There aren’t enough plagues in writing.
Epidemic diseases have shaped our world more than almost any other force, whether we’re aware of it or not. They egged on the “Dark Ages,” and they damn near emptied the Western hemisphere after white colonists/imperialists showed up.
And yet, they’re underutilized in fiction. Outside of stories where disease is the central plot, epidemics are usually relegated to the background, an aesthetic addition that conveys a sense of “oh look, stuff sucks right now.” Rarely do they occupy a realistic middle-ground; present and plot-or-world-relevant, but not the focus of the story.
Which is a shame. Epidemics make kingdoms rise and fall, they can smash you back to the stone age or force you into space. Whole segments of the population can become pariahs and outcasts, while others can ride the chaos straight to a throne. And they’re not always limited by time or place— a plague on one continent can shatter the economy of another, and the cultural effects of disease can echo for centuries. All of that makes for good worldbuilding… as long as you know enough about epidemics to use them right.
Well, lucky for you, I wrote this article to fill in those blanks. We’ll start by offering a brief explanation of how epidemic diseases evolve, and why they form repeatedly in some places and rarely in others. Then, we’ll explore the cultural/historical impact of plagues by looking at the Americas, the AIDS epidemic, and the Black Plague. Finally, I’ll offer some insights on how to best use these diseases in your writing.
100% Organic, Farm-Grown Plague!
Jared Diamond gives a good explanation for the evolution of epidemic diseases in his seminal text Guns, Germs, and Steel (which should be required reading for all worldbuilders, by the way). And, like almost everything else in his book, it all comes down to farming.
Remember; diseases evolve and reproduce by infecting other living creatures. To survive, the current host needs to encounter a new host whose immune system can’t fight off the infection. In communities that are small or spread out, it’s hard for any disease to survive. The pool of potential hosts is too small and, chances are, they won’t interact closely enough to spread the disease. This is doubly true of lethal diseases—their host will probably die or be ostracized before it has a chance to spread or evolve, and it will die out.
That changes when we shove a whole lot of people into one place. Suddenly, the infection has a nearly endless supply of new applicants and, with each one, the chance of it evolving into something lethal (or more infectious) increases. And, when it becomes lethal, there are so many potential hosts that the disease doesn’t need to worry about all its hosts dying or becoming immune; after all, there’s always someone new to infect. To quote Jared Diamond:
They [diseases] need a human population that is sufficiently numerous, and sufficiently densely packed, that a numerous new crop of susceptible children is available for infection by the time the disease would otherwise be waning.
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, p. 195
But, dense population centers can’t exist without food, and it’s hard to supply food for a “sufficiently numerous” population without some form of organized agriculture. In most of Europe, that agriculture was dependent on domesticated animals. The conditions for those animals weren’t sanitary and, for the most part, the animals providing food and labor for population centers were densely packed and lived close to their human owners. And what was true for humans—that dense population centers allowed microbes to spread—was true of animals too.
Given enough time, those animal microbes hopped over to human hosts, whose immune systems had no resistance to them. The results were disastrous:
The major killers of humanity throughout our recent history—smallpox, flu, tuberculosis, malaria, plague, measles, and cholera—are infectious diseases that evolved from diseases of animals, even though most of the microbes responsible for our own epidemic illnesses are paradoxically now almost confined to humans.
Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, p. 189
Indeed, three of those diseases came from cattle, two from pigs and dogs, and malaria is the one gift that chickens ever got us for Christmas.
This, by the way, is part of the reason that plague after plague migrated from Europe to the Americas, while very few (debatably) went back the other way. While new research has proved that the Americas housed some of the world’s greatest population centers, none of them were dependent on domesticated animals. Plus, they had higher sanitation standards than their European counterparts.
In fact, European cities were notoriously unsanitary. Jared Diamond referred to them as a “bonanza for our microbes” and stated that, until the beginning of the 20th century, cities needed a constant immigration of healthy peasants from the countryside to survive… because everyone else was dying from crowd diseases.
So, in short: farming caused the evolution of deadly epidemics (through domesticated animals), and the formation of population centers whose high numbers and unsanitary conditions allowed even the most lethal plagues to propagate and turn these cities into petri dishes ready to wipe out half the world on a whim. You know where they come from, now.
But, for writers, it’s more important to know what these plagues do to a culture, and to a people.
Burn the Witch, Curse the Gods, and Hold on to What Little You Have Left
According to recent data, it’s estimated that the Native American population in 1491 was between 90 and 112 million. More than there were in Europe, by a wide margin. Then, the Europeans brought their diseases and… well, I’ll let Charles C. Mann tell you:
Disease claimed the lives of 80 to 100 million Indians by the first third of the seventeenth century. All these numbers are at best rough approximations, but their implications are clear: the epidemics killed about one out of every five people on earth. [Emphasis added]
Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, p. 108
One out of every five on earth. Even if we skew the numbers both ways to make a conservative estimate, that means that these diseases wiped out 70% of the goddamn western hemisphere. Now, putting aside questions of racism (there was a lot of it), whether the Europeans knew what they were doing (they didn’t understand the mechanics, but knew full well they were spreading lethal diseases), and whether this should count as an attempted genocide (absolutely), it’s obvious that a culture doesn’t stay the same after this kind of damage. In talking about Tawantinsuyu, where half the population died in three years, Mann comments:
The human and social costs are beyond measure. Such overwhelming traumas tear at the bonds that hold cultures together. The epidemic that struck Athens in 430 B.C., Thucydides reported, enveloped the city in “a great degree of lawlessness.” The people “became contemptuous of everything, both sacred and profane.” They joined ecstatic cults and allowed sick refugees to desecrate the great temples, where they died untended. A thousand years later the Black Death shook Europe to its foundations.
Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, p. 109
Think about it: Look to both sides and in front of you. Boom, only one of you is left, smallpox got the others. Maybe you. If not this time, then maybe the next. Now, live with that fear. All day. Every day.
The population drop, alone, changes a people no matter where you are. Even if you in a backwater town so small its horses are on the census, hearing that nine out of ten people in New York City died of disease would be terrifying. But, let’s assume you survive; life’s about to get much, much harder. The sharp population decline makes whole civilizations untenable, as there’s not enough labor to go around.
Population centers, where most of our advancements are made, are both the first and the hardest hit. Technological advancement grinds to a screeching, bloody halt. Record-keeping is likely to go out the window. The arts may or may not survive. Depending upon who dies, whole crafts and disciplines may vanish… simply because everyone who knew about them died. The old and young probably go first, meaning that a place loses its living connection to history and its chance at a future. If cultures are books, as anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss says, then whole libraries are torched. To quote Charles C. Mann: “In our antibiotic era, how can we imagine what it means to have entire ways of life hiss away like steam?”
Hopelessness sets in fast. Tomorrow may never come—for you and the world. The Black Plague saw the full breadth of this. Some people became zealots in hopes of being cured by religion, others saw the plague as God’s wrath, and still others saw it as proof that God never existed in the first place. Overall, faith dropped in the plague’s wake. People abandoned their families, shut themselves off from the world, and spent all their money. Work stopped. Economies shattered, inflation spiked—there wasn’t enough labor to go around, goods rose in value while no one had money to buy them. Crime abounded. After all, what did the consequences matter if you could die tomorrow, anyway? Back in 1700’s North America, the Omaha made deliberately suicidal attacks on enemies and the survivors became wanderers.
The rich and powerful aren’t immune, either. As Mann says: “disease not only shattered the family bonds that were the underlying foundation of Indian societies, it wiped out the political superstructure at the top” (p. 125). When King Liholiho Kamehameha II and Queen Kamamalu of Hawai’i visited Great Britain in 1824, both died of measles. Their deaths ushered in a time of social chaos for Hawai’i. The organization that made these places strong in the first place were just… gone. A body without a head. Imagine if your government suddenly vanished. What happens to everyone else?
This social fracture is incalculably worse for marginalized people. You don’t have to go back very far to prove that: just look at how AIDS affected the LGBT community. When the AIDS epidemic started in the 1980’s, Far Right pundits jumped on it. Lillian Faderman, author of The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle, points out that the infamous Patrick Buchanan said that “AIDS was a sign that ‘Nature is exacting retribution’; but now, he wrote, not only were these homosexuals a ‘moral menace,’ they were a ‘public health menace,’ too” (p. 416). Buchanan and his ilk leveraged the fear of plague to claim that “gay rights” was a threat to heterosexuals, while African Americans and Latinos got similar treatment. It got worse from there:
Their misery was palatable. AIDS was the leprosy of the times; and gay men, whether infected or not, were the lepers… If gays didn’t already know they were pariahs, they were reminded at the 1983 Gay Freedom Day Parade by the policemen wearing rubber gloves as they diverted traffic around the marchers.
Lillian Faderman, The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle, p. 423
New forms of bigotry can also form as a social response to plagues. Mann notes that modern antisemitism was a “grandson of the plague.” Indeed, Jews were one of Europe’s largest social minorities at the time and, desperate to find someone to blame, non-Jews claimed that Jews were poisoning the wells or otherwise causing the spread of plague in a bid for world domination. That idea is completely bat-shit crazy, yet we feel its echoes today.
Finally, no government is prepared for a plague. And, once the plague gets bad enough, the common folk turn their hate towards those in power. Revolution is soon to follow, bringing all its myriad consequences… with one addendum: once the people in power are gone, the plague is still there.
Writing While Sick
All of the above has its place in your writing. Everyone reading this could insert these scenes into their work or allow these ideas to infect their settings. Here, I’d like to give some tips on how to use this information to its greatest effect.
First, remember that you don’t need to make any of these things the focus of the story. Plagues can happen a continent away or centuries ago and still affect your world. I implore you not to tell stories about plagues, but to think about how plagues like these could shape your world’s culture, art movements, economy and religions, in the past, present, and future.
In fact, you should be wary about focusing too much on the plague, itself. Unless there’s a magical/technological intent behind the disease—I.E. it’s caused by a sentient force—plagues make poor antagonists. They lack agency and personality. It takes a unique writer to make a compelling story with an antagonist like that. Don’t get me wrong; they make great backdrops for other stories, especially those that pit humankind against itself (think modern zombie stories), but making them the driving conflict of a story is difficult.
Instead, bring them into the story like any other force, as another subplot and source of conflict or trauma. And, for those who like to flip the script, you can take any of the rules above and start breaking them. Make a plague form in a small civilization or create a culture that reinvents itself and grows stronger (but maybe corrupted) in response to an epidemic. I just finished a short story about that, myself. Hell, come up with a story where a revolution coincides with the end of a plague, and they realign their value system.
No matter what you do with plagues, they’re a strong tool to have in your worldbuilding belt. Hopefully, you’ve already got some ideas brewing. Happy writing!
Oh, and uh… remember to wash your hands.
Featured Image Courtesy of Enrique Meseguer!
Special thanks to Jared Diamond, Charles C. Mann, and Lillian Faderman!
