With the rapid spread of COVID-19, people across the globe are feeling anxious and uncertain. It’s important to remember that we’ve been here before. Many times. With less technology and less knowledge about health, medicine, and germs. So, before you rush out and buy more toilet paper, take a look at some of the worst pestilences in human history and how we got over them and changed the world.

Dancing Plague

Let’s start with one that’s kind of silly and historically dubious. In the summer of 1518, a literal dancing hysteria came over Strasbourg (modern day France). One day a young woman began to dance in the streets. Soon after, more young women joined in. After a few days, many people from town all began to dance in the town square non-stop. They would dance day and night and many succumbed to exhaustion or heart attacks.

The event itself happened and was well documented but the death count is a little sketchy. The number most often thrown around is that 400 people danced to their deaths. However, there are no firm records of the number of deaths and it’s believed the number 400 came from exaggerated retellings.

The Strasbourg dancing plague lasted until September when they just started putting the dancers into the hospital where they recovered. No one knows what caused the outbreak but theories include mass hysteria as well as ergot which is a mold that grows on the ingredients to make bread (and one of the main theories behind the hysteria that caused the Salem Witch Trials!).

Sweating Sickness

Perhaps one of the most mysterious epidemics to ever hit humankind was the Sweating Sickness. More peculiar was that even though it did eventually make it to continental Europe, the Sweat was mostly an English affliction.

The first known epidemic was in 1485, and broke out soon after the Battle of Bosworth in which Henry Tudor (later Henry VII) won the crown from King Richard III. It erupted multiple times before disappearing from the earth completely in 1551.

Perhaps the scariest part of the sickness was how suddenly it would appear, and the poor afflicted soul would often be dead in a matter of hours. It would start with chills followed by a headache and severe pain in the neck and heart. Then a fever would spike and the person would become delirious as they would begin to sweat. The mortality rate was as much as 50% depending where you were.

One of the worst outbreaks occurred in 1528 during the reign of Henry VIII. Henry VIII was a hardcore hypochondriac. He always had the best doctors and medicines on hand for any slight affliction. When the Sweat returned, he was the poster child for social distancing and had the court broken up into smaller groups and moved to smaller houses. Anne Boleyn was sent to her ancestral home at Hever Castle to quarantine but she and her father both got the disease. Henry sent his second best doctor (had to keep the best for the king obviously) but tellingly did not go visit her himself. Anne was one of the lucky few who survived…and ultimately went on to marry the king and become mother to Elizabeth I.

To this day, no one knows what caused the Sweat. A few similar illnesses popped up over the centuries since but nothing quite like it. It’s speculated that anything from poor sanitation to the hantavirus could have been responsible.

Plague

Perhaps nothing invokes fear like the Black Death. Plague has been a scourge on earth for thousands of years but it was in the 1300s that it really began to do some damage. Between 1347 and 1665, the plague came in multiple waves and killed at least 25 million people across Europe.

Now the plague still exists but not that many people die from it anymore. So what changed? QUARANTINES!

Remember, germ theory is centuries off. They vaguely realize that being in close contact spreads disease. In Venice, a great port city, they noticed that sailors were just bringing everything in illnesses and all. So they started making newly docked sailors isolate themselves for 30 days. That soon became 40 days or quaranta giorni.

Shakespeare was born during a plague epidemic and since his older siblings had already died of it, his parents went into isolation to protect him. Later in life, another plague outbreak shut down the theaters in London so he worked on Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear, and Macbeth during the year that this went down. Sir Isaac Newton also was quarantined and had to leave Cambridge and spent the year working on inventing calculus and the theory of gravity. Overachievers.

(You do not have to be productive during the global trauma of a pandemic.)

1918 Flu

I’m guessing this is the one you clicked here for. The 1918 Flu seems like the distant past but not a lot in terms of how we fight disease has changed. The events surrounding the 1918 Flu are also shockingly similar to COVID-19.

At the tail end of the Great War, soldiers in the trenches (and on military bases in the US) began to fall ill. Spain had remained neutral during the war and had a freely operating press whereas most other countries censored news. Because of this, Spain had covered the flu pandemic from the beginning and was the only place that people got any news about the flu since it was censored everywhere else. Because they were the only ones talking about it, everyone assumed that it started there. This is why it is known as the Spanish Flu (but like what is happening now with COVID-19 and people trying to blame specific countries, I will be referring to it as the 1918 Flu because down with racism).

No one knows exactly where the 1918 Flu originated but one theory is that it came from a military base in Kansas that was near a hog farm and along a migration path of birds. It was later shown that this flu was from the H1N1 family.

The symptoms were similar to COVID-19 as well. In the first wave, the symptoms were mild. Fever, chills, coughing, sneezing. But the second wave that hit in the fall included pneumonia that would effectively drown a person’s lungs. Unlike COVID-19 (as far as we know anyway), the 1918 Flu hit young people the hardest.

With soldiers moving between trenches and bases and then returning home from war, civilian cases began to spike and that’s when they realized they had a pandemic on their hands. Luckily, by this point in history, doctors were on board with germ theory and knew that hand washing, not touching your face, and not shaking hands were all things that would help.

There were mass quarantines across major US cities. I’ll focus on Seattle because that’s where I live and we had the misfortune of being the first US epicenter for COVID-19. Here’s what happened in pictures:

The 1918 Flu came in waves for 15 months. There were no vaccines for it, the best you could hope for was a good nurse who provided supportive care. Thanks to social distancing and mandatory quarantines they were able to decrease the spread until eventually everyone who had not succumbed to the disease had herd immunity. Understandably, people were traumatized from both the First World War and between 50-100 million people dying as a result of the 1918 Flu (there’s no way to know the actual number dead as many people were misdiagnosed and records still weren’t amazing). As such, people just wanted to forget the whole thing ever happened and it actually took decades for studies into the pandemic to occur.

Since 1918, there have been multiple deadly flu pandemics. 1957-1958, 1968-1969, and 2009-2010 (H1N1).

I personally am a high anxiety person on a good day. Hypochondria is my natural state. I researched and wrote this article because knowledge is power and understanding something – in this case the history of some of our most terrifying diseases – can take some of the fear away.

The takeaway here is that we have been here many times before with way less scientific understanding and tools at our disposal. It will be uncomfortable, but we will survive. Listen to doctors and stay home!