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