48 · MONEY
ISSUE 61
L AST WORD
The Bluesman is a Maltese sound engineer working in New York.
PESTILENCE The Bluesman analyses COVID pandemic measures undertaken in the hope that eventually the pandemic, like previous ones, will be a thing of the past in no time.
There was a pestilence in the air, yet some saw it not. There was a pestilence in the air, yet some chose to flirt with it. There was a pestilence in the air, and many died. It crept upon us as far as public awareness or notification was concerned much like the sickening miasma that was thought to arise from the swamps in Louisiana at night. In truth, the theory had come into being far away from any Louisiana swamp although it did have a firm grip on folklore and Louisiana.
Before the understanding of the spread of disease was spawned and grew in acceptance, your average man in the street, field, and palace was baffled by sickness. The devil and witches were one thing, everybody was happy to have a scapegoat, and the lonely crones and their demon familiars were easy targets. But by the early 1700s, the enthusiasm for witch trials was dying. Probably because burning these poor women wasn’t having the desired effect and cures weren’t forthcoming. One woman was pardoned after conviction and set free in England, highlighting this loss of appetite for burnings. A couple of years later in Scotland, Kate Nevin after being hunted for three weeks was put to death
by Faggot and Fire [not what you think] in Perthshire. It took another 70 years before Europe put a halt to these horrendous proceedings, Switzerland being the last country to do so. Now folk needed to understand where cholera, chlamydia the Black Death and other fine ravagers of humankind were coming from. In their minds, the idea took hold that it was a miasma [from the Greek for pollution], a form of bad air. Florence Nightingale, the Lady with the Lamp, the nurse who came to prominence during the Crimean War where she was a managing nurse. She used to walk through the wards at night carrying a lamp,
to check up on patients, hence the name she was known by, and she was a firm believer in this theory. Her work making sure that hospitals were fresh and airy to combat this ‘bad air’ causing ‘miasma’ helped pave the way to the spotlight being turned on ‘microbes’ as being the cause of this decaying matter fouling the air and eventually being identified as the cause of infection. A sceptic of this Miasma Theory, however, was a fellow named John Snow. He espoused the idea that it was contaminated water, not air that spread disease and his attention was drawn to the fact that amid the 1854 cholera pandemic he observed a high mortality rate
