478 1 MAY 2020 • VOL 368 ISSUE 6490 sciencemag.org SCIENCEPHOTO: CULTURA CREATIVE (RF)/ALAMY STOCK PHOTOT
edious were it to recount, how citi-
zen avoided citizen, how among
neighbours was scarce found any
that shewed fellow-feeling for an-
other, how kinsfolk held aloof, and
never met,” wrote Giovanni Boccac-
cio in the Decameron ca. 1349, having re-
treated to a villa outside of Florence amid
the “great dying” of the bubonic plague
( 1 ). More than three centuries later, Daniel
Defoe recounted similarly trying times in
A Journal of the Plague Year: “When every
one’s private Safety lay so near them, that
they had no Room to pity the Distresses of
others...The Danger of immediate Death to
ourselves, took away all Bonds of Love, all
Concern for one another” ( 2 ).
Our lives are overturned by such “emer-
gent occasions,” as John Donne reported
in 1624 in Devotions upon Emergent Occa-
sions: “We study Health, and we deliberateupon our meats, and drink, and ayre, and
exercises, and we hew, and we polish every
stone, that goes to that building; and so our
Health is a long and a regular work; But in a
minute a Canon batters all, overthrowes all,
demolishes all; a Sicknes unprevented for
all our diligence, unsuspected for all our cu-
riositie...summons us, seizes us, possesses
us, destroyes us in an instant” ( 3 ).
What written consolations might we
turn to in this time of COVID-19? For those
searching for meaning in the midst of
plague, history and literature have long of-
fered tinctures against terror.
A body is burdened with a sickness, as
Susan Sontag well understood, but it is the
body politic that suffers in a pandemic, as
our social life changes irrevocably. “Well,
everybody is worried about everybody now,”
she wrote in a work of fiction in the New
Yorker in 1986, during the burgeoning AIDS
crisis. “[T]hat seems to be the way we live,
the way we live now...the end of bravado,
the end of folly, the end of trusting life, the
end of taking life for granted” ( 4 ).
Even echoes of an earlier generation’s
atomic anxieties and apocalypses register
differently when read in this moment. NevilShute’s 1957 postapocalyptic novel On the
Beach, for example, now seems to eerily pres-
age our own tallying of 2-week quarantines
in cities not yet abandoned but already re-
wilding: “‘It’s horrible,’ she said vehemently.
‘Everything shut up, and dirty, and stinking.
It’s as if the end of the world had come al-
ready.’ ‘It’s pretty close, you know,’ he said...
‘How far off is it, Peter?’ ‘About a fortnight,’
he said. ‘It doesn’t happen with a click, you
know. People start getting ill, but not all on
the same day. Some people are more resis-
tant than others.’ ...‘But everybody gets it,
don’t they?’ she asked in a low tone. ‘I mean,
in the end.’ He nodded. ‘Everybody gets it,
in the end.’ ...‘It’s possible to get it slightly
and get over it,’ he said. ‘But then you get it
again ten days or a fortnight later.’ ...He nod-
ded. ‘That’s the way it is. We’ve just got to
take it as it comes. After all, it’s what we’ve
always had to face, only we’ve never faced it,
because we’re young’” ( 5 ).
In an effort to understand our present pre-
dicament, we turn not only to earlier fears
but also to speculative futures, whether in
the form of scientific models or science fic-
tion novels. Although it was terrestrial mi-
crobes that ended H. G. Wells’s 1898 novelBOOKS et al.
By Luis Campos“
Tinctures of time and Schrödinger’s virus
Li terature and science converge in a pandemic
HISTORY OF SCIENCEThe reviewer is secretary of the History of Science Society
and regents’ lecturer in the Department of History,
University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA.
Email: [email protected]History and literature
can provide tinctures
against existential terror.E23G671