GET WELL SOON: History’s Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them

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Nonfiction
Trading syphilis for smallpox

GET WELL SOON
History’s Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them
By Jennifer Wright
320 pp. Henry Holt and Co, New York.

Reviewed by David E. Hoekenga, M. D.

Plagues have killed more humans than anything else. In fact, nothing else comes even close. Yet the author writes with unreserved humor and grace, beginning with her dedication: “For Mom and Dad, Would it kill you to go to the doctor now and then?”

The author cleverly uses a picture of a Chili’s restaurant which holds 180 adults, to graphically illustrate just how 168 Spaniards (without guacamole) could conquer 80,000 Incas who were weakened by disease and misled by their gods. She remarks when describing encephalitis lethargic that the neurologist Oliver Sacks was the coolest man who ever walked on the earth. With this judgement I totally concur.

In chapter after deadly chapter Wright catalogues the deadly effect of plague after plague, accurately describing a variety of tragedies that have befallen humanity. The Antonine Plague killed two thousand Romans a day until the Empire was no more. There is debate among experts as to whether it was measles, typhus or smallpox that degraded the Empire, but she firmly believes it was smallpox, based on her reading of Galen’s description of the appearance of the victims. A study of the toll caused by the Antonine Plague suggests 18 million deaths. During the bubonic plague, doctors’ costumes were dressed all black and included a long-pointed beak. That, she writes, was “slightly less creepy than Big Bird.” But the beak could be packed with arose petals, oranges and spices to disguise the smell of rotting flesh, so it served a purpose

And then there were the ravages of syphilis arriving in Barcelona in 1493 and killing one million Europeans, “a fair trade,” she writes, “for the measles and smallpox the Europeans exported to the Americas. Just name a famous person between 1520 and 1928 and they probably had it.” Beethoven, Flaubert, Napoleon, Schubert, Hitler, Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln are believed to have had it. Syphilis was called the great imitator because its many symptoms resemble so many other diseases, often destroying victims’ noses before their descent into madness. Theo van Gogh, “became violent in his dementia and attacked his wife and child.” Guy de Maupassant lost his mind in a more gentle fashion and anxiously asked everyone he knew,” You haven’t seen my thoughts anywhere, have you?”

Tuberculosis seems to have peaked somewhat later and was widely glamorized. However, Wright says it doesn’t make people “cool, poetic, sexy, classy, or genius, just dead.” Often called consumption, it kills Violetta in Verdi’s La Traviata. Her last note in the opera is a high B-flat which the author states no one with tuberculosis would ever be able to hit. It also takes the Nicole Kidman character in Moulin Rouge. For generations, consumptives were idealized in literature as the ideal of feminine beauty. The English poet Elizabeth Siddal was a long-necked “glamorized tubercular aesthetic turned deadly.” She was known for her slimness, pallor, long red hair and looking as if she were dying of tuberculosis.

Wright lauds many of the heroes who fought these diseases. But into the “shitty quagmire” of cholera she singles out a physician named John Snow, a real square, like the Game of Thrones character Jon Snow.  Doctor Snow is a teetotaler and a scold with poor bedside manner and no social life. In 1849 during an epidemic in England and Wales killed that fifty thousand people, Snow became convinced that cholera was spread by water, an idea poo-pooed by many. He waited five years until baby Lewis contracted cholera. Her family had a cesspool in their front yard and got their water from the most popular water source in Soho, the Broad Street Pump. When seventy-four people died there, Doctor Snow constructed a map showing that the closer people lived to the Broad Street Pump, the more likely they were to fall ill or even die.

Despite his meticulous data, Dr. Snow was attacked by a medical journal The Lancet which stated, “he lives in a metaphorical sewer!” Skepticism persisted for years and the Lancet claimed that “noxious smells” were a malignant influence in the causation and aggravation of disease. But during the next outbreak of cholera in 1866, officials told citizens to boil their water. After that, there was never another cholera outbreak in London. “Ever,” states Wright.

Get Well Soon is an informative, fun and quick read.