Compassion in the Time of Pandemic

By John Smelcer, PhD, CAGS

For decades, I taught a popular university course called “Literature of the Plague.” The syllabus included books like Albert Camus’ The Plague, Stephen King’s The Stand, and Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone. It also included Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, published in 1722, but based on events during the 1665 Great Plague when bubonic plague swept through London. More popularly, Defoe also wrote Robinson Crusoe. I even wrote a novel based on how the 1918–1920 Spanish Flu pandemic decimated the population of Alaska Native peoples…