, one 17th-century British naval administrator named Samuel Pepys did just that. He fastidiously kept a diary from 1660 to 1669 – a period of time that included a severe outbreak of the bubonic plague in London. Epidemics have always haunted humans, but rarely do we get such a detailed glimpse into one person’s life during a crisis from so long ago.
And yes,I'm far,far,*far* closer to the grave than to the cradle.I'm old enough to remember when phone numbers began with two letters!
And switchboards....
One large difference - well maybe about 1000 : it is NOT the Bubonic Plague; it is 2020; we have modern, Western medicine, labs, scientists, researchers, hospitals, and medicines; We the (Quarantined) People are healthy.
other than that, just about the same.
Oh, and they didn’t have a Bill of Rights to shred.
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>the Spanish flu
One interesting point about the Spanish Flu is that a Japanese doctor Gomibuchi treated his own family with diptheria serum. They almost instantly recovered. If only that had been tried in the Western world.
Thanks for that post.
This is nothing like the plague, which was a virtual death sentence. I believe the 1918 flu had a death rate of 3 percent in the US, although much worse in some other parts of the globe, particularly isolated, backward communities.
If this resembles anything, it’s the 1957 Asian flu, still well within living memory. I was born that October, about the time the flue hit. At various times in my childhood, I recall my parents or other adults, mention in passing how bad the Asian flu had been.
But they said nothing about the entire country shutting down to cope with what was for the time an unusually bad seasonal flu. According to the Wikipedia entry, the US death toll was somewhere between 70,000 and 116,000. The population that year was about 178 million.
On a per capita basis, this crisis has a long way to go to match the 1957 epidemic.
Every time the dead cart comes around on our street I make a note of it in my diary.
I follow Sam on twitter where bits of his diary are posted as if he’s tweeting each day and people react. Last year he was reporting daily the events of the plague - and when I was in London, last September, he was reporting on the Great Fire of 1666 that followed. It makes it seem like it’s happening now. Yesterday he reported that his wife helped with the birth of a baby girl. Hard to believe that kid was born in the 1660’s. @samuelpepys
I was born the following month. We survived!
FTA: Because these lists noted London’s burials – not deaths – they undoubtedly undercounted the dead.
Did they bury live people?
Daniel Defoe wrote a very good book on the plague in England, “Journal of the Plague Year.”
Not true AT ALL bro.
The black death wiped out 40 percent of the population!!
Everyone of EVERY age died. No treatment. Mortality rate near 100 percent.
This thing’s not even a cold compared to that disease and that time.
Spanish flu is closer and maybe without some modern treatments we would have 3 or 4x the number of deaths.
I bet that flu hit the old the hardest too. you’re right about that.
But the black death...yeesh...that’s in ebola territory
“If this resembles anything, it’s the 1957 Asian flu.”
I remember that. I was in grade school. But back then the big scare (at least for us kids) was polio, as we could directly relate to it as some of our classmates had suffered its terrible consequences. We all hated getting our polio shots (and how happy we were when the shot was replaced by the sugar cube dosed with serum!).
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England resisted having an organized police force because they felt it would impinge on people's freedom. Law enforcement was organized by local communities who hired a constable and some watchmen. They hired men to patrol the Thames in boats, and the Bow Street Runners were established to respond to emergencies, but they didn't fund a full-fledged police force until it was established by law in 1829.
Don’t forget party lines.
I’m surprised Pepsy (pronounced Peeps), had time to keep a diary with all the fornicating he did.
Thanks for replying to my post.
Much as what I noted about the Asian flu, when I was a kid, I certainly heard a lot about what a scourge polio had been. Unlike you, I never was fortunate enough to get the Sabin vaccine — a lot of my earliest childhood memories involved getting stuck like a pin cushion on what seemed to be a regular basis.
There’s a fine book about those times titled: “Patenting the Sun: Polio and the Salk Vaccine” by Jane S. Smith (1990, Morrow). I read it not long after it was published, and it’s had an honored place on my shelf ever since, in the anticipation of reading it again someday. I should note that while it covers Jonas Salk and his work in great detail, it doesn’t devote many pages to the Sabin vaccine.
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