History reveals how societies survive plagues

摘要

This isn't the first time in history that societies have been racked by social unrest while in the grip of a pandemic. That may be scant comfort, but as Bruce Bower explains in this issue (Page 24), impacts of a pandemic often reach beyond the toll of illness and death. In the mid-200s, the Plague of Cyprian may have helped to irreversibly weaken the Roman Empire. In the 19th century, soldiers sent to Haiti by Napoleon Bonaparte to quash rebellion succumbed to yellow fever, leading to Haitian independence and Napoleon's sale of the territory of Louisiana to the United States. Yellow fever's grip on Louisiana perpetuated racial inequity, Bower reports. White people who survived gained special privileges once they were immune to the mosquito-borne disease. Enslaved people, however, did not; surviving yellow fever just made them more valuable as workers.