In epidemiological terms, members of a stricken community begin to acknowledge an increasing number of cases and deaths resulting from the spread of a particular contagious disease. The first act is one of eye-opening shocks or events.
An intrepid scholar of the devastating cholera pandemics of 1833, 18, Rosenberg used Camus’ novel to characterize the unfolding of an epidemic as a dramatic set of events, usually in four acts, with a distinct but somewhat predictable narrative plot line.Īnd since I can no longer teach my students in person, I thought a cleaned up version of my tattered lecture notes - on Camus and Rosenberg - might be useful in recommending a good novel while we all shelter in place. I was introduced to the novel while still in graduate school after reading an essay entitled “ What Is an Epidemic?” by the eminent historian Charles Rosenberg. Slow acceptance and delayed courses of action in the face of contagious threats are common features in the history of human epidemics. Each year I teach it I not only learn new things, but also walk away expressing wonder at how Camus got everything about an epidemic right. It is, bar none, the best study of an epidemic or pandemic as a social phenomenon that I have ever read. None of these literary works, as brilliant as they are, hold a candle to Albert Camus’s “The Plague,” a remarkable novel I routinely assign to my students. As coincidence would have it, we were knee-deep in the section on epidemics, and making our way through such classics as Henrik Ibsen’s compelling drama of a public health crisis in a small Norwegian town, “An Enemy of the People,” Katherine Anne Porter’s influenza tale “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” Larry Kramer’s document of the early years of the AIDS pandemic, “The Normal Heart,” and Sinclair Lewis’s Pulitzer Prize novel of medical research and infectious disease, “Arrowsmith.”
Gretchen Whitmer, D-Mich., declared an emergency in my home state, and my university’s president ordered an unprecedented shutdown of the entire academic enterprise, I was teaching my undergraduate course on literature and medicine.
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