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Comment by CraigLam | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me, the people (inn-keepers, etc) were way too accepting of the refugees. They should have been barricading the town gates. Many of them paid with their lives, and their family's lives. I'm still reading A Journal of the Plague Year, it's fascinating and surprisingly modern in tone, despite the archaic language. It's like one of those zombie apocalypse films, except this guy was living it for real. Recommended :)

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The novel "World War Z" basically touches on this resemblance. The author seems to have read lots of information about what real humans due when plagues and diseases strike and how human society reacts, and then transposed it to zombie apocalypse, which gives it a strange kind of authenticity.

The book wasn't very film-able, so the movie they made from it was quite different in approach.

I've also heard there's a non-fiction book about the "Spanish flu" outbreak that basically reads like a zombie film (e.g. one interesting tidbit, they call it the Spanish Flu because that is where the first reported cases were, but it didn't start there, the other countries just suppressed the information because they were at war)

Thanks for the tidbit

Stopping the people won't help much, the Bubonic Plague generally isn't spread from person to person but from rat to rat via fleas which only go after humans once all the rats are dead of the plague. Several cities in the 14th century plague did try to quarantine themselves without much success. The pneumatic version of the plague which cropped up in some northern areas could be spread directly from person to person and, IIRC, the septic version too via the fleas that typically prayed on humans. But those caused a minority of the plague deaths.

Yeah, the germ theory of disease and quarantine are incredibly valuable tools.

It's only in the last 150 years that it gained scientific acceptance.

And when it did, it was such a powerful revelation that it temporarily made scientists blind to any other cause of disease.

It took a while for the scientific community to accept that some diseases are caused by a lack of vitamins, for example.

Another example might be the over-diagnosis of tertiary neurosyphilis as the cause of mental illness and death, e.g. in some of my recent reading great and legitimate doubt was placed on that being a cause of the death of Winston Churchill's father. We now know there's a host of causes, many of which aren't (yet known to be) infectious.

Although we must be careful, in one of my more interesting jobs, building a full text database for Year Book Medical Publishers (a part of Time ... -Life? Time as in the LA Times back then), the leading article for the general book for that year was on the proof of gastrointestinal ulcer being caused by a bacteria. The editor of that entry figuratively smiled about "taking away another disease from" ... whichever specialists assigned it all to stress (which of course can predispose someone to getting an infection).

Also some bacteria are actually extremely good for you when you eat them, like Lactobacillus, I.e. What you'd find in kimchi, sauerkraut, pickles.

Or that the majority of the human body by cell count is actually composed of bacteria...

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