110. The Curve

Dr. Wheelwright was the grand old man of the philosophy department at my college. We jockeyed to get into his limited seminars, even though we knew the grading was tough. Once, as we went over test results, a student asked how it was that he graded on a curve, but had given out no A’s. “I do grade on the curve,” said Dr. Wheelwright, “and it’s 30 years long. Some years there aren’t any A’s.”

 

In Rats, Lice, and History, author Hans Zinsser says the biologist’s task is to make the incremental discoveries that, over time, will lead to an understanding of diseases and their historical roles. He quotes another philosopher, Henry Bergson, that “a very small element of a curve is near being a straight line… [but] life is no more made up of physical-chemical elements than a curve is composed of straight lines.” 

 

The detail that Zinsser assembles in piecing together a “biography of Typhus Fever” and making the argument that infectious diseases have had greater impacts on history than have the movements of armies and the actions of generals—is prodigious. Tracing ancient texts from China to Egypt to Greece—many ancient plagues were thought to have originated in Ethiopia—and combing records for the appearances of lice and mosquitoes, and the “domestication” of rats, he concludes that infectious diseases are never static, and that the movement and mutations of these diseases to and from animal and insect populations will never end. The biologist—and the historian--work to grasp the inflections of the curves that have changed and might change the behavior of diseases, and the course of history.

 

The domestication of rats is due to affluence. I.e., with sufficient food supplies, rats do not need to travel as far for their own basic needs, and the diseases they carry are thus held to small human populations. And “were it not for the single and simple procedure of the Jennerian vaccination,” smallpox epidemics would be with us still, “attacking each new generation.”

 

It’s interesting to think now about where we are on the coronavirus curve. And to think about the impacts it has already had and will have on national and international politics. It succumbed to religious and political pressure in India, which resulted in super-spreading and a disease out of control. In Brazil, political divisions are deep with a president who scorned the disease. It had its role in our recent election, and President Biden has made overcoming it a keystone of his early presidency. 

 

Is it hidden in the violent outbreaks in Israel and Ethiopia? And has our Governor Brown made the right bets on closing and opening schools and the economy? Where are we on the curves?

 

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