‘Unprecedented’

It is unprecedented the number of times we hear the word ‘unprecedented’.  It seems that ‘unprecedented’ things happen on a daily basis.  Perhaps this is not surprising in the context of COVID-19 but the recent overuse of ‘unprecedented’ predates the coronavirus. We were so used to hearing ‘unprecedented’ in relation to meteorological events that ‘The Yearly with Charlie Pickering’ did a skit on the word’s usage in December last year: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=503299967198756. https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=503299967198756  However, the Cambridge Dictionary reminds us that the word means: never having happened or existed in the past. Are the events we are witnessing today ‘unprecedented’?

In reality, there have been many episodes of global infections which have taken vast tolls on human lives. In the BCE period there was the Plague of Athens (430 t0 426 BCE) in which typhoid fever killed around a quarter of the Athenian population and its army. Two further plagues followed in the first three decades of the Common Era – the Antoine Plague (165 to 180 CE) and the Plague of Cyprian (251 to 266 CE) – both of which were believed to be due to smallpox and were recorded as killing around 5,000 people per day. Then there was Plague of Justinian (541 to 750 CE) which was the first occurrence of the bubonic plague (the plague caused by the bacterium yersinia pestis) which is believed to have eliminated a quarter of the world’s population including around 50% of Europe’s inhabitants.  As you will note, all these infections lasted for many years – often returning in waves – and were extraordinarily deadly.

However, it is the ‘Black Death’ which probably deserves the epithet ‘unprecedented’ as the most fatal pandemic in recorded human history.  Sweeping in waves from Asia to Europe and Africa between 1347 and 1351, it is believed to have resulted in up to 200 million deaths or between 30% and 60% of the population of Europe. Historians and epidemiologists still discuss its causes. Was it just the bubonic plague? Or, given the varying symptoms described, was it in fact a combination of bubonic plague, smallpox and even anthrax?  (Forensic archaeologists have found evidence of all three pathogens in medieval graves).  The ‘Black Death’ also recurred repeatedly over three centuries with the ‘Great Plague of London’ (1665-1666) thought to be the last major outbreak. Whatever its cause, the ramifications of the ‘Black Death’ still provide  important insights for us today.

Of course, there have been many deadly epidemics and pandemics since the Middle Ages. In 1855 there was the Third Plague, a pandemic which started in China before moving to India and then the rest of the world killing ten million people. It was during this pandemic that America saw its first involvement with the San Francisco Plague of 1900-1904. Then there was the incorrectly named ‘Spanish flu’ which infected around 500 million people in the world between 1918 and 1920 killing between 10% and 20% of people who contracted it. And, while some plagues are deadly across the world, others are deadly to specific groups. For example, smallpox devastated the native population of Australia, killing around 50% of Indigenous Australians in the early years of British colonisation.

Perhaps every plague is ‘unprecedented’ in its own way as each plague forces us to re-evaluate our lives, our connections, our beliefs and our mortality. It reminds us of being human and also of our place in the complex world in which we live.  Finally, in relation to our world, I will include a reference to an article in the New Yorker that Jill Dwyer shared with me. This provides another fascinating and different take on these ‘unprecedented’ times: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/the-pandemic-is-not-a-natural-disaster