Thread by @AhsokaKnows

Lots of people are stressing about "social distancing". Why are they pushing this crazy new thing that we're all supposed to do, even though no one's ever mentioned it to us before?
(1) because it works
and (2) It's not new. Not even close.

It's a medical history thread!
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Remember the plague? Not as a bacterial illness treated now w/antibiotics - THE Plague, Black Death, the one that killed millions?
(In the current context, you may recognize it from tweets as "the thing happening when Shakespeare wrote instead of raising his kids".)
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Well. People in the 17th century didn't know about bacteria or antibiotics.
But they knew symptoms, they knew it spread easily, they knew it was a terrible way to die.

So when the plague appeared in the town of Eyam (north England), townsfolk were understandably worried.
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They knew they were in trouble - and they knew everyone in nearby towns was going to be in trouble pretty soon, too. So the good people of Eyam made a pact.
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They dragged rocks to the town border to mark the border.
And they agreed that NO ONE would leave the town. Not even if they were completely healthy. Everyone agreed to stay home - no matter how bad things got, nobody crosses those boundary stones.
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And NO ONE would be allowed into the town from outside, either.
But trade still needed to happen sometimes. So they dug little holes into their boundary stones and filled them with vinegar. (They thought - wrongly - that it was a sterilizing agent.)
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They would leave coins in the vinegar holes, and the items normally bought from other towns would be dropped off by vendors near the stones, vendors would take their payment from the vinegar hole coins, and no one would have personal contact as any part of it.
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Some villagers probably weren't happy about this. We do have evidence at least one person may have tried to leave - and was chased out of the next town, who knew where she came from. But peer pressure being what it is, most of them sat tight and stuck it out.
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Eventually so many people died, they couldn't harvest their own crops and family members often had to bury their own dead.
They had to rely heavily on their vinegar-coin trade system to have enough food.
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They DID keep having church services, because 17th century Europe had pretty strong feelings about not going to church - but moved them outside, away from potentially contaminated surfaces, and where people could sit farther apart.

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(And this being the 17th century, even with that system, they probably DIDN'T have enough food.)

The quarantine went on for OVER A YEAR.
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Almost everyone in Eyam died. Less than a quarter of the population is thought to have survived.
So it's not a "happy ending".

But they stopped the disease spreading to every other community they might have normally had contact with.
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Plague can spread without a person being obviously sick. (It's thought to have got into Eyam on fleas that were just hanging out in a fabric shipment - not in an infected person at all!)
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The people of Eyam "socially distanced" themselves - rather heroically, given the price they paid - and in so doing, contributed to stopping that outbreak of plague across northern England.
And the survivors resurrected their town, eventually returning to normal life.
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Eyam is not the only place to have done something like this. But they are one of the well known examples.
You can still visit (but NOT RIGHT NOW!) and see plaques hung to commemorate the dead, and they put on a remembrance service annually.
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We remember them because social distancing WORKS to stop or slow the spread of contagious disease.
COVID isn't the plague. We aren't courting starvation as crops rot in the fields.
This should be a much easier decision than it was for the poor folks of Eyam. #StayHome
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