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After a human case of bubonic plague was confirmed in Pueblo County last week, CU Boulder scholar Thora Brylowe explores why it and all plagues inspire such terror

Of all the specters humanity fears—the storms and wars, the failures and disasters and vagaries of nature—perhaps none is so pervasive and terrible as plague.

Not just Plague with a capital P—bubonic plague, caused by the Yersinia pestis bacterium, the Black Death of 14th-century Europe that killed anywhere between 25 million and 200 million people—but all plagues, real or fictional, that sweep in from other places or rise from Earth itself, scything through populations with maddening indifference, toppling cities and civilizations, swapping hard-won humanity for the animalistic instinct to survive.

When Pueblo Department of Public Health and Environment officials last week, the announcement made . Even though we have long known that Yersinia pestis is transmitted by fleas and cycles among wild rodent populations, and even though it can be treated with antibiotics and human cases are now extremely rare, mention of this plague—and of all plagues—still can spark fear.

Thora Brylowe, an associate professor in the CU Boulder Department of English, covers plagues real and fictional throughout history in the course Plague and Pandemic.

In an era of vaccines, antibiotics and multi-platform public health campaigns, and of more accurately terming them epidemics or pandemics, why are plagues still so terrifying?

“One reason is that plague can have this intense moral valence,” says Thora Brylowe, an associate professor in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of English who has taught a course called . “For a lot of history, people have viewed plagues as God’s punishment. We saw that at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, where some people were saying God was punishing certain populations.

“And if it’s not God’s punishment, then it might be framed as survival of the fittest, which we saw during COVID. We’re desperate to find reasons for why this thing we can’t control, or don’t think we can control, is happening.”

A history of plague

The fear of plague, the horrible death it brings and its inexorable and ruinous march through entire populations, countries and continents has informed human history keeping and art almost since the beginning of such things. The 10 Plagues of Egypt detailed in the book of Exodus in the Old Testament—estimated to have been written in the 13th century BCE—still hold a terrible fascination. 

Likewise, the Plague of Thebes, ultimately attributed to Oedipus’ sins in Sophocles’ 429 BCE play Oedipus Rex, can still stir anguish two millennia later:

For all our ship, thou see'st, is weak and sore

Shaken with storms, and no more lighteneth

Her head above the waves whose trough is death.

She wasteth in the fruitless buds of earth,

In parchèd herds and travail without birth

Of dying women: yea, and midst of it

A burning and a loathly god hath lit

Sudden, and sweeps our land, this Plague of power;

Till Cadmus' house grows empty, hour by hour,

And Hell's house rich with steam of tears and blood.

Oedipus Rex is one of the works that Brylowe uses or references in teaching Plague and Pandemic, a list that also includes Daniel Defoe’s 1722 CE Journal of the Plague Year and more modern works like Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2002 novel The Years of Rice and Salt and the 2021 board game Bristol 1350.

Through art and historical documents involving plague, certain themes emerge, Brylowe says, including a desire to “other” certain populations as plague bringers or plague carriers; to frame plague as something that came from outside or faraway places; and to answer the possibly unanswerable question of what it means to be human.

Plague is morally fraught, Brylowe adds—from forced inoculations for smallpox and involuntary removal to isolated colonies for people with leprosy (ostensibly undertaken in the name of population health) to willfully ignoring plagues happening on other continents.

"Bring Out Your Dead," a ca. 1864 wood carving by artist Edmund Evans, depicts a town crier on a medieval street during the Black Death. (Photo: National Library of Medicine)

“If you look at the Ebola narrative, initially it was that this was happening in a little remote village in western Africa and nobody was doing anything about it, but then somebody got on an airplane and now it’s going to kill us all,” Brylowe says. “We were able to ignore it until suddenly it’s in Virginia.

“It doesn’t help that plagues have been really sensationalized, and the way we talk about them isn’t always accurate. I remember reading (Richard Preston’s 1995) The Hot Zone, and my takeaway was that Russia has huge, sloshing buckets of smallpox lying around. I’m not sure that’s a great way to talk about what we fear.”

Fear of the uncontrollable

Fear, however—especially fear of what we seemingly can’t control—does inspire art. What is the zombie genre, Brylowe asks, if not an exploration of plague? “There also are a lot of arguments for vampirism being a form of plague, if you think about it as a disease spread through blood,” Brylowe explains. “So much of the plague narrative is exploring how it makes you either not human or less human.

“It’s interesting when that runs into our desire for human beings to ultimately be good, for humanity to triumph in a ruined world. In Train to Busan, which is a movie I love, the single dad saves his daughter and saves the day by sacrificing himself in a zombie outbreak, and we see that as a very good and moral outcome. When that equation is flipped, like in The Walking Dead, and the plague is not God’s punishment, but humans are the monsters, that’s a moral complication that’s maybe more realistic but probably can’t give us a happy ending.”

Plague in art often reflects humanity’s fears and uncertainties specific to the time in which it’s created, Brylowe says, which may help explain why current books and films dealing with plague are often associated with climate change—plague-causing viruses emerging from razed rainforests, plague species growing uncontrolled in rising and warming oceans.

Exploring plague in art also is a way of exploring and understanding self, she says: “At a basic level, plague is about our bodies. This is where we really see the subject-object dichotomy. It’s saying, ‘If this thing that is not me infects me, what does that mean for my body as an object?’ We talk about plague as a way to explore the relationship between mind and body. I think that’s part of the reason why monsters that look like humans but are not human are so scary. The body as an object has taken over, and we don’t know where self exists anymore.”

Top image: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

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