After a week that’s seen Edinburgh’s Covid cases rise dramatically, remembering the history of plagues, diseases and epidemics that has rocked the city might not seem like the most reassuring thing.
The past year has changed Edinburgh irrevocably, but it isn’t the first time a pandemic has devastated the city.
It’s impossible to visit, much less live here, without knowing about our history of plagues and pandemics. Mary King’s Close is the most famous example, with its residents being bricked in and left to die rather than risk infecting other people.
The 1645 plague killed one in every two citizens, but the city had already lived through something similar.
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A deadly outbreak in 1389 killed two thirds of the population, and in 1361 even the nobles, in their better ventilated homes and palaces, were affected. Bodies piled high in the streets and ships would be quarantined at dock or sent to Inchkeith island.
And even as late as 1905, Leith was hit with the bubonic plague. Thanks to swift action, only one tenement was affected which was shut off from the public and heavily disinfected. Because of this, only one family out of the 30 people living in the tenement was affected - a man, his wife and child.
John Hughes was the only death recorded, and his wife and child recovered. A week after his death, a newspaper reported that:
"The Local Government Board of Scotland yesterday issued a notice to the effect that they have received a certificate from the Leith Medical-officer of Health official establishing that, with the exception of the death of the first sufferer from plague, John Hughes, who died on May 11th, no death from or fresh case of plague has occurred within the five days following isolation on May 10th, that all measures of disinfection have been carried out and that measures have been taken against rats."
You can’t compare one pandemic to another, but it’s hard after the past year and a half to read this account and not feel a pang of envy at how quickly things were controlled.
That was largely due to the lessons learned from history, and an increased understanding of how disease and pandemics spread. Although it’s painful to consider, we have that knowledge now and it’s crucial that it’s taken into consideration when future policies are made.
Public health officials have made no bones of the fact that they have predicted a major pandemic for years now, and that COVID-19 may not even be ‘the big one’. It’s likely there will be another in the not too distant future and if we can do nothing else, it's to learn from our past mistakes and successes and remember how much Edinburgh has survived so far.
