“Yellow Terror” arrived in the mail out of the blue. I opened to the first page, and I’m sure my face turned pale as I read, “Poor Shreveport! Woe-stricken Memphis! How afflicted, how lamentable you are … Friends, dearly beloved have been laid low, and the very air is ripe with lamentation.” Those words were written in an 1873 opinion column by Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise. The language sounds old-fashioned, but as noted by the booklet’s writer, American Jewish Archives Director Gary Zola, they are echoed today.
Infectious diseases have haunted us historically, and I take their misery and devastation personally. When I first came to America from Bermuda as a young girl, I came down with chicken pox, measles, German measles, pneumonia and scarlet fever all in my first year here. Antibiotics saved me, and I’ll be forever thankful to the scientists who invented medications and vaccines. But I’ll never underestimate the power of transmissible diseases.
Maybe studying epidemics should be a required topic in history classes. Maybe seeing even a partial list of these diseases would prompt more COVID action: smallpox, yellow fever, typhoid ever, scarlet fever, Spanish flu, diphtheria, polio, measles, whooping cough, AIDS, SARS and Ebola. Be afraid.
But fear might not influence those who insist on looking the other way, as many do. The downside to our amazing scientific advances is a pervasive sense of being as invulnerable as Superman. Surely epidemics and pandemics are either a thing of the past or science fiction. Or worse, COVID-19 is a partisan hoax, the number of infected is inflated, and the fatality numbers are out-and-out lies.
Unfortunately, we have fallen prey to the common desire to ignore, deny, forget and move on. And the result has been a calamitous disunity with testing, treatment and vaccinating. This phenomenon isn’t new. Rabbi Wise wrote about the epidemic, “… Why did not the medical facilities of the country take this matter in hand and present to the Congress united action to this important subject?”