The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
statement
Wednesday, September 30, 2020 — 16 

A lesson from past 
pandemics

BY WILLA HART, STATEMENT COLUMNIST

L

ast week, in one of my history classes, Sick-

ness and Health Since 1492, I was assigned 

the reading “The Cholera Years” by Charles 

E. Rosenberg. The book is a dense, nearly 300-page 

account of the United States cholera epidemics of the 

1800s; the syllabus had us reading all but one chapter. 

I flipped through the pages of endless paragraphs and 

resigned myself to a Saturday unfortunately spent.

Then I started reading the book. Within the first 

30 pages, I found myself unexpectedly sucked in by 

Rosenberg’s description of a cholera-stricken New 

York. “By the end of the first week in July (in 1832),” 

Rosenberg writes, a few days after the city’s first chol-

era cases were confirmed, “almost everyone who could 
afford to had left the city. Farm houses and country 

homes within a thirty-mile radius were completely 

filled ... Visitors to the city were struck by the deathly 

silence of the streets, unaccustomedly clean.” I read 

this paragraph, then read it again. I felt as though I 

was reading an account of New York during the CO-

VID-19 outbreak. Vividly, I was reminded of the pho-

tos that had circulated the internet in the early days 

of COVID-19 in March 2020, images of a Times Square 

gone quiet and empty of tourists. 

The similarities didn’t stop there. Throughout the 

rest of his book, Rosenberg proceeded to outline the 

terror New Yorkers faced with cholera, their new ob-

session with cleanliness and how cholera dispropor-

tionately affected poor populations. His descriptions 

felt strangely prescient to me, the commentary almost 

uncomfortably familiar. For all our differences and 

scientific evolutions, the cholera outbreak in the 1830s 

had many outwardly similar social effects to the pan-

demic we face today.
W

hen I decided to declare a Minor in Sci-

ence, Technology and Society with a 

concentration in medicine, I didn’t think 

it would ever be particularly useful for me. It was an 

interesting field of study, I thought, and offered an ex-

cuse to take classes across a range of disciplines; that 

was enough to convince me to sign up. As a Philosophy 

major, I’d already thrown practicality to the window. 

What’s five more indulgent humanities courses before 

I graduate?

When COVID-19 hit, I was taking one of those indul-

gent classes: AIDS and Other Health Crises. It didn’t 

take long for me to realize, after I returned home, that 

my education had already uniquely prepared me to un-

derstand and discuss COVID-19. Not to say I was an 

expert, only that I alone among my family had previ-

ously learned about the concepts that news anchors 

were now discussing on TV, and so I was most easily 

able to explain them. I talked my dad through “flat-

tening the curve” and explained to my mom the differ-

ence between quarantine and isolation. I told my sister 

about the basics of making flu vaccines. 

It felt like a stroke of luck, then, that I had cho-

sen the minor I did. Even if everything else was going 

wrong, I thought, at least I was getting some use out of 

my education.

It’s only over the past few weeks that I’ve realized 

just how valuable my education really is. 

I’m taking the bulk of the classes for my minor 

this semester, and the more I read about the history 

of medicine, the more I realize that everything we’re 

experiencing now, as both individuals and as a soci-

ety, has been experienced by others before. In other 

words, we are not alone in history. 

It’s a notion I find incredibly comforting, even if 

it’s one not necessarily often spoken about. We usually 

prefer to frame the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of 

novelty — just think about how often you’ve heard the 

term “unprecedented” in the last six months. And in 

some ways, COVID-19 definitely is unprecedented: It’s 

a “novel” virus and the first serious global pandemic in 

decades. Still, novelty, for me, has become exhausting. 

As French philosopher Albert Camus writes in his 

novel “The Plague,” which chronicles a breakout of 

bubonic plague in an Algerian city, “Considering the 

abnormal conditions (the townsfolk) were up against, 

the very word ‘novelty’ had lost all its meaning.”

When I read this sentence last weekend as part of 

my weekly school readings, it hit me unexpectedly 

hard. I’m tired of being told what a unique position 

we’re in as a society. I’m tired of being told how crazy 

this all is. It’s not comforting anymore, if it ever was. I 

want things to be normal again. I want to not be afraid 

that these “unprecedented” times are going to turn out 

to be the apocalypse — because, as the world contin-

ues to crumble around us, it feels more and more likely 

that that’s exactly where we’re headed. 

In one of my classes last week, as we were wait-

ing for the last few students to join the Zoom call, my 

professor started talking about COVID-19 and the so-

called “college experience.” 

“People worry right now that they’re not getting 

their college experience,” he said, “But this is the most 

real college experience you could possibly have.”

The last student joined the Zoom, then, and my pro-

fessor moved on to discussing our readings, so I never 

got to hear his explanation for exactly what he meant 

by that. But I’ve been thinking about it for the past few 

days, and though I still don’t know precisely what he 

was getting at, I have my own interpretation of what 

he meant.

The college experience, as it’s sold to us, is largely 

artificial. It’s consumptive, revolving around frat par-

ties and football games, expensive dorm rooms and 

late-night study sessions. But that’s just one depic-

tion of the college experience. There’s another side 
of things which is perhaps less openly discussed, but 

which I believe is much more fundamental to one’s 

college years: the experience of becoming an adult.

Growing up is weird. It’s weird the first time you 

have to pay your own utility bills. It’s weird the first 

time you realize how expensive nice toilet paper is. It’s 

weird the first time you compare savings accounts to 

see which will get you a higher yield on your invest-

ment. And it’s weird the first time you face a national 

or global crisis. There’s something for every genera-

tion. For millennials, it was 9/11 and the Great Re-

cession; for us, it’s COVID-19. I wish it wasn’t. I wish 

this wasn’t happening, that people across the world 

weren’t dying from a disease that good leadership and 

social distancing should be able to limit, if not prevent. 

But this is happening, and people are dying, and we 

have to face the gravity of that.

It doesn’t matter how many people, historically or 

today, have experienced pandemics before: This pan-

demic is still painful. We can’t change or ignore that, 

and we shouldn’t try to. But at a time when the world 

feels uniquely unstable, it can also be reassuring to 

know that everything we’re experiencing, as indi-

viduals and a society, has been experienced by others 

before. Two hundred years before I was born, people 

were feeling and experiencing the same things I am 

right now, in a place not too far from here. Societies 

changed, cities slowed, friends and families were sep-

arated. And yet, eventually, they came back together 

again. The world survived. 

Knowing that doesn’t soften the tragedy we’re cur-

rently experiencing, but it does reassure me that, 

whatever this is, it probably isn’t the apocalypse.

ILLUSTRATION BY MAGGIE WIEBE

