Diseases, both real and fictional, play a significant role in fiction, with certain diseases like Huntington's disease and tuberculosis appearing in many books and films. Pandemic plagues threatening all human life, such as The Andromeda Strain , are among the many fictional diseases described in literature and film.
Genuine plagues have formed the central elements of books from Giovanni Boccaccio's c. 1353 The Decameron onwards. Boccaccio tells the tales of ten people of Florence who escape from the Black Death in their city. The book inspired Geoffrey Chaucer's 14th-century Canterbury Tales , which similarly tells the stories of people on pilgrimage in a time of plague. [1] Ingmar Bergman's 1957 film The Seventh Seal (Swedish : Det sjunde inseglet) is set in Denmark during the Black Death, and features a game of chess with Death personified as a monk-like figure. [2]
Tuberculosis was a common disease in the 19th century, and it appeared in several major works of Russian literature. Fyodor Dostoevsky used the theme of the consumptive nihilist repeatedly, with Katerina Ivanovna in Crime and Punishment ; Kirillov in The Possessed , and both Ippolit and Marie in The Idiot. Turgenev did the same with Bazarov in Fathers and Sons . [3] In English literature of the Victorian era, major tuberculosis novels include Charles Dickens's 1848 Dombey and Son , Elizabeth Gaskell's 1855 North and South , and Mrs. Humphry Ward's 1900 Eleanor. [4] [5]
Albert Camus's 1947 The Plague , probably based on cholera in 19th-century France, was seen both as fable about the need for people to help each other in the meaningless world seen by existentialism, and as alluding to the German invasion of France, fresh in Camus's mind. [1]
Huntington's disease appears in many novels, such as Ian McEwan's 2005 Saturday . It was criticised as prejudiced in the medical journal The Lancet for its negative portrayal of the protagonist with the disease. [6]
Diseases, especially if infectious, have long been popular themes and plot devices in fiction. [1] [7] Daniel Defoe's pioneering 1722 A Journal of the Plague Year is a fictional diary of a man's life during the plague year of 1665 in England. [1] Mary Shelley's 1826 The Last Man created the genre of "post-apocalyptic pandemic thriller" with her story of a plague that is spreading across Europe towards her protagonists in Britain. [1] Edgar Allan Poe's 1842 "The Masque of the Red Death" is a gothic tale of a plague, perhaps symbolising the hubris of the wealthy, and their nemesis. [1]
More recently, Michael Crichton's 1969 The Andromeda Strain is a science fiction thriller about a world-threatening microbe that a military satellite brings down to Earth and wipes out a town in Arizona. White-coated scientists do their best to contain the outbreak. [1] The 1995 12 Monkeys is another post-apocalyptic thriller.
The Plague is a 1947 absurdist novel by Albert Camus. It tells the story from the point of view of a narrator in the midst of a plague sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran. The narrator remains unknown until the start of the last chapter. The novel presents a snapshot of life in Oran as seen through the author's distinctive absurdist point of view.
The Black Death was a bubonic plague pandemic occurring in Western Eurasia and North Africa from 1346 to 1353. It is the most fatal pandemic recorded in human history, causing the deaths of approximately 40% to 60% of the region's population peaking in Europe from 1347 to 1351. Bubonic plague is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis spread by fleas, but during the Black Death it probably also took a secondary form, spread by person-to-person contact via aerosols, causing pneumonic plague.
The Last Man is an apocalyptic, dystopian science fiction novel by Mary Shelley, first published in 1826. The narrative concerns Europe in the late 21st century, ravaged by the rise of a bubonic plague pandemic that rapidly sweeps across the entire globe, ultimately resulting in the near-extinction of humanity. It also includes discussion of the British state as a republic, for which Shelley sat in meetings of the House of Commons to gain insight to the governmental system of the Romantic era. The novel includes many fictive allusions to her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, who drowned in a shipwreck four years before the book's publication, as well as their close friend Lord Byron, who had died two years previously.
Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction is a subgenre of science fiction in which the Earth's civilization is collapsing or has collapsed. The apocalypse event may be climatic, such as runaway climate change; astronomical, such as an impact event; destructive, such as nuclear holocaust or resource depletion; medical, such as a pandemic, whether natural or human-caused; end time, such as the Last Judgment, Second Coming or Ragnarök; or any other scenario in which the outcome is apocalyptic, such as a zombie apocalypse, cybernetic revolt, technological singularity, dysgenics or alien invasion.
Plague or The Plague may refer to:
"The Masque of the Red Death" is a short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1842. The story follows Prince Prospero's attempts to avoid a dangerous plague, known as the Red Death, by hiding in his abbey. He, along with many other wealthy nobles, hosts a masquerade ball in seven rooms of the abbey, each decorated with a different color. In the midst of their revelry, a mysterious figure disguised as a Red Death victim enters and makes his way through each of the rooms. Prospero dies after confronting this stranger, whose "costume" proves to contain nothing tangible inside it; the guests also die in turn.
Paleopathology, also spelled palaeopathology, is the study of ancient diseases and injuries in organisms through the examination of fossils, mummified tissue, skeletal remains, and analysis of coprolites. Specific sources in the study of ancient human diseases may include early documents, illustrations from early books, painting and sculpture from the past. Looking at the individual roots of the word "Paleopathology" can give a basic definition of what it encompasses. "Paleo-" refers to "ancient, early, prehistoric, primitive, fossil." The suffix "-pathology" comes from the Latin pathologia meaning "study of disease." Through the analysis of the aforementioned things, information on the evolution of diseases as well as how past civilizations treated conditions are both valuable byproducts. Studies have historically focused on humans, but there is no evidence that humans are more prone to pathologies than any other animal.
The Black Death peaked in Europe between 1348 and 1350, with an estimated third of the continent's population ultimately succumbing to the disease. Often simply referred to as "The Plague", the Black Death had both immediate and long-term effects on human population across the world as one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, including a series of biological, social, economic, political and religious upheavals that had profound effects on the course of world history, especially European history. Symptoms of the Bubonic Plague included painful and enlarged or swollen lymph nodes, headaches, chills, fatigue, vomiting, and fevers, and within 3 to 5 days, 80% of the victims would be dead. Historians estimate that it reduced the total world population from 475 million to between 350 and 375 million. In most parts of Europe, it took nearly 80 years for population sizes to recover, and in some areas, it took more than 150 years.
Through its effect on the world's population and major artists in various fields, tuberculosis has appeared in many forms in human culture. The disease was for centuries associated with poetic and artistic qualities in its sufferers, and was known as "the romantic disease". Many artistic figures, including the poet John Keats, the composer Frédéric Chopin and the artist Edvard Munch, either had the disease or were close to others who did.
The Scarlet Plague is a post-apocalyptic fiction novel by American writer Jack London, originally published in The London Magazine in 1912. The book was noted in 2020 as having been very similar to the COVID-19 pandemic, especially given London wrote it at a time when the world was not as quickly connected by travel as it is today. However unlike COVID-19, in this story, victims died within an hour and mortality was practically 100%.
Bubonic plague is one of three types of plague caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. One to seven days after exposure to the bacteria, flu-like symptoms develop. These symptoms include fever, headaches, and vomiting, as well as swollen and painful lymph nodes occurring in the area closest to where the bacteria entered the skin. Acral necrosis, the dark discoloration of skin, is another symptom. Occasionally, swollen lymph nodes, known as "buboes", may break open.
The Decameron, subtitled Prince Galehaut and sometimes nicknamed l'Umana commedia, is a collection of short stories by the 14th-century Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375). The book is structured as a frame story containing 100 tales told by a group of seven young women and three young men; they shelter in a secluded villa just outside Florence in order to escape the Black Death, which was afflicting the city. Boccaccio probably conceived of the Decameron after the epidemic of 1348, and completed it by 1353. The various tales of love in The Decameron range from the erotic to the tragic. Tales of wit, practical jokes, and life lessons contribute to the mosaic. In addition to its literary value and widespread influence, it provides a document of life at the time. Written in the vernacular of the Florentine language, it is considered a masterpiece of early Italian prose.
The second plague pandemic was a major series of epidemics of plague that started with the Black Death, which reached medieval Europe in 1346 and killed up to half of the population of Eurasia in the next four years. It followed the first plague pandemic that began in the 6th century with the Plague of Justinian, but had ended in the 8th century. Although the plague died out in most places, it became endemic and recurred regularly. A series of major epidemics occurred in the late 17th century, and the disease recurred in some places until the late 18th century or the early 19th century. After this, a new strain of the bacterium gave rise to the third plague pandemic, which started in Asia around the mid-19th century.
Biological warfare (BW)—also known as bacteriological warfare, or germ warfare—has had a presence in popular culture for over 100 years. Public interest in it became intense during the Cold War, especially the 1960s and '70s, and continues unabated. This article comprises a list of popular culture works referencing BW or bioterrorism, but not those pertaining to natural, or unintentional, epidemics.
Human interactions with microbes include both practical and symbolic uses of microbes, and negative interactions in the form of human, domestic animal, and crop diseases.
Biology appears in fiction, especially but not only in science fiction, both in the shape of real aspects of the science, used as themes or plot devices, and in the form of fictional elements, whether fictional extensions or applications of biological theory, or through the invention of fictional organisms. Major aspects of biology found in fiction include evolution, disease, genetics, physiology, parasitism and symbiosis (mutualism), ethology, and ecology.
Phantom Plague: How Tuberculosis Shaped our History is a 2022 non-fiction book about the history of tuberculosis by health journalist Vidya Krishnan.
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