Preface • xviiworks of art. When any new plague struck, the cache of responses lodged in
that collective memory provided tools for coping emotionally and practically.
AIDS has made us more conscious of past pestilences as we assess the
devastation facing sub-Saharan Africa, which may eventually lose half its
population younger than sixteen years. Yet this new affliction does not con-
stitute a return to a dark age of indiscriminate disease and death. A major
epidemic, spinning out of control, could not happen in the materially and
scientifically advanced parts of today’s globe, we keep telling ourselves even
as we confront the new disease of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome),
which mysteriously surfaced in southern China in November 2002.
The specter of biological terrorism following the attacks of September 11 ,
2001 , on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon has brought us closer to
the fears that haunted earlier generations. When powdery anthrax in letters
sent by an unknown assailant made its erratic appearance through the U.S.
mails, many panicked. Then, as public authorities sealed off areas and chem-
ically treated letters and packages, the numbers of persons infected dropped,
along with public concern. Anthrax cannot kill tens of thousands of persons,
let alone hundreds of thousands, as have some previous epidemic disasters.
Traveling into such uncharted waters is the stuff on which fiction can be
fashioned—or, more precisely, the fusion of historical fiction and science fic-
tion. We know of two outstanding modern works on the plague: Connie
Willis’s Doomsday Bookand Michael Crichton’s Timeline.Both marvelous
creations transport us back in time from our microbe-conscious world into
that of the fourteenth century, using science-fiction technology.^4 The reader
relates immediately to the people in these stories, just as Daniel Defoe’s
readers did in London in 1722. Defoe passed off his Journal of the Plague Year
as a newly discovered “eyewitness” account from the Great Plague of London
in 1665. Using fictional people but drawing on historical documents that are
missing in science-fiction accounts, he described the fears and struggles in
this time of great mortality more compellingly than historians have done.
Still, if we wish to learn from the past about confronting a deadly, runaway
malady, why not let the persons who faced the catastrophe tell their stories in
their own language and with their own understanding? We have focused our
medical and historical lenses on how those who lived through the Great
Plague experienced it in its totality—medically, politically, socially, econom-
ically, and religiously. With that aim, we have reserved any mention of our
own age’s biomedical and cultural understanding of plague to the end of this
book, after our protagonists have had their say.
Plague epidemics of the past have been examined from just about every