Has disease always been politicized or has this been a recent occurrence (last 100 years or so?)
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Always. Or religiosized (yes, I know that's not a word), possessed by Satan! Sickness is payback for sin!!
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If you count "x group is secretly bringing the plague and/or poisoning our wells as part of a neferious plot" as a similar phenomenon, it's ancient
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Yes. Always a scapegoat. Now it's the Chinese I guess.
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Marcus Aurelius says hi.
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I want to say yes. I'm trying to remember Thucycdides' description of the plague in Athens — the civil chaos coming from it.
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All I remember is he called it "miasma" but nothing else.
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There are two books by historians about the 1918 pandemic that I highly recommend: America’s Forgotten Pandemic by Alfred Crosby and American Pandemic by Nancy Bristow. The similarities between 1918 and now are striking.
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I've been reading a lot about AIDS for a class I'm teaching, and the similarities are striking, so I began to think how far this use of disease as a political weapon goes.
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