Demons of Illness and Poverty Stalking the Lucky Gods, by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, 1884. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Herbert R. Cole Collection.

Epidemic

Volume XIII, Number 3 | summer 2020

Miscellany

“There are observances necessary for a healthy man to employ during a pestilence,” advised the first-century Roman medical writer Aulus Cornelius Celsus, “although in spite of them, one cannot be secure.” Best of all is “to go abroad, take a voyage. When this cannot be, to be carried in a litter, walk in the open before the heat of the day, gently, and to be anointed in like manner.”

All the world is topsy-turvy, and it has been topsy-turvy ever since the plague.

—Jack London, 1912