Opinion | What the Plague Can Teach Us About the Coronavirus

The city that gave us the word quarantine nearly 600 years ago is once again facing an epidemic. On Feb. 23, officials in Venice canceled the final days of its Carnival festival, which brings hordes of tourists to the notoriously overcrowded lagoon city. The coronavirus Covid-19 had arrived.

Faced with a novel virus, it’s worth reconsidering Italy’s long experiences with epidemics and heeding the lessons. Though the etiologies of plague and the present coronavirus differ hugely, the social consequences of these outbreaks resonate in alarmingly similar ways.

As a historian of medicine, my research focuses on Italy in the early modern period, from 1400 to 1700. In this period, many of our current public health approaches, including tallying fatalities, emerged in response to outbreaks of plague. The word quarantine derives from the Venetian word for 40 days, the length of the isolation period imposed on ships during times of plague. City officials during the Renaissance, faced with recurring bouts of plague, developed our statistical approach to tracking outbreaks. From the 1450s in Milan and the 1530s in Venice, all deaths in these cities were systematically recorded to monitor outbreaks. In 17th-century England, these tallies were printed weekly as broadsheets, which counted plague deaths by parish under the gloomy headline “Lord have mercy upon us.”

The distant past is not our best source of advice for pathogen containment. But it does offer clear lessons about human responses to outbreaks of infectious disease.

In the Renaissance, Italy was made up of many small territorial states, and travel between them was regularly curtailed because of outbreaks of plague. Travelers moving between regions during these times had to carry health passes issued by local governments testifying that they were traveling from places free of plague.

In the opening to “The Decameron,” the 14th-century poet and scholar Giovanni Boccaccio described reactions in his native Florence to an outbreak. He lamented that “the reverend authority of the laws, both human and divine, was all in a manner dissolved and fallen into decay.” We should take Boccaccio’s account as a warning. Despite Machiavelli’s call in 1513 for Italian unification in the final pages of “The Prince,” Italy only became a single nation in 1861; its deep regional divisions are still felt politically, linguistically, gastronomically and in the infrastructure its transit systems.

In this time of coronavirus, Italy’s national identity — and that of Europe more broadly — is showing signs of strain. In addition to closing off certain towns with clusters of infections, regional governments are working to isolate themselves from the rest of the country. Most notably, the province of Basilicata has imposed a 14-day quarantine on all citizens entering from Piedmont, Lombardy, the Veneto, Emilia-Romagna and Liguria. These measures are about much more than health controls. They highlight regional identities and emphasize the tensions between local and national actions being taken to contain Italy’s outbreak.

Beyond the exacerbation of regionalism in Italian society, we should be on guard against the ways that outbreaks of disease have historically led to the persecutions of marginalized people. One of the best documented social outcomes of the plague in late-medieval Europe was the violence, often directed at Jews, who were accused of causing plague by poisoning wells.

Since the eruption of the coronavirus, we have witnessed widespread anti-Asian discrimination and numerous acts of violence against Asians. We should learn from the past, identify these violent attacks as the scapegoating they are, and condemn them swiftly and harshly.

In Italy, anti-migrant sentiment is also being conflated with anxieties about the new coronavirus. The Italian interior ministry announced that the 276 migrants who were rescued off the coast of Libya last week would be placed in mandatory quarantine in Pozzallo, Sicily, though they had no connection to people or locations affected by the coronavirus. Leaders of the far-right Lega Nord party are stoking the flames of fear and fury, protesting that even in the face of the coronavirus crisis, with cities and towns under lockdown, Italy has not closed its ports to migrants. This kind of slippage from disease to accusations against a vulnerable social group, is an outcome that we have seen throughout history — as foreigners, prostitutes, Jews and the poor were blamed for outbreaks of plague.

The predictable turn to xenophobia, racism and persecution represents the breakdown of our society’s laws and morals in the face of fear and disease. It, too, is a symptom of disease, if not a biological one.

In the coming months the coronavirus may continue to spread. We will need to be on guard against contagion, but we will also need to be on guard against our own human instincts.

Hannah Marcus is an assistant professor in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard and is the author of the forthcoming book “Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

Opinion | What the Plague Can Teach Us About the Coronavirus

View News Source Web-page

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.