Brian Michael Jenkins - Plagues and Their Aftermath: How Societies Recover from Pandemics

And, as the story plain doth tell,

within the Countrey there did rest

A dredfull Dragon, fierce and fell,

whereby they were full sore opprest:

Who by his poisoned breath each day did

many of the City slay.

THE SHIRBURN BALLADS, 15851616.

EARLY CHRONICLERS CONNECTED plagues with pestilential fumes from fire-breathing dragons. The idea, although fanciful, was not far from medical theory at the time, which attributed outbreaks of disease to miasmasconcentrations of poisonous vapors. Although contagion theory replaced noxious-air explanations of infirmity in the nineteenth century, as late as the mid-1960s, when I was a soldier in the Dominican Republic, farmers showing up at our makeshift medical clinic still blamed chronic aches and other health problems on a bad wind (un viento malo) that had entered their body, usually at night.

The focus in this study is not on the causes of epidemics but on their consequences. Like dragons, epidemics have long, thrashing tailslegacies not only of lives lost but of devastated economies and social disorder. These, in turn, are likely to have political repercussions. The COVID-19 pandemic will be intensively studied, but it may be years before its effects can be observed and analyzed. Past epidemics, however, offer clues as to what could occur in a future post-pandemic environment.

Scholars have produced a rich literature of past outbreaks of disease, ranging from Thucydides account of the plague that ravaged Athens starting in 430 B.C.E. to recent accounts of the AIDS and Ebola epidemics.

The effects of epidemics are not measured only in mortality. Their secondary consequences, a prominent bacteriologist wrote in 1934, have been much more far-reaching and disorganizing than anything that could have resulted from the mere reduction of the population.

Secondary effects include the economic and social disruptions caused by the contagion and efforts to contain it, the effects of widespread fear and public hysteria, increased suspicion and scapegoating, the spread of rumors and conspiracy theories, and political disturbances and disorder that undermine government legitimacy. Modern medicine has been able to reduce the number of deaths and to mitigate, if not eliminate, the sense of helplessness and despair that people must have felt in previous centuries when faced with plagues they could not understand. With advances in science able to reduce mortalityespecially as a percentage of the worlds population, other kinds of disruptions may now be the primary effects of epidemics.

Historical descriptions of the impact of epidemics fall into several broad categories. Traditional historians relating the history of a country or people mention epidemics only when the epidemics clearly alter the trajectory of eventsfor example, when they result in the loss of a war, contribute to the fall of an empire, or have such dramatic depopulation effects that they change the organization of society.

More recent historians look at huge swaths of time and territory to uncover underlying forces that affect the course of events in ways that conventional national histories might miss. As Jared Diamond noted in Guns, Germs, and Steel, Because diseases have been the biggest killers of people, they have been decisive shapers of history.

Disease has also attracted a set of historians who see epidemics as a distinct category for analysis. As Frank Snowden wrote in Epidemics and Society, Epidemics have left a particular legacy in their wake. Their singularity merits attention. Historians of epidemics analyze the effects of various contagious diseases throughout history or document specific outbreaks of disease and their consequences in certain regions, countries, or cities. With its massive death toll, Europes Black Death of the fourteenth century has probably attracted the most attention, but books such as