What can we learn from history, in the midst of a pandemic, fear and uncertainty about the future? G10 students in their Individuals & Societies (I & S) class worked on some historical investigation. Below are two comparisons/case studies of diseases in the past and at the moment.
This is a case study of cholera and Covid-19.
And here we have a comparison between black death and Covid-19.
In addition to retrieving facts from historical documents and interpreting them objectively, what can we learn from illnesses? While the answer might vary from person to person, the American essayist Susan Sontag, in her influential Illness as Metaphor (1978) might have offered us a direction:
Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.
We are all obliged to take Covid-19 seriously and adapt to a post-pandemic world order in the near future.