Plagued by the past

When ANU research officer Philippa Barr started writing her book on a historic outbreak of the bubonic plague in Sydney, the world was closing its borders due to a different disease – COVID-19.

Soon after, she was struck by an illness caused by bacteria from the same family as the plague.

“It was quite stunning in terms of coincidence,” Barr says. “I was incredibly unwell.”

For Barr, the illness was “a slow process whereby you’re consistently getting weaker and weaker, more and more distressed by things that ordinarily wouldn’t be so stressful, and more and more malnourished”

The experience changed the way she thought about disease.

“When you’re ill, you have a totally different way of perceiving the world around you, and your vulnerability is almost a methodology, because you’re not in the same physical body that you were before you had the disease,” Barr says.

“It was a really unpleasant experience, but one that is helpful if you are writing about the experience of how diseases might impact people differently.”

History repeating

Uncertainty and emotion in the 1900 Sydney plague chronicles the story of the ‘Black Death’ in the early 20th century. Some of the patterns of behaviour Barr came across in her research felt very familiar.

“Things like the initial panic, the initial abandonment of the city and then the tentative way in which people came back together and returned to these social environments, but with these new rules in place,” Barr says. “These actions were reinforced by emotions like fear and disgust.”

Bacteriology was a new branch of science at the time of Sydney’s plague. This meant leaders responding to the outbreak had a limited understanding of how the disease was caused or spread. Although the miasma theory, which attributed disease to ‘bad air’ was on its way out, belief in its credibility lingered like a bad smell.

“There was actually this big effort to fumigate the air, fumigate the sewers, fumigate library books, and there were all these different chemicals that were spread throughout the city to cover up or eradicate these smells: chloride, sulphur, formalin, perchloride of mercury,” Barr says.

These responses were a form of ‘hygiene theatre’ – measures that create the illusion of improved safety while doing little to reduce risk. Similar actions occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I do remember in the beginning phases of COVID-19, people were wiping down surfaces because we were worried that it spread through fomites,” Barr says, referring to a form of transmission that involves contaminated objects.

Emotional outbreaks

In some cases, the negative emotions associated with the spreading of disease can help with self-preservation. Barr remembers feeling disgusted when walking into a badly ventilated room during the COVID-19 pandemic and changing her behaviour accordingly.

But fear of disease can also be weaponised politically and used to heighten our worst biases.

Medical and government authorities promoted the superiority of the nation’s public health response compared to other British colonies around the world. At a time when Australia was on the verge of becoming a Federation, creating a sense of fear and disgust about other colonies was meant to help shape our national identity.

Certain parts of the press also drummed up racist sentiment, using inflammatory language about everything from perceived cleanliness to cooking practices to advocate for the demolition of migrant housing.

When Barr tracked the use of emotional language in newspaper clippings and other texts from the time, she also noticed that descriptive language was often used to cover over a lack of facts.

“When you read words like cleanliness, dirt, disgust, filth, repulsion, vermin, you can see that people are filling gaps in knowledge with symbolism,” she explains.

There are echoes of this strategy in more recent times too. Remember Trump calling COVID-19 the “China virus”? Emotional language shortcuts can line up with existing inequalities to create stigma.

“The main pattern that we fall into with disease is the colonial-period trap of thinking diseases only spread in the Third World,” Barr says. “That’s completely wrong. It’s the inequalities in healthcare.”

Learning lessons

Barr’s research and her efforts to expose lessons from the past have earned her the Addi Road Award for Multicultural History from the History Council of New South Wales.

She believes that favouring loaded language over clear science communication prevents people from fully understanding a situation. This can create a lack of trust.

“When people are treated as though they can’t be trusted with information, then they stop trusting the source of that information,” Barr says.

The lessons we take from our far and recent past may be needed sooner than we might like.

“The WHO recently announced the plague as one of the 24 international priority pathogens, along with cholera and some other diseases of the 19th and 18th century,” Barr says. “It can still break out among the human population. And some of these pathogens can evolve fairly quickly if left unchecked.”