Quote of the Day (Samuel Pepys, on London’s Great Plague)

“The people die so, that now it seems they are fain to carry the dead to be buried by daylight, the nights not sufficing to do it in. And my Lord Mayor commands people to be within at 9 at night, all (as they say) that the sick may have liberty to go abroad for ayre.”—Samuel Pepys, Diary of Samuel Pepys, describing the Great Plague of London, August 12, 1665

Let’s get this straight immediately: the image accompanying this blog post is not a mistake.
Look past the somewhat archaic diction of this entry in the famous diary of English naval bureaucrat Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) and you’ll discover he’s describing a situation that couldn’t be more contemporary: a health emergency confronting a major metropolis and world capital.

At one point in the Great Plague that gripped London from 1664 to 1666, an estimated 8,000 people died in the British capital in a single week. The dreaded disease was, in fact, the bubonic plague, spread by rats in some of the poorest sections of the city. Ultimately, an estimated 75,000-100,000 of London’s population of 460,000 succumbed to the plague.

Pepys’ diary entries paint a vivid picture of how the rapidly morphing health crisis affected contemporary culture (many people wouldn’t buy then-fashionable wigs because, they feared, the hair had been cut off the heads of disease victims). Most of all, though, what strikes you is that the panic spread because so little was known about the disease’s cause and transmission.

Contrast that with a news item that I wish had drawn more attention and outrage than it did this week: the blistering heat that has doubled Moscow’s normal daily mortality rate, devastated Russia’s stores of grains and, in a series of unforgettable images (like the one in this post), put thousands out on the street of that nation’s capital wearing masks to guard against smog.

I’d like to borrow now a line from an otherwise inarticulate former Presidential candidate, Bob Dole: “Where’s the outrage?” As Russians suffered, many American cities also endured heat waves that for awhile badly strained electrical grids and threatened the lives of the elderly and those with poor bronchial conditions. Yet the U.S. Congress did precisely nothing to move forward a global-warming bill with any sort of teeth.

In a way, we are worse off—and certainly more morally culpable—than the Londoners of Restoration England. Lacking understanding of what plagued them, Pepys and his contemporaries were powerless to stop it.

On the other hand, the first use of the term “global warming” (coined by geochemist Wallace Broecker, in an article for the journal Science) occurred 35 years ago this past Sunday, and, especially in the last two decades, evidence for this climatic change has risen with the temperatures. Yet somehow, we haven’t been able to summon the will to do anything about it.