Editorial: Special Issue on Diseases, Disasters, Deaths and Disorders in Arts, Literature and Culture

Thakurdas Jana

Guest Lecturer, Dept. of English, Bhatter College, Dantan

Special Issue on Diseases, Death and Disorder, 2020

In our post-Corona global situation, it has been proved that in the big timeline of evolutionary history, humans occupy a very small place and the historical timeline is very short. Ever since the birth of life on this planet, evolution was predestined to be accidental in nature and chaotic in pattern. The chaotic disorder is most clearly evident in the evolution of the micro-organisms, which can be either benevolent or malevolent for other organisms. Still, in this short span we have many records of diseases and deaths affecting humankind all over the world. As S.E. Gould wrote in the Scientific American “Although many human infections only developed after human settlements and animal domestication, early human ancestors would still have been fighting off bacteria and other nasty diseases.”

Gabriel Trueba and Micah Dunthorn reported that “during the Paleolithic period, many human-specific infectious diseases may have originated in primates, not in domestic animals.” The ancient Greeks also suffered from many epidemics which they referred to as ‘nosos’, as used by Plato to describe love in The Republic, ‘photoros’ meaning death and destruction as used by Aeschylus, Aristophanes, and Thucydides also, and ‘loimos’ meaning pestilence as used by Esiodus when he describes the two woes Zeus sends against men, as loimos and limos,’  Sophocles in Oedipus Tyrannus, Herodotus. The ancient Greeks suffered from diseases like malaria which caused the fall of some Greek city states and also the death of Alexander. Plague which affected Athens in 430 BC after the Peloponnese War, was accounted by Thucydides:

“The disease began, it is said, in Ethiopia beyond Egypt, and then…it suddenly fell upon the city of Athens…Athenians suffered…hardship owing to the crowding into the city of the people from the country districts…Bodies of dying men upon another, and half dead rolled about in the streets and, in their longing for water, near all the fountains. The temples too, in which they had quartered themselves, were full of corpses of those who died in them.”

The plague of Athens has also been painted by Michael Sweerts in 1652 AD.

Another world-wide epidemic in the fourteenth century, known as the Black Death also caused the death of 45 to 200 million people in Eurasia and North Africa. It was the second plague pandemic recorded after the Plague of Justinian (542–546). This ‘Dance of Death’ has also been presented by Boccaccio in The Decameron, Petrarch, Geoffrey Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales, and William Langland in Piers Plowman. Works by Konrad Witz in Basel (1440), Bernt Notke in Lübeck (1463) and woodcuts by Hans Holbein the Younger (1538) have also reflected the Danse Macabre.

These diseases in the form of epidemic and pandemic frequently changed the course of human history, destroyed civilizations resulting in mass migration. This, however, indirectly contributed to the remaking of human culture in the sense that the outbreaks forced humans to adopt new ways of life, settle in new lands, explore new ideas and search for alternatives in crisis periods. Throughout our human cultural evolution, humans have responded in many ways as an act of resistance to the diseases and to the collective and personal losses, as an act of appeasement for neutralizing the invisible natural and supernatural powers, as an act of precaution for future generations and so on.

Just as the phenomenon of regenerative power and growth in nature inspired the notion of Mother Earth, the spectacle of suffering and disasters inspired the notion of malevolent agencies in nature and gave birth to the notion of many gods, demons and invisible malevolent operators. As a response, shamanism arose as an intermediary agency. With the Neolithic agricultural settlement, many new diseases got transmitted from the domesticated animals and at the same time we witness the rise of religions as a system of protection. With the Chalcolithic consolidation of human culture mythology arose as a testament of the power of the invisible forces operating in nature. As the whole world seemed to be a sacrificial altar of universal human tragedy, poetry was used as a tool to appease those forces. Similarly humans devoted their best architectural skills to the creation of the grandest building in the form of temples and best sculptural skills to the making of idols of gods which would supposedly protect their cities and lives.

The issue of disease and death became acute after the Industrial Revolution which gave birth to colonialism. It made an intervention not just in the lives of the natives but also in the lives of the other animals, environment and nature itself with its policies and of course, with the introduction of new diseases unknown hitherto in those lands. During the Cold War years, medieval warfare strategy was raised to a new height of scientific perversion with the experiment and introduction of biological weapons. Some suspect that right now with the Corona pandemic we are verily the victims of this weapon. True or false, scientists tell us that many of the recent outbreaks are just consequences of the neocolonial greed that violates human, animal and environmental ethics. Keeping in mind the themes hinted above this special issue with the contribution of renowned scholars and researchers has attempted to highlight the flow of creative thought emerged in this period of quarantine transgressing the geographical and disciplinary barriers.

In our Special Issue we wanted to explore how the human cultures got impacted by the experiences of deaths and diseases and how humans have historically responded to the crises through literature and arts. We aimed at opening up a front of discussion with this issue. Finally, we look forward to the invention of remedy for the diseases, and then our experience of living under the shadow of death will teach us to take care of our life in a better way from a completely new perspective.

We express our sincere thanks and gratitude to all the contributors for making this issue possible.

References

Mitchell-Boyask, Robin. Plague and the Athenian Imagination: Drama, History, and the Cult of Asclepius. Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Reilly, Patrick. Bills of Mortality: Disease and Destiny in Plague Literature from Early Modern to Postmodern Times. International Academic Publishers, 2015.

Gould, S.E. “Ancient Diseases of Human Ancestors”. Scientific American, May 12, 2012.