It's the plaaaaaague!

[damned_colonial]

It's July 1st. Let the "Plagues and Pandemics" discussion begin!

I'll be posting some questions/prompts for discussion over the next month, at least one a week and hopefully a bit more than that. If anyone else has points for discussion, please feel free to post with them. I am responsible for making sure *some* discussion posts happen, but I'm happy to share!

For now I'd like to open up with something very general:

What have you noticed are the main similarities and differences between the various plague stories you've read?

What impressions did you get regarding the author's historical research? How do you think the author's understanding of the period in question affected the way the story was told?

Comments

[damned_colonial]

Well, I've read "Fever, 1793", "Doomsday Book", "Year of Wonders", and I'm ploughing through the "Journal of the Plague Year" audiobook intermittently. I also posted an excerpt from Patrick O'Brian about Yellow Fever.

Similarities: this is blindingly obvious, really, but all the protagonists are survivors. I was really moved by the medieval chronicler quoted in "Doomsday Book" who watched and documented everyone around him die, then died himself. I recognise the writerly difficulty of writing someone who dies at the end of the book, but there's a part of me that would've liked to read it. Perhaps I should go dig up that medieval account?

Differences: genre, mostly. I've got a factual-sounding account that's only faintly fictional (JotPY), a straight historical (YOW), a YA historical (F1793), and a time travel book with a modern protagonist experiencing the Black Death (DB). I have Hambly's "Fever Season" out from the library, and that's a mystery. I found that the genre conventions were what made the stories stand out most, even more than the historical era in which they were set (1340s, 1660s, 1790s).

Wrt historical research and the author's understanding of the plague/pandemic they're writing about... the main thing I've noticed is that modern authors, who understand the germ theory of infection, have a great deal of trouble avoiding showing their knowledge, even if just by pointing at the historical characters and smirking behind their hand. O'Brian was probably the most obnoxious about this, with all his stuff about Stephen avoiding "miasmas", and Willis was probably the least, in that her protagonist was modern and didn't have that problem. She did have the issue of translating her understanding to the medieval people she was staying with, in ways they'd understand, but I thought it was done fairly sensitively (both internally to the story, in eternally wrt how Willis wrote it for our consumption).

[starlady]

I noticed the dilemma of the author's knowledge playing itself out, too--in some ways I actually thought Fever, 1793 solved the problem most elegantly, since Andersen has the Benjamin Rush vs. the French doctors (with Rush being basically a medieval quack, and the French being modern) debate play out within the book, and actually have readily observable consequences for the protagonist and her family. I live right near Philadelphia, actually, and it was something of a shock to see Rush taken down those pegs, since he's still something of a favorite local son.

In general, living near Philadelphia, I thought Andersen did a great job of capturing it as it was at the time--which isn't surprising, since she lives in the PA suburbs of Philly.

[daegaer]

While I haven't been able to keep up with anything this summer since getting sick, I remember how very moved I was by Doomsday Book generally. Was the mediaeval chronicler referred to the Irish monk John Clyn? His note about putting by writing materials so that anyone who survived could continue the account he could no longer write is very sad:

"So that notable deeds should not perish with time, and be lost from the memory of future generations, I, seeing these many ills, and that the whole world encompassed by evil, waiting among the dead for death to come, have committed to writing what I have truly heard and examined; and so that the writing does not perish with the writer, or the work fail with the workman, I leave parchment for continuing the work, in case anyone should still be alive in the future and any son of Adam can escape this pestilence and continue the work thus begun."