Nearly a year into the coronavirus is jaunt through humanity. The cyclical nature of this

pandemic, particularly in the United States, is clear. We bend the curve, loosen our grips,

the curve springs back, all because we struggle to learn lessons from earlier waves and even from earlier plagues.

And there is much to glean from that history about old maladies and about the values,

temperament, infrastructures, and moral structures of the societies they attack.

Frank Snowden is a professor emeritus of the history of medicine and author of epidemics and society from the black death to the present.

When we spoke to him in March, he told us that an epidemic, quote, holds a mirror to the civilization.

The bubonic plague in the 14th century shows what are our relationships to our fellow human beings.

You read in Bocacho about the terrible flight of people and terror from the plague.

Husband, left wife, and vice versa.

Parents fled their children.

One can see the scapegoating, the search for a demonic influence. This is not something that we ourselves did, of course.

It's always some other group or person that we want to blame. That seems to me one of the constants. We can see it in homophobia,

in the American epidemic of HIV-AIDS today, and the assault on Asian people. It's something

that seems, alas, to be with us since the very beginning, the hunt for witches, pogroms

against ewes, xenophobia unleashed societies coming to a halt.

I want to move on to a more modern infection that certainly changed the face of the Western world,

bedeviling Napoleon.

Let's start with his invasion of Russia in 1812, where his superior armies were overrun,

not by the Tsar's troops, so much as what?

Oh, dysentery and typhus.

His military tactics were predicated on lightning strikes and

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