“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” wrote the Spanish-born Harvard scholar George Santayana in 1905. A century of unimaginable change lay over the horizon, including two world wars, global pandemics, women’s voting rights, the first moon landings, and the dawning of the internet age.
Needless to say, Santayana’s famous quotation has taken on a life of its own. Reworking his words to the point of exhaustion, those who remember Santayana’s insight ironically take it for granted more often than not. *** “In these uncertain times…”. No expression has aged more quickly. In these uncertain times we are told to wash our hands, cough into our sleeves, socially isolate, and avoid gatherings of more than two people (three’s a crowd). In these uncertain times, however, all is not lost. The study of the past can guide us in the face of political alarm, social anxiety, and public crisis. Contagion, and the fear it inspires, are as old as history. In 431 B.C., a mysterious plague ravaged Athens. Its impact, described by the Greek historian Thucydides, was eerily familiar. “Neither were the physicians at first of any service, ignorant as they were of the proper way to treat it, but they died themselves the most thickly, as they visited the sick most often; nor did any human art succeed any better. Supplications in the temples, divinations, and so forth were found equally futile, till the overwhelming nature of the disaster at last put a stop to them all together.” Happily, medical science has moved on, but few readers will overlook the universal challenge of pandemic disease, resurrected in the ominous form of COVID-19. Left to their own devices, Athenians embraced measures that afforded some respite: social distancing and self-isolation. Similar patterns held during the terrifying pandemic of the Black Death in the fourteenth century. Another eyewitness to history, Giovanni Boccaccio captured the moment in his classic account, The Decameron. The plague’s relentless progress terrorized Boccaccio and fellow citizens of medieval Florence: “despite all that human wisdom and forethought could devise to avert it, as the cleansing of the city from many impurities by officials appointed for the purpose, the refusal of entrance to all sick folk, and the adoption of many precautions for the preservation of health.” Some coped by taking to prayer, others to the bottle: “drinking with an entire disregard of rule or measure, and by preference making the houses of others, as it were, their inns.” Still others coped, in that Netflix-less age, by the oldest medium of all: telling fantastic stories around the fireside, inspiring those Boccaccio captured forever in his writing. Closer to home and our own time, southwest Ohio is no stranger to epidemic disease. Outbreaks of cholera in 1832 and 1849 claimed around 2 and 4 percent of Cincinnati’s population respectively, attesting to the dismal sanitation of the nineteenth century Queen City. In light of current events, much has been written about the 1918-1919 global pandemic, which infected perhaps a third of humanity. With a fatality rate of some 2.5 percent, “Spanish Influenza” killed up to 50 million worldwide: more than the First World War to which it furnished such a gruesome epilogue. In Cincinnati, city leaders responded with closures of schools, theaters, libraries, bars, and other public spaces. Different times, but oddly familiar. If history teaches us one thing, then the lessons of the past are not enough to save us from the ignorance of the present. There’s much about COVID-19 we don’t know, much we can only guess at in the coming months. To acknowledge and embrace uncertainty is itself a lesson from history, perhaps the most important. Thankfully coronavirus is not cholera or the Black Death. But it is not nothing. The uncertain months before us will be a time for putting history to the test, and for recognizing our shared humanity above all else.
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AuthorMatthew Smith, PhD (History). Public Programs at Miami University Regionals. Historian of Appalachia, the Ohio Valley, & the early American republic. Archives
February 2024
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