When Contagion Strikes

by CLR Peterson | Apr 26, 2020 | Contagious disease, Father Damian, Francis of Assisi, Leprosy

Compassion, cruelty, or escape? Why do people act in such different ways when confronted with threats of contagious disease? Ignorance of a disease’s cause sometimes led to extreme reactions.  Spiritual beliefs also played a role. Both Catholic and Protestant traditions reveal merciful as well as cruel responses. We’ll look back over the centuries and suggest novels and nonfiction that dive deeper.

LEPROSY

Before and after the plague, leprosy was a much-feared contagious and often fatal bacterial nerve disease for thousands of years.

Disfiguring symptoms (rash-like skin patches and loss of extremities due to inability to feel pain) meant people afflicted with leprosy were shunned and often forced to live in leper colonies.

Most people avoided lepers, but not these heroes:

Francis of Assisi—(1181-1226) was a rich young man who abandoned his life of luxury for a life of poverty devoted to living like Jesus, preaching and serving people. Although he had felt a long-standing revulsion, he not only gave lepers coins for food, but also embraced them. Evidence suggests he may have contracted leprosy from these contacts.

Father Damian—(1840-1889) was a Catholic priest who ministered to lepers’ physical, spiritual. and emotional needs on the Hawaiian island of Moloka’i, where the state ordered them to live in isolation. He lived there for eleven years and contracted the disease himself.  He continued his work on Moloka’i and died six years later.

Read about them:

Saint Francis of Assisi, biography by G.K. Chesterton

Moloka’i, historical novel by Alan Brennert

Or watch: Brother Sun, Sister Moon (popular 1972 movie about life of Francis)

PLAGUES (beginning in the mid-1300s):

“The mystery of the contagion was ‘the most terrible of all the terrors,'” author Barbara Tuchman wrote about the Black Death (Bubonic Plague) of the 14^th century, in her novel, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century.

Because people didn’t understand the causes of the plague, Christian men and women known as flagellants wandered through town and countryside flogging themselves, trying to atone for the world’s evil. They believed this might persuade God to end the plague.

Others scapegoated Jews, believing they had caused the plague by poisoning water. As was common through the centuries, people turned to violence, expulsions and massacres against their Jewish neighbors (including burning to death nearly two hundred Jews in Strasbourg in 1349).

Yet others sacrificed their lives to care for the sick, such as in Wittenberg, Saxony, in 1527:

The plague arrived in the town of Wittenberg, where Martin Luther taught and lived, in August, 1527. Then:

• The university shut down.
• Many students and professors fled.
• Luther’s patron, the Elector of Saxony, ordered Luther to leave.
• Luther refused, insisting he needed to stay to minister to the townspeople.
• Luther and his wife, Katharina, opened their home to shelter and treat plague victims.
• Luther’s own son became ill, but survived.

Read about it:

Decameron—written during Italian Renaissance, characters escape the Plague by retreating to a villa in the Italian countryside to wait out the end of the plague

A Distant Mirror, by Barbara Tuchman (novel, mentioned above)

Katharina Fortitude, by Margaret Skea—novel about Katharina von Bora’s marriage and life with Martin Luther, including the time of Plague

The Reformation of Suffering: Pastoral Theology and Lay Piety in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany, by Ronald K. Rittgers—(nonfiction) scholarly examination of responses to the plague and other suffering

Plague in 17^th-Century England:

• Plague arrived in London in Spring, 1665.
• Theaters, Oxford and Cambridge Universities were closed.
• In 1666, King Charles II commanded an end to all public gatherings.
• Many wealthy Londoners fled to the countryside to escape infection. 
• In London, the sick and those in their households were quarantined, with the government supplying their food.

Read about it:

Samuel Pepys’ diary: (nonfiction) his entries from Spring,1665-1666 chronicled London’s bubonic plague epidemic

For more on this Plague outbreak, see this recent article: “What Social Distancing Looked Like in 1666.”

A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe—Over 50 years after the epidemic, Defoe drew upon historical documents to write this realistic novel about the plague’s effects on London.

The Weight of Ink, by Rachel Kadish—a fascinating time-split novel set partly in 17^th-century London at the time of the Plague

Year of Wonder, by Geraldine Brooks. Fictionalized account of how a town in the English countryside isolated itself to prevent the spread of the Plague

EPIDEMICS IN THE HABSBURG EMPIRE:

In 1710, Emperor Joseph I attempted to isolate his territories from the spread of disease

• He created a “sanitary cordon” several miles deep along the thousand-mile-long southern border with the Ottoman Empire.
• He died of smallpox the following year, in spite of his efforts.  

Read about it:

For more, see this article: “Joseph I’s Coronavirus Solution.”

Nonfiction:

The Habsburg Monarchy 1618-1815, by Charles Ingrao

The Grand Strategy of the Habsburg Empire, by A. Wess Mitchell

Readers, are there lessons we can draw from these stories from the past?