New ideas of living
Throughout millennia, people have fostered some pretty irrational ideas about how infectious diseases such as plague and cholera were spread. Some of those notions—like the idea that the ancient Cyprian plague could be caught simply by staring into the face of someone afflicted—seem laughable, like something the Monty Python troupe might have sprinkled into one of their medieval parody scripts for television. Yet even as waves of disease washed again and again over population centers, it took centuries for science to fully understand the invisible world of microbes. Until that happened, people under pandemic siege tried to explain the overwhelming amount of death they saw in different ways. Some used simple observations, while some turned to fervent beliefs. Others viewed the cataclysm through the lens of their long-held biases, while still others processed the carnage through superstitions and bizarre theories. When masses of people started inexplicably dying, many early cultur