The long beaks of Black Plague doctors, circa 1348 CE, ensured social distancing, so did their sticks. Goggles glasses integrated to Plague Personal Protection Equipment covering the entire body, prevented the Plague to enter through the eyes… Similarly, COVID can enter the body through the eyes, but Twenty-First Century medical authorities forgot to consult with their Fourteenth Century peers…
Black Plague doctors had indeed had biocide agents in their respirators… Doctors got little infection, and nobles… not at all.
Nobles were socially distant in their castles and well protected from rats and their fleas by armies of domesticated dogs, cats, civettes, hawks, falcons and owls, etc…
No nobles were injured in that Black Plague experiment…
Middle Age authorities imposed blockades on the penalty of instant death from skilled archery… To go from Marseilles to Aix was impossible, as archers had orders to shoot on sight. But the isolation from town to town mostly failed… In the end. But it delayed the pandemic, which took a couple of years to spread from Marseilles, where it arrived by boat, and the rest of Western Europe. Quarantine initially failed, because contaminated goods were allowed on the land, and transmitted disease, even if no human directly did.
As far as transmission of infection was concerned, much was known: Pericles, 25 centuries ago, was tried for ignoring basic rules against infection, while a “plague” had started in Athens, bringing a relatively enormous loss of lives… In Pericles’ defense that when Athens was besieged… But ha should have anticipated this, as top general, and he recognized he anticipated everything in the war with Sparta, “but not a pandemic”.
Red hot irons were used against infection, and people were injected with smallpox even around 1700… (Very deadly…) Washing hands was more problematic, water was not necessarily clean, they would have had to use wine…
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Friend Ian Miller observed: “So social distancing works!”
Yes! Absolutely! Social distancing is a noble pursuit, it saves lives, civilization, now or in the future, I have ruled aristocratically all my life! But the notion of nobility is deeper and more subtle than usually considered…
Noble, nobilitas actually comes from: *gnobilis, literally “knowable,” from gnoscere “to come to know,”
We owe everything to the most noble instincts, even the flag of the USA. The basic artistic idea comes from the Franks, Seventh Century, let me present to you the Coat of Arms of Charles Martel (who famously crushed two giant Islamist invasions of Francia :
Plato believed that societies should be ruled by philosopher-kings… But of course that was a self-contradictory notion: A king is a power center of one, an autocrat, fundamentally, even for the best, an assassin. A philosopher is the one who rules over wisdom, that is knowledge, and is, in turn, ruled by them. Fundamentally completely ineffectual at ruling over men.
The most advanced societies should be ruled, not by one self-declared super-smart monkey, as Russia and China are, but should be ruled, not by monkey, but by the best and highest ways, namely the most intelligent ones. “Ways” are those of the multitude, the mores, morality. In other words, the light of the most knowledgeable, the most noble take a long time to reach the multitude.. But that’s how civilization advances. Having one person impose more advanced and clever ways is tempting and can superficially work, as in the cases of Caesar, Clovis, Bathilde, Charlemagne, Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, etc. But for one enlightened, progressive ruler, one hundred vicious autocrats blossom (even short term apparent progress, for example Augustus, and many other Roman emperors, is followed by long term disaster).
The point that Plato forgot, in his hatred of democracy, is that the notion of king, that of physical power on subjects is not… noble, not knowledgeable, as it ignores the blatant ethological fact that humans are not made to be ruled…
Only knowledge is truly noble.
Knowledge starts with as little as one, it’s true… but new knowledge needs peer review, and is only validated by the multitude.
Forget philosopher-kings. Embrace knowledge,, knowledge of facts, knowledge of logic, knowledge of emotions, knowledge of the crowds… Next we will fustigate Elon Musk’s blatant ageism… and hubris, which reminds us of why, and how plutocracy makes even the best, into evil beasts….
Patrice Ayme