Chapter 9 : Fiction, Fact, and Reality

Abstract:

The realities of infectious disease are sometimes portrayed most graphically, not in textbooks, but in novels and in factual works whose authors have moved away from a strictly scientific mode of writing. The book La Peste (The Plague) describes the epidemic as an allegory for invasion and occupation by the Germans and the defeat of France. One such passage, illustrating the sense of desolation that grew stronger as the disease became firmly established and the town's gates were closed, says: By mid-August, the plague had swallowed up everything and everyone. Though based on actual events in London nearly 60 years previously, and drawing on the memories of people who had lived through the epidemic, A Journal of the Plague Year's disturbing power comes primarily from its author's imagination. Another author writing about viral pneumonia in Pathology for the Physician says: The lungs were voluminous and covered in a fibrinous exudate. An example of a piece of text with great power comes from neither a novel nor a textbook but from the autobiography of a science fiction pioneer. The pioneer's account of the hemoptysis that he experienced as a young man many years before, says: Every time I coughed and particularly if I had a bout of coughing, there was the dread of tasting the peculiar tang of blood .