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| https://duxbury.wickedlocal.com/news/20180627/draken-viking-longship-visits-plymouth |
this is probably an urban legend, but there is a lot of speculation about what would have happened if the settlement had succeeded: think Colombian exchange of disease and crops that would have changed history on both sides of the ocean. If the Indians had become resistant to smallpox, could they have stopped European settlement of North America? And could syphilis have decimated armies in Europe and changed that continent's history also?
see also: the Emigma of Dighton Rock
the rock has been a focus of marvel and speculation ever since the year A.D. 1690, when the Reverend Cotton Mather, of witchcraft and brimstone fame, described it and the curious message engraved on its weathered, red-brown sandstone face.-------------------
A trivial fact about Cotton Mather: He helped popularize small pox prevention in the 1720s by inoculating people with a small amount of actual smallpox: a practice he had learned about from African slaves and one that was being used in the Ottoman Empire and popularized in England by Lady Montague, who lived there with her ambassador husband.
this was risky, of course, but the morality was much lower than getting the actual disease, especially since most Americans (either Europeans who were born in the colonies or the Native Americans) had no resistance to the disease, the morality was quite high.
And when George Washington was fighting near Boston which was having a minor small pox epidemic, and knew most of his men had never been exposed to the disease, he first tried quarantine/isolation, but later mandated that all recruits who had never had smallpox receive smallpox vareolation in areas separate from the main camp, and only join the army after recovery.
That probably saved the American revolution.
In contrast, the black slaves who joined the British to fight because they were promised their freedom caught the disease because the British were clueless about the need for this preventitive treatment.
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There is a concept about "communities of memory": that churches, clubs and other institutions remember the lessons of human experience in the past and codify these lessons into laws and customs.
In medicine, the US military (and it's close relation, the US Public Health Service) has one such memory.
For example, our National Guard unit had a "headsup" about the potential for HIV to become a major epidemic before it hit the news, and I did the HIV counseling for screening our National Guard units at a time when the MSM was pushing the fake news that "everyone" was at risk for the disease. Uh, no: but it was taboo to mention behaviors that spread the disease.
Fast forward to the Coronavirus:
So maybe allowing Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Spring Break in Florida, and the New York City celebration of the Chinese New year were a bad decision, especially since the President had already closed the airports to stop the possible spread of the disease.... and when you read about stuff like this, where people who should have known better encouraged such parties, it does make one wonder if maybe one should heed the lessons of the past.
headsup instapundit
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