Chapter 5. Extended riff on dangers of naming diseases poorly (eg swine flu is not spread by pigs but pork exportsxweee banned by several countries anyway). Discussion of CDC naming guidelines which looks grim in light of Trump drumming on China/Wuhan virus.
-
-
Sadly I think this stuff is still potent. Indian WhatsApp is full of bullshit traditional medicine ideas and religious crap. Though to their credit, people seem to be treating them as a second line of defense rather than first.
Show this thread -
Gotta admire the Christian missionaries who spread western medicine through the test of the world, as well as their politically courageous local sponsors, in the early 20th century. Double jeopardy: religious and lifestyle hostility.
Show this thread -
This book is giving me a sense of civilizational memento mori. Modernity is so young and fragile. Just a hundred years ago the world was vastly shittier than it is today, yet we’re callously risking hard-won things for shallow vanities. Kudos to GWB for learning this history.
Show this thread -
“Watson [one of the missionaries in Shanxi] measured the impact of the governor’s [Yen] modernization efforts by his own practical yardstick: how many villages spontaneously organized their own quarantine at the first indication of an outbreak.” Worked well apparently.
Show this thread -
Possibly, it’s not current state of knowledge but openness to new states that determines success in adaptation. These superstitious Chinese villages 100 years ago in Shanxi were more open to learning and change than many ostensibly modern parts of the US today.
Show this thread -
People in Allied countries suspected biowarfare and wondered if Aspirin made by German company Bayer secretly contained more and whether German U-boats were spreading the flu. Today that would be suspicion of Russian or Chinese vaccines.
Show this thread -
This chapter has a vignette about a devout but backward part of Spain, Zamora, that avoided mass gatherings but excepted church gatherings. Had a devout and anti-science bishop who catalyzed lots of masses and funeral parades. Ended up with the worst record in Spain.
Show this thread -
Sad that religious congregations have been superspreading vectors from Black Death to Covid. It’s almost as though religion is a behavior like sneezing and coughing. Wear an atheism mask during pandemics people.
Show this thread -
Alright back to this thing. I feel like this is my capstone read in a Covid-adaptation course. Where were we? Ah yes. Religious people spreading death with their beliefs in Spain.
Show this thread -
A chapter on how disgust-based distancing and burial practices are hygiene measures found beyond humans in nature and how these behaviors gave rise to distancing practices. Three big ones: cordon sanitaire, isolation, and quarantines. All 3 from times of ships and small towns.
Show this thread -
With the rise of big cities and other forms of travel besides sea, these measures became less popular. Takes a small town where everybody knows each other for this stuff to work without external top-down authoritah. Large cities = impersonal = defection behaviors.
Show this thread -
Huh interesting, disease surveillance became a governance thing after the Middle Ages and by 20th century most western countries had systems for tracking spread of key diseases. The problem is, in 1918, influenza was not on the list. Slipped under the surveillance radar.
Show this thread -
For modern disease control you need 3 top down things to work: detection, tracking of spread, and compliance with measures. In our case, testing, research on spread (droplets etc), and masking. Older control measures don’t scale to modern cities.
Show this thread -
This point about historically cities and villages administering their own measures, often really harsh, is surprising. Town in England cordoned itself off and half the people died before it was lifted. Makes sense. They had no good medicines. Containment had to do all the work.
Show this thread -
Flu snuck under radar everywhere except a few islands, Australia being the major one. They had enough warning and got quarantine right to skip first 2 waves. New Zealand didn’t. American Samoa escaped because they figured out spread. Western Samoa, under New Zealand, didn’t.
Show this thread -
Long discussion of epidemiology 101, social distancing, masks, vaccine controversies etc. All familiar now but would have read like science fiction when this book came out. It’s weird to read about this stuff covered with reference to 1918 with academic distance.
Show this thread -
Feeling of not deja vu exactly but something like it. As in “omg they already knew all this stuff 100y before Covid and we’re just learning it under live fire and relitigating 1918 arguments like they’re new?”
Show this thread -
Must be weird for authors like Spinney to suddenly see their obscure interests take over headlines. It’s like if 2x2s suddenly took over headlines and everybody started citing my 2x2 stuff.
Show this thread -
This part is a bit boring but would have been interesting in 2019. Authoritarianism vs democracy, role of newspapers, minorities and marginalized populations suspicious of health measures. All stuff we’ve been through live.
Show this thread -
One difference is that keeping schools open was a better bet then since kids otherwise lived in crowded tenements or ran around unsupervised.
Show this thread -
Extended description of New York’s relatively good performance despite early fumbles. It was full of particularly vulnerable Italian peasants at the time, living in slums and already disproportionately suffering from respiratory diseases like TB. Pandemic led to improvements.
Show this thread -
...Paired with similar extended description of events in Mashed, Persia, where things went much worse. At the time it was a medieval pilgrimage center and Persia was in a partial vacuum due to the collapse of Tsarist Russia and the Great Game.
Show this thread -
The British were filling the vacuum and doing their usual thing of simultaneously raiding the country (for troops) and trying to govern it. Two bad harvests and the people were already starving. It was set up to be a shitshow and it was.
Show this thread -
Weird time machine aspect here. 1918 was around the beginning of global synchronized time. Local stories ranging from nefyevsl to modern. Governance systems with similar range of vintages.
Show this thread -
Mashed appears to have been somewhere between Shanxi and South America in development terms. New York comes off most modern so far. As in Shanxi, Christian missionaries played a significant role. Targeting a Shiite holy spot for evangelism and being tolerated for medicine.
Show this thread -
We interrupt this thread to note that Trump and Melania apparently just tested positive. Well our own shitshow just got worse so I’m glad to read about even worse shitshow in Persia 102 years ago

Show this thread -
That Mashed vignette was interesting. A sense of modernity arriving alongside missionaries and medicine. Persia modernized shortly after in 1921 under Reza Khan. Seems like Spanish Flu triggered a lot of modernity arrivals. Covid might trigger a lot of anthropocene arrivals.
Show this thread -
We stop here tonight. Gotta check on what the Discourse is saying about Trump having Covid. This seems like an awful development to me. He might win on sympathy votes or die and trigger a civil war from the grave. Ugh. BoJo, Bolsanaro, and now Trump. Hmm.
Show this thread -
We return to 1918, and the next chapter, titled The Placebo Effect. Conventional medicine had just recently been privileged by law over alts like naturopathy and faith healing. There were no antibiotics or antivirals. Drugs were artisan. No double-blind or animal trials, no QA.
Show this thread -
Aspirin was the big deal and heavily overprescribed in unsafe doses, which may have caused some deaths. Quinine too which may have caused some of the reported loss of color vision as a side effect. Digitalis, strychnine... sounds like an Agatha Christie medicine cabinet.
Show this thread - Show replies
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.
Today we’re lucky enough to have political controversies about proper testing of the correct thing. The FUD in 1918 must have been mind-boggling. They were MINOs: Moderns in Name Only.
Still true with Covid