Hiding Diseases: Plague and Smallpox

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 936

“Ring around the rosies, a pocket full of posies,

Ashes, ashes, well all fall down.”

This old nursery rhyme has more to do with plague than a skipping-and-falling song, more like the Tom Wait’s version of the “Dwarf’s Marching Song” (“Heigh Ho”, see below) than anything that could ever be dreampt of in a Disney film. It was the mater-of-fact way of dealing with the vast death brought on by the various Plagues:  saying a round of rosaries to try and invoke divine intervention to keep the disease away from the prayer-mender; posies as a fragrant flower to mask the stench of those actually afflicted with the disease; and then of course the ashes from the piles of burnt corpses of Plague victims, fallen down to death. 

These two images show different aspects of segregating—if not hiding—disease.  The first is a propagandistic portrayal of a man dying of the Plague.  This snippet of plaguaganda was an ars morendi published in the 1460’s, and depicts a not-gruesome portrayal of what was generally a very gruesome death.  The inflicted lies there in bed, with sheets and a pillow, looking faint and removed in the retiring Victorian fashion (removed 400 years), surrounded by images of his faith/belief. 

I suspect that anyone who knew anything about the Plague knew that this scene wouldn’t be truthful, necessarily, but I guess if it could even momentarily confuse the viewer into thinking that the visitation of Death could be so composed in the face of this horrendous disease, I guess that’s the hope you hang onto.  There is a minor battle between the possible claimants of the soul of The Sick, but that would be going on anyway whether the coming death was relatively peaceful, or not. There wasn’t much to be done—as the feeble attempts of preventing the disease would indicate, what with choices like urine baths, bleeding, leeching, bell ringing, pus-sucking, rotten animal corpse talismans, incense burning being some of the preventative choices—so like a belief in Heaven or Nirvana or whatever, the hopeful consolation of a possibly decent dying could keep people from running amok. 

The second shows the hospital hulk Castalia, “one of the old Hospital Boats superseded by land hospitals in 1904”, which was more a floating street than a hospital.  It was a complex of five buildings nested on the hulk of the double-hulled paddle steamer Castalia—appropriately named, as it refers to the Delphian  fountain that Apollo fabricated from the nymph “Castalia” and alludes to the possibility of rejuvenation and cleanliness, or health, perhaps).  The hospital held hundreds of smallpox patients, sent there by the Metropolitan Asylum Board in an effort to stem the flow of the disease and infection rates from the rest of the population of London.  Smallpox  was still a vast killer in mid-/late-Victorian England, and given the information available at the time this was a good social inoculation by distance and segregation.  (It is interesting to note that out-of-service de-masted, defrocked and striped ships of the line were used to house prisoners (though generally prisoners of war); in particular, those kept in the East River housing American soldiers inflicted vast death tolls via maltreatment and urgently hideous living conditions.)  This really doesn’t fit with the propagandist/suppressing model of the above, and its removal did prevent the contagion from spreading, but, well, it does look like the Asylum Board was trying to hide the sick.

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