Epidemics, blame and bad behaviour: common stories from Ancient Athens to 21st century Bournemouth (originally published June 2020)

 

Epidemics, bad behaviour and blaming are a common occurrence during outbreaks of disease, whether in 21^st century Britain or in ancient Athens.   Had I realised this at the beginning of lockdown, I could have produced a prophecy, not a blog post.

One of the earliest reliable descriptions of an epidemic and its impact was written by the Athenian historian Thucydides, who wrote in the 5^th century BCE. He tells how during the Peloponnesian War there was an outbreak of plague in Athens. When the disease first emerged it was attributed to the Peloponnesians having poisoned their water supplies,  an idea with contemporary Trumpian parallels.  As the epidemic spread, those accusations faded away, but other familiar aspects emerge. People died in isolation as friends and relatives stayed away for fear of contagion,  some heroic individuals cared for the sick but at the cost of their own lives.  Finally, as the scale of the calamity was revealed, public behaviour became nihilistic. “There was no fear of gods or laws”, Thucydides says, and the pleasure of the moment was all that mattered.

The Ancient Greeks might not have understood contagion and the nature of diseases, but their responses to the crisis have recurred through the centuries right through to the present day.   In the medieval period, Christians looked for scapegoats too. Their targets were usually Jews but also Muslims, other perceived heretics, and even women and the clothes they wore. They saw plagues and epidemics as punishments wrought by a vengeful God. By contrast in the Islamic world epidemics were seen as a mercy sent by God; a way that the faithful could enter heaven. Despite this, there is still evidence that some Muslims were not too keen to get to heaven earlier and left for the countryside when epidemics struck. 

It is often suggested (even by academics who should know better) that the reason that Jews and Muslims were blamed for epidemics is that they had lower death rates from medieval plagues. This, they assert, arose from good hygiene practices, such as ritual handwashing, associated with their beliefs. However, there is no evidence to back up this assertion.  Michael Dol has shown that deaths from epidemics across the Middle East were just as severe as in Europe. Also, if there were fewer deaths among non- Christians in Europe then conversely, more deaths would be expected in the Christian Middle East than in neighbouring non-Christian communities, but this is not the case. Also, bubonic plague is not spread by infectious droplets but via bites from infected fleas.  Blaming Jews and Muslims was just another example of intolerance and scapegoating (does this sound familiar?).

Come forward to the last great plague epidemics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and we are in familiar territory.  Scapegoats were still found.  In England, various nations were blamed for the plague’s arrival, including the Dutch and the French. Religious intolerance abounded; Puritan magistrates suggested the plague was a judgement on sinful cities and used it as an excuse to repress brothels and taverns.  The poor got sick because of the way they lived; in squalor, frequenting taverns and alehouses. Thus morality and ‘illness as retribution’ were linked in a way that would delight contemporary tabloid editors.

A variation on scapegoating was to blame another country for whatever ailment was newly found to be a concern, so diseases are named after the nation that is the local focus of blame. In the nineteenth century, syphilis was known as variously across the world as the Polish disease, the Turkish disease and the Neapolitan disease.  The naming of Spanish flu encapsulates both scapegoating and the unexpected consequences of censorship.  The major European powers suppressed information about the new flu to avoid damaging morale during World War I; Spain was neutral, and so there were no press restrictions, and the flu outbreak was reported freely there. Thus news of the flu arrived first from Spain (where it was called the French flu) rather than from local presses.

 

Government responses have also remained consistent. In the late medieval period, despite reoccurrences of the plague, England was slow to adopt measures to limit the impact of epidemics. Its first official policy was not implemented until 1518, years and in some cases centuries, after Scotland, Italy and France had all put measures in place to minimise contact with the infected.   Repeatedly governments across Europe denied the existence of plagues or downplayed them to reduce the impact on trade and society.   Once epidemics had become established, then familiar issues arose. Public services were overwhelmed; prisoners demanded to be released from prisons for fear of being trapped with sick people. Pest houses,( temporary buildings designated for isolating the sick), were overwhelmed. As trade stopped and markets closed then food shortages occurred. Control measures were imposed; quarantines established, funeral attendances limited, plays banned, gatherings were forbidden, and the epidemics served as an excuse to impose social control particularly on the poor and those designated as vagrants. 

 

Populations also responded in ways we would recognise, resisting the regulations, gathering to drink with neighbours, crowding funerals and generally ignoring restrictions. The middling sort sucked their collective teeth and complained about the poor; in Norwich, in 1603, there were complaints that the under-sort would not be restrained by the magistrates.  Meanwhile, the wealthy left for their country houses. During the plague outbreak of 1563 Queen Elizabeth, I decamped to Windsor and had a gallows erected to execute anybody who arrived there from London.  In his diary for 1666, Pepys records his lute master as saying that during the plague, sick people leant out of their windows to breathe into the faces of healthy passers-by.   People offered quack cures such as chewing tobacco, suggested a miscellany of causes including wig wearing and gave advice via the equivalent of social media: hand-printed bills. As soon as the number of deaths dropped in the 1665 outbreak, Defoe claimed that Londoners forgot the danger and “opened shops, went about streets, did business, and conversed with anybody”  with the consequence that ”imprudent, rash conduct cost a great many their lives”.

As always in history, we need to consider the sources. Who are they writing for, how contemporary is their account with the events they describe.  Pepys was writing as events happened and not as entertainment or another form of publication, so his account is probably reliable. In comparison, Defoe is a less sound source. He was only about five years old in 1665 and his Journal of The Plague Year was published in 1722, long after the events described.   

 

Another link with epidemics that might feel familiar is the correlation of riots and social unrest with outbreaks of disease. These incidents were not confined to any particular countries; they occurred globally.  In the medieval period, this upheaval was clearly tied to scapegoating, Jews, clerics, beggars and others being massacred in large numbers.  In the 18^th century Russia a familiar government response of quarantine, destruction of contaminated property,  trade restrictions and other measures made the population angry and afraid. Starvation was a real fear, but the city officials and the middle classes fled, leaving the poor and the workers to survive on their own.  Riots ensued, property was destroyed, and Archbishop Ambrosius was killed for preventing access to an icon of the Virgin Mary. In 1832  during the cholera epidemic that struck Britain, a Liverpudlian mob attacked a dispensary, the first of eight uprisings in a two-week period. In each of these incidents, the crowds were convinced that doctors were killing poor people so they could use their bodies for anatomy classes.  Fear of the medical profession was not confined to Liverpool, in the same year, rioters in Paris accused doctors of poisoning their patients. In Sicily, the peasants attacked the elites and government institutions because they thought wealthy landowners were poisoning the poor. In all these places, outbreaks of cholera and the associated fear of illness and economic crisis combined to create civil unrest.   In 1894 in Milwaukee in the USA a smallpox outbreak and mistrust of the practices at the isolation hospital lead to thousand-strong mobs gathering to prevent children from being taken to hospital.    Similar riots occur across the globe in the early 20^th century.  Even as recently as 2014-15 when ebola ravaged Liberia,  riots broke out in its capital Monrovia when quarantine was imposed on the population but ignored by a  government official. 

 

COVID-19 reminds us that we are not so far away from those Ancient Athenians, as modern medicine struggles to cure the disease whilst scapegoats and fake cures abound.  Couple this with our interdependence in a globally-connected world that also enables speedy transmission of disease and our responses are predictable. Fear, stress and restrictions on freedoms make humans behave in ways that are both unsurprising and terrifying.   Maybe if there were more historians in government, we might have better predicted the human responses to our current pandemic.

 Suggested Reading

The Impact of Plague Paul Slack

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, BOOK II ch 47-53

Rebecca Rideal 1666

https://wellcomecollection.org/articles/Xn4chRIAAK03rFsj

The Annals of London: A Year-by-year Record of a Thousand Years of History John Richardson

The Comparative Communal Responses to the Black Death In Muslim And Christian Societies Michael Dols

Epidemics: Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS

The Diaries of Samuel Pepys

A Journal of the Plague Year  Daniel Defoe