5. Collect information about epidemic of past time and of recent times. How people dealt at
that time and dealing in recent times? Explain
Answers
Answer:
keep smiling..
Explanation:
When considering the broad scheme of an epidemic or pandemic as a social phenomenon, perhaps the best study that I know of is not a study at all but is rather the remarkable novel by Albert Camus, The Plague—a text I routinely assign to all my students hoping to learn anything about epidemics. Indeed, the eminent historian Charles Rosenberg uses the novel in his seminal essay “What Is an Epidemic?” to gain insights into the nature of an epidemic, combining the observations from fiction with decades of scholarship documenting three of the most serious public-health crises of human history—the devastating cholera pandemics of 1833, 1845, and 1866 (Rosenberg, 1992). From these considerations Rosenberg characterizes the unfolding of an epidemic as a dramaturgic event, usually in four acts, with a distinct but somewhat predictable narrative plot line:
During the first act, “progressive revelation,” members of a community begin to acknowledge an increasing number of cases and/or deaths resulting from the spread of a particular contagious disease. Camus’s The Plague demonstrates this pattern with one of the most memorably disgusting opening scenes in all of literature:
When leaving his surgery on the morning of April 16, Dr. Bernard Rieux felt something soft under his foot. It was a dead rat lying in the middle of the landing. On the spur of the moment he kicked it to one side and without giving it a further thought, continued on his way downstairs. Only when he was stepping out onto the street did it occur to him that a dead rat had no business to be on his landing. . . .
In the pages that follow Dr. Rieux finds many more dead rats along the streets of Oran, but it takes a great deal of hectoring, cajoling, lecturing, and—perhaps most critical when chasing after an epidemic—precious time to convince his fellow townspeople that there is, in fact, a serious problem threatening the entire community’s health. This lethargic response is not restricted to the pages of fiction. Slow acceptance and delayed courses of action in the face of contagious threats are common features in the history of human epidemics. In some cases this tardiness is ascribed to “failure of the imagination,” a reason that may be au courant but that is decidedly uninformative. More often the delayed acknowledgment of an epidemic can be explained by the fact that acknowledging it would threaten various interests or strongly held beliefs, from the economic and institutional to the personal and emotional.
Act two, “managing randomness,” involves the society creating an intellectual framework within which the epidemic’s “dismaying arbitrariness” can be understood. Readers of The Plague will recall the heated debate over causation of the epidemic that took place between the doctor, who subscribes to a modern, scientific approach to understanding the plague, and the Catholic priest, who preaches that the plague’s visitation was an act of divine retribution for sinful lifestyles which thus demanded repentance. This dichotomy in understanding deadly disease, with religion or morality on one hand and science on the other, was a hallmark of many societies in the past, and we should not discount the role that religious, spiritual and cultural beliefs and practices can play in mitigating, containing, or inflaming an epidemic in our own era.
Answer:
Explanation: