Mon, Apr 28, 2003 page8

• Editorial: A lesson from the history books

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  After the hysteria of the bottle-throwing protests by quarantined medical workers at the Taipei Municipal Hoping Hospital on Friday, the suicide of a quarantined patient on Saturday and the attempted suicide of another yesterday, let us tell a historical story.

  In 1665 London was engulfed by bubonic plague -- memorably recorded in Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year. Nobody now can be sure what the connection between plague-stricken London and the remote lead-mining village of Eyam in Derbyshire was. The story handed down by posterity is that the plague first appeared in the village in late August or early September via a consignment of cloth, ordered from London by the village tailor, Alexander Hadfield. It is thought that the cloth was infested with plague-carrying fleas. The first person to die, on Sept. 7, 1665, was Hadfield's assistant George Vicars. The disease soon claimed most of Vicar's unfortunate family.

  Plague was not, of course a new disease in those times. Since the great pandemic of 1347-50, which might have killed a third of Europe's population, people knew how to recognize the disease and how it progressed. What they didn't know was how the sickness was transmitted or how to cure it. They did, however, think that person-to-person contact played an important role.

  With plague appearing in the village, the most obvious thing for anyone to do was to get out as fast as they could. For some, of course, this was impossible -- they simply had no means of survival outside the village. And for the other villages around Eyam, a mass flight would have been the worst possible state of affairs.

  This was prevented by the hard work of the village rector, or priest, William Mompesson, and his predecessor Thomas Stanley. That Mompesson and Stanley could work together was something of a triumph in itself since they were radically divided on religious issues and Mompesson had in fact taken Stanley's job after the purges of radical clergy following the restoration of the monarchy and the end of the incredibly bitter civil-war period in 1661.

  Nevertheless the two clergymen worked together to persuade the villagers that they should stay put, making use of the Gospel of St. John: "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends (15:13)."

  The village agreed to establish a cordon sanitaire around it that nobody was to cross for any reason until the disease had burned itself out. Food was deposited by the surrounding villages at designated sites at the edge of the cordon, from which the people of Eyam collected it at different times to avoid cross-infection.

  The village thus simply cut itself off from the world and throughout the winter of 1665 and the spring and summer of 1666 experienced an extraordinary, and extraordinarily harrowing, silent martyrdom. The parish register records 273 deaths from the plague, from Vicars' in September 1665 to that of Abraham Morton on Nov. 1, 1666. Since the village is thought to have had a population of around 350 at the beginning of the plague, this is a staggering mortality rate. Nobody outside the village, however, was infected. The clergymen's plan worked -- at a terrible cost.

  We leave it up to readers to ponder what relevance this little-known story might have for modern Taiwan. Obviously there are worse things than being shut up at home or in Hoping Hospital for a couple of weeks. But are there bigger issues involved. Is Taiwan a society where self-indulgence and personal gratification have eroded values of moral responsibly? What other interpretation might we put on Friday's events?
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