HYDERABAD: The world is still breathing even though the Covid-19 pandemic is tearing it apart. But it has lived past its agony as have its people across different timelines and geographies.
The known history of pandemics goes back to Antonine Plague that began in 165 AD that spread in Egypt, Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy claiming more than five million lives as it’s said to have started from Mesopotamia as soldiers returning to Rome brought it with them.
And then around 100 years ago came the Spanish Flu killing 500 million people across the world. In between these deadly diseases lie other timelines darkened with Black Death which lasted from October 1347 to 1352. This bubonic plague ravaged all hamlets and towns in Europe claiming a third of the population of the continent. But there were people, who survived, worked and lived not just to tell the tale but also to offer the world fruit they reaped from the hard labour utilised during the hard and quiet quarantine times.
In the summer of 1606, a deadly plague ravaged England. In the same year, celebrated English playwright-poet William Shakespeare wrote ‘King Lear’, which is one of the saddest tragedies ever written. The plague appears in shadows between the plots. During that time public places were closed, the streets were deserted, there were several deaths and church bells gloomily tolling to announce the innumerable funerals added to the bleakness.
Much before that in 1592 there was another plague outbreak which made Shakespeare turn more to poetry. He wrote the famous long narrative poem ‘Venus and Adonis’ during the six-month lockdown period.
It was in 1630s that an outbreak of plague in Italy saw the legendary astronomer, mathematician and physicist Galileo Galilei work deeply on his research of the cosmic world. He is said to have lived on a diet of honey and dried fruits, which very actually mixed with medicines, secretly sent by his daughter while he was under house arrest.
That spring, he was in Rome arranging for the publication of his controversial work ‘Dialogue of the Two World Systems’, parts of which were published in Florence and Rome. The plague led to the restriction on transport and a few copies reached to the Catholic elite of Rome. Pope Urban VIII was exasperated which led to the ban on the book and the astronomer was summoned to be tried in the court. He made a pleading that the trial be done in his home city Florence. The 69-year-old is said to have written in a letter to his nephew in 1633 before his trial: “If neither my advanced age, nor my many physical conditions, neither the afflictions of my mind, nor the length of the journey in this present suspected time of tribulations [plague] are enough to stay the Tribunal .
then I will undertake this journey.” While Galileo faced a turbulent quarantine period riddled with trials and poor health, a few years later in 1665 in England Issac Newton redefined the world of science with his discoveries. The Great Plague of London had begun and he was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge University. After getting his undergraduate degree, he had to return to the farm of Woolsthorpe Manor, his family owned. The 23-year-old, during that time period, helped develop calculus writing series of papers on the same. He invested his time in the study of optics doing experiments and discovering that white light contains all the colours in the spectrum. And later, the iconic event of falling on an apple on the ground led to more experiments and research which culminated in 1687 as the law of universal gravitation published as the famous ‘Principia’, which completely changed the ideas of this world.
— Saima Afreen saima @newindianexpress .com @Sfreen