Quietly screaming in medical historian
At people going about a pandemic disease that they find personally inconvenient 'got to live with it'.
As if 'living with it' is just about shrugging your shoulders and letting the dice fall as they may.
Am surprised at no reports of rumbling in the cemeteries where Victorian sanitarians are buried.
Because when you are dealing with a disease like this, very like the kinds of things they were dealing with, which had no actual cure, a high rate of mortality, and debilitating effects on survivors -
- what you threw your efforts into, was *PREVENTION*.
Even pre-Victorians - the Venetian quarantine of ships in time of plague, etc.
Cholera - okay, your measures against miasma had not worked, but once Snow had pointed out that it was water and not airborne - sewers (though even then, it had to wait until Parliament was inconvenienced by the Great Stink of 1858 to get the money voted.)
Smallpox - vaccination, plus isolation hospitals for active cases.
Encouragement of social practices - you know, like not spitting in public, which was about TB? -
- and Fun-packed public information film, which warns of the dangers of germ-spreading sneezing in wartime.
Thinking also of a whole range of things from food adulteration to avoidable death in childbirth, that people presumably thought were interfering with trade (and their right to colour sweeties with arsenic, bulk out bread with alum, etc) and flying in the face of religion, nature, and the fact that Doctors' Hands Could Not Possibly Be Filthy.
While occasionally efforts of prevention were misguided and just wrong (routine inspection of sex workers for STIs at a time when diagnosis was pretty much guesswork, just saying), and certain interventions now considered excessive (I was part of the generation of what are now deemed unnecessary tonsillectomies), prevention, and it's mostly something that has to be undertaken at a collective level, is usually the horse to bet on
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