I am about one third through Daniel Defoe’s book, A Journal of the Plague Year. Reading it, it feels like, we, humans, managed to change the world around ourselves in the last four hundred years significantly. Better infrastructure, great advances in science, medicine, longer life expectancy…, but on the whole, how people behave, hasn’t changed much. Still afraid when things are about to change, gullible, relying on advice from people with no credibility. I look at my facebook feed and see recommendations for vitamin C, zinc, CBD oil, hell, even read a story about a guy poisoning himself after taking chloroquine phosphate, an additive used to clean fish tanks, in hopes to prevent getting infected with coronavirus.
Here are some some excerpts from the book on conjurers of cheap tricks during the plague in London
The apprehensions of the people were likewise strangely increased by the error of the times, in which, I think, the people, from what principle I cannot imagine, were more addicted to prophecies, and astrological conjurations, dreams, and old wives' tales, than ever they were before or since.
Whether this unhappy temper was originally raised by the follies of some people who got money by it, that is to say, by printing predictions and prognostications, I know not ; but certain it is, books frighten them terribly;
Next to these public things were the dreams of old men; or, I should say, the interpretation of old women other people's dreams; and these put abundance of people even out of their wits.
Others saw apparitions in the air; and I must be allowed to say of both I hope without breach of charity, that they heard voices that never spake, and saw sights that never appeared; but the imagination of
the people was really turned wayward and possessed; and no wonder if they who were poring continually at the clouds saw shapes and figures, representations and appearances, which had nothing in them but air and vapor.
I could fill this account with the strange relations such people gave every day of what they had seen ; and every one was so positive of their having seen what they pretended to see, that there was no contradicting them without breach of friendship, or being accounted rude and unmannerly on the one hand, and profane and impenetrable on the other.
They ran to conjurers and witches and all sorts of deceivers, to know what should become of them, who fed their fears and kept them always alarmed and awake, on purpose to delude them and pick their pockets. So, they were as mad upon running after quacks and mountebanks, and every practising old woman, for medicines and remedies, storing themselves with such multitudes of pills, potions, and preservatives, as they were called, that they not only spent their money but even poisoned themselves beforehand for fear of the poison of the infection, and prepared their bodies for the plague instead of preserving them against it.
Some ads from dubious doctors of the time
Infallible preventive pills against the plague, — Never-failing preservatives against the infection, — Sovereign cordials against the corruption of air, — Exact regulations for the conduct of the body in case of an infection, — Antipestilential pills, — Incomparable drink against the plague, never found out before, — An Universal remedy for the plague, — The ONLY true plague-water, — The royal antidote against all kinds of infection : and such a number more that I cannot reckon up, and if I could, it would fill a book of themselves to set them down.
All this reminded me of scene with
Priscilla Barnes from Mallrats. A fortune teller whose credibility relied on the third nipple which… turned out to be fake. You can probably find some more examples at
Mr. Skin.
