1/. “We feared the balmy air. We feared the cloudless sky, the flower-covered earth, & delightful woods.”

In 1826, Mary Shelley published The Last Man, a novel set in 2100 imagining the extinction of the human race by way of a global pandemic.

Anyone up for my #CoronaBookClub?
2./ “Farewell to the arts,—to eloquence” writes Mary Shelly in the Last Man.

Was this allegorical like Camus' plague bacillus that "never dies or disappears for good” or - as our galleries & venues close & 24 hour news fills our heads - was it prescient? https://twitter.com/StefSimanowitz/status/1133449270928072704
3/. Daniel Defoe also has a warning from beyond the grave.

In his “A Journal of the Plague Year” published in 1722 about the bubonic plague of 1665, he writes how the government tried “to suppress the printing of such books as terrify’d the people."

Sound familiar?
#Coronavirus
4/. In Strasbourg in 1518, 400+ people danced themselves to death.

“One theory is that superstition combined with the horrors of disease & famine tearing through Strasbourg may have triggered a stress-induced hysteria. Mass anxiety can drive mass mania.” @CereinynOrd #COVIDIOTS
You can follow @StefSimanowitz.
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