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What the Plague Foretold About COVID
The Black Death has similarities to the current pandemic
I picked a book out of a random bookcase in my house the other day, wanting to just get out of my head and read a bit. Ended up being an interesting read with more than a few parallels to recent events.
So much for trying to get away from current events
In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death & the World it Made by Norman F. Cantor, the late professor emeritus of history, sociology, and comparative literature at NYU and celebrated medievalist, was published in 2001 — well before any of the recent nonsense. His questionable plague origin commentary aside, I found parts of the book to eerily echo the last nearly 2 years of the modern age.
As Cantor noted, historians of disease find commonality in pandemics — people tend to flee to supposedly safe areas and conspiracy theories blame the disease on “strangers and unpopular minorities.” We have yet to break the cycle.
Unprepared and scared
He opened the book by mentioning a warning from biomedical experts at a 2000 AMA conference that the world, particularly the United States, was not ready for a pandemic. Why? America was more concerned with bioterrorism. Even some…
