Pandemics, Books, History

I have been interested in pandemic disease for many years. When I did my infectious disease fellowship at Naval Medical Center San Diego in the early 1980s, I remember one of my peers presented a seminar on bubonic plague. While he used the medical literature in the seminar, he based it on the chapter about the Black Death in Barbara Tuchman’s book A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. That inspired me to find that book and read it. Then to find other books about the Black Death, then cholera, yellow fever, influenza, HIV, and on and on. I had a conversation about the history of these diseases with a junior colleague 25 or so years ago; he indicated he never read any of the books and had no interest in them. I chalked it up to intellectual incuriosity.

This year the world has been convulsed with another pandemic. I had hoped never to experience such an event but Mother Nature had other plans. Although retired, my wife and I have followed the pandemic closely. I read Michiko Takutani’s essay Coronavirus Notebook: Finding Solace, and Connection, in Classic Books today. It is a thoughtful article and worth bookmarking and rereading as time goes by. It made me think that the history of this pandemic is already being written. Takutani has nothing good to say about the response to the pandemic by the Trump administration. She quotes John Barry in his book The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History: “those in authority must retain the public’s trust” and “the way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one.” Of course, Trump and his gang have transgressed all of those tenets, starting way before COVID-19 came onto the scene.

I won’t be here to read how people 100 years from now interpret our response to coronavirus. I suspect that the historians of the future, reading accounts such as Takutani’s, will not be kind to those who were supposed to lead us in this time. I certainly intend to vote in November to hopefully eject from office those such as Trump who failed the leadership test. Hopefully, that will be a key component of how these times are viewed in that more distant future.