Podunk Pundit

The covid plague, which has killed over a million Americans so far, is a reminder that history is one plague after another. When my generation was young the plague du jour was polio which crippled and killed some of our contemporaries and terrified our parents. When a vaccine was discovered there was a great sigh of relief.

We also forget how hard life was for our ancestors doing harsh manual labor in crowded cities and unhealthy environments before there was modern medicine to rely on. All of which contributed to shortened life expectancy. 

The plague that haunted my grandmother’s generation was tuberculosis, also known as the White Death. Her mother died of it at 31, her brother at 32, her sister at 27, her son at 24. The disease was identified as early as 4,000 BC and has been detected in the ancient mummies of Egypt. 

From the 1600s to the 1800s TB was so widespread that it is believed to account for 25% of all deaths, in part fueled by the advent of urban crowding and the coming of the industrial revolution.  But the dead were far from restricted to the working class. It was so pervasive inthe 1800s that frequently appeared in the period’s literature and two operas. 

The list of the famous victims of TB at its height includes Keats, Simon Bolivar, President James Monroe, Chopin, Thoreau, St.Therese of Lisieux, Chekhov, Calvin, Kafka, Anne and Emily Bronte, Robert Burns, Moliere, Whitman, Stephen Foster, Delacroix, Schrödinger, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bartholdi of Statue of Liberty fame, and on and on. 

In 1905 one of the first Nobel prizes was awarded for the discovery of the bacillus that causes tuberculosis. Increased attention to public heath and isolation of victims helped but failed to eliminate the plague until effective medicines were created beginning with the first vaccines in 1921. These finally managed to decrease mortality by 90% in the 1950s. 

We are lucky compared to those who came before the era of vaccines and antibiotics. One by one vaccines were developed that could make previously deadly diseases less terrifying. The targets included rabies, smallpox, measles, mumps, rubella, whooping cough, hepatitis, tetanus, diphtheria, and more recently covid.

Despite being surrounded by TB deaths in the family, my grandmother somehow avoided contracting the plague. And because of the failure of doctors to save so many members of her family she avoided them too, attended services of a Christian Science congregation, and lived to the ripe old age of 95. 

She lived with my parents from the time I was born. While they worked, she cooked the family meals everyday, did the laundry, and read me bedtime stories some from books once owed by her son Richard, dead of tuberculosis of the bone just six years before my birth. In retrospect I suspect I served as a stand-in for him.

She wasn’t wrong to believe that medical science is not infallible. For example, resistant strains of TB threatened a resurgence of the plague beginning in the 1980s. As recently as 2022, largely in Africa, Southeast Asia and India, over ten million TB infections were recorded and 1.3 million deaths. Unfortunately, you have to get the treatment to avoid the infection. WHO (the World Health Organization) reports that TB is still rampant in less developed parts of the world where medical care may be in short supply.

Jefferson said the price of liberty is eternal vigilance but it also appears that the price of survival is eternal detection of the next plague and creation of the next vaccine. The medicines that greatly reduced the threat of tuberculosis, polio, and so many other scourges saved countless lives. 

And yet, the threats never cease. New plagues are continually emerging and waiting to join the long list that has decimated the human species over the course of history. The bubonic plague killed at least a third of Europe’s population in the fourteenth century. As recently as 1918, Spanish Flu killed 50 million people around the world, including 675,000 Americans.

In our time, we have experienced the arrival the such viruses HIV, Ebola, Marburg, Sars, Mers, Zika, and most recently Covid which has so far killed 7 million around the world. WHO scientists have now warned that the next pandemic, dubbed Disease X, could be 20 times worse than Covid. Not exactly something to look forward to, but it may be slightly encouraging to know there are scientific cops on the beat who will try to protect us from whatever comes next. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American author, philosopher, and transcendentalist, coined a famous phrase in one of his poems — “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.” His implied preference, like his neighbor Thoreau, was for an austere natural simplicity rather than for rampant materialism.

Still, we are all creatures of our own personal abode. There is no place like home in part because it contains and is given character by our stuff. These may include heirlooms we have inherited, familiar furniture that we find comfortable, landscapes that harbor years-worth of memories.

After a recent trip to faraway places, coming home was comforting in part because it was familiar, especially the stuff it contained. An upstairs room is a library, its walls covered with shelves that contain books organized by subject matter, genre, and author. There’s great comfort to be had from immediate access to fiction, poetry, history, fine arts, biographies accumulated over the years.

There’s also comfort to be had from a few odd artifacts or objets d’art. A farmer my mother knew when I was a child would occasionally plow up some surprising oddities in his fields and pass them on to the curious kid she’d told him would find such finds intriguing. And I did. Enough so that all these decades later I still have the molar of a mastodon that he gave me. A few other fossils are on display. He also sent me many Indian arrowheads in a cigar box that wound up in the garage and were stolen, presumably by some other neighborhood kids. A lesson to keep your stuff in a safe place.

Other stuff that warm’s the heart and gives home more character than it might otherwise possess hangs on the walls. Some are old fashioned sepia photos of ancestors long gone but not forgotten. There are also photos of the part of the world where I grew up. One of a steel mill and others of the river where we played that ran through our home town. 

A fondness for Japanese Ukiyo-e prints has resulted in several walls adorned with them which depict men crossing a bridge in the rain, fishermen throwing nets in the water with Mt. Fuji in the background, sailing ships, wading birds and the like. 

The walls also have reminders acquired in other far away places. Tara in Ireland, a painting of a mediterranean island complete with volcano, another of a Chinese tea plantation and its workers, a church in the English village of Rumsey where ancestors several centuries ago may have been married. There’s also a little collection of illustrations from stories found in children’s books by L. Frank Baum, Poe, Washington Irving et al. There’s also a painting of a yard sale by a woman I used to work with. 

None of these pictures are especially valuable, but together they are an organic part of our lives. They give character, nostalgia, and beauty to the place where we spend our days. It is stuff that might mean next to nothing to anyone else, but it captures moments from our past and help to keep the memories fresh. The value of such stuff should not be underestimated.