132. Visible signs

When Smallpox ravished the earth, those who didn’t die were left with terrible pockmarks. English Queen Elizabeth’s came down with smallpox in 1562. She nearly died from the disease, and her skin was so scarred that she covered the pockmarks with heavy white makeup made of white lead and vinegar, which slowly poisoned her.

 

When polio stormed across the US in the 1950s, pictures of children in iron lungs were ubiquitous. And when August’s “dog days” hit in my northern Minnesota town, the bus no longer took us to the nearby lake to swim. 

 

We were afraid of polio, and the pressure to help those in the iron lungs and to find vaccines and cures impelled a national March of Dimes campaign. As a boy scout in Southern California, I and my fellow scouts solicited dimes from passersby and marched them up the curb along one of Oceanside’s main streets. Meanwhile, mothers went door to door in their March of Dimes. Defeating polio was not left to the scientists and doctors; we all participated. Nationwide empathy—as well as fear—raised money which contributed to the development of the vaccine. 

 

Covid is a trickier customer. For those who survive, it leaves no lasting marks—with the possible exception of the wasting bodies of some of the “long-haulers.” There are no pockmarks or limps to mark the survivors you encounter on the street, in schools, and the marketplace. 

 

I was talking with our smart, short-term cataloger, Charlotte, who has a degree in medical history, about the difficulties this poses. Maybe if the faces of survivors all turned bright red, or their head and body hair all fell out, vaccinations would be an easier sell.

 

The reinstatement of empathy is an even tougher task. We have watched TV screens show New York workers get bodies from homes and unload them into freezer truck temporary morgues. We’ve listened to exhausted doctors and healthcare workers describe their days and their patients. And still there are deniers, some of them working in health care. 

 

The way out of the current Covid crisis is still unclear, and the unintended consequences of the lengthening world-wide event are as unimaginable as the danger of lead poisoning must have been to Queen Elizabeth almost 500 years ago.

 

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