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Get Well Soon: History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them

Book by Jennifer Wright · 3 quotes · Human Nature, Humanity, The Past

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Get Well Soon: History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them Quotes

“It’s easy to forget that people from the past weren’t the two-dimensional black-and-white photos or line drawings you might encounter in some dry textbooks. They weren’t just gray-faced guys in top hats. They were living, breathing, joking, burping people, who could be happy or sad, funny or boring, cool or the lamest people you ever met in your life. They had no idea they were living in the past. They all thought they were living in the present.”

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Book:Get Well Soon: History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them
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“Whether plagues are managed quickly doesn't just depend on hardworking doctors and scientists. It depends on people who like to sleep in on weekends and watch movies and eat French fries and do the fantastic common things in life, which is to say, it depends on all of us. Whether a civilization fares well during a crisis has a great deal to do with how the ordinary, nonscientist citizen responds. A lot of the measures taken against plagues discussed in this book will seem stunningly obvious. You should not, for instance, decide diseased people are sinners and burn them at a literal or metaphorical stake, because it is both morally monstrous and entirely ineffective. But them a new plague crops up, and we make precisely the same mistakes we should have learned from three hundred years ago.”

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Book:Get Well Soon: History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them
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