Unit 8Section 2 Eexercise 7 Responding to an Epidemic: Fear and Adaptation

In the excerpt below, Axel Munthe describes his experience of the diphtheria outbreaks. He alludes to his own fear and to the stoic behavior of his Italian contact, who maintains his equanimity even though his own daughter dies in the epidemic. The cholera epidemic below is more horrific still. As you follow the author’s narrative, it is worth thinking about the distinctions between his fears and his actions, and, when imagining your own behavior in a modern-day version of an epidemic, what response you would consider foolhardy or dutiful, and whether you would be subject to rational fear or hysteria.

From The Story of San Michel, by Axel Munthe (pp. 112-115)

If anybody would care to know about my stay in Naples, he must look it up in “Letters from a mourning city” if he can get a hold of a copy…I was evidently rather pleased with myself for having rushed from Lapland to Naples at the moment when everyone else had left it. There is a good deal of swaggering as to how I went about night and day in the infected poor quarters, covered with lice, feeding on rotten fruit, sleeping in a filthy locanda. All this is quite true, I have nothing to retract, my description of Naples in cholera time is exact as I saw it with the eyes of an enthusiast. But the description of myself is far less exact. I had the cheek to put in writing that I was not afraid of the cholera, not afraid of Death. I told a lie. I was horribly afraid from the first till the last. I described in the first letter how, half-faint from the stench of carbolic acid in the empty train I stepped out on the deserted Piazza late in the evening, how I passed in the streets long convoys of carts and omnibuses filled with corpses on the was to the cholera cemetery, how I spent the whole night amongst the dying in the wretched focaci of the slums. But there is no description of how a couple of hours after my arrival I was back once more in the station eagerly inquiring after the train for Rome, for Calabria, for the Abruzzi, for anywhere, the further the better, only to get out of this hell. Had there been a train there would have been no “letters from a mourning city”. As it was, there was no train till noon the next day, the communication with the infected city having been almost cut off. There was nothing to do but have a swim at Santa Lucia at sunrise and to return to the slums with a cool head but still trembling with fear. In the afternoon my offer to serve on the staff of the cholera hospital of Santa Madalena was accepted. Two days later I vanished from the hospital having discovered that the right place was not among the dying in the hospital but among the dying in the slums. How much easier it would have been for them and for me, thought I, if only their agony was not so long, so terrible! There they were lying for hours, for days in the stadium algidum, cold as corpses, with wide-open eyes and wide-open mouths, to all appearances dead and yet still alive. Did they feel anything, did they understand anything? So much the better for the few who could still swallow the teaspoonful of laudanum one of the volunteers of the Croce Bianca rushed inito pour into their mouths. It might at least finish them off before the soldiers and the half-drunk beccamorti came at night to throw them all in a heap in the immense pit on the Campesanto dei Colerosi. How many were thrown there alive? Hundreds, I should say. They all looked exactly alike, I myself was often unable to say if they were dead or alive. There was no time to lose, there were dozens of them in every slum, the orders were strict, they all had to be buried in the night. As the epidemic approached its climax, I had no longer any reason for complaining that their agony was so long. Soon they began to fall down in the streets as if struck by lightening, to be picked up by the police and driven to the cholera hospital to die there a few hours later. The cabby who drove me in the morning in tearing spirits to the convict prison of Granetllo, near Portici and was to take me back to Naples, was lying dead in his cab when I came to look for him in the evening. Nobody wanted to have anything to do with him in Portici, nobody wanted to help me get him out of the cab. I had to climb on to the box and drive him back to Naples myself. Nobody wanted to have anything to do with him there either, it ended by my having to drive him to the cholera cemetery before I could get rid of him. Often when I returned in the evening to the locanda, I was so tired that I threw myself on the bed as I was, without undressing, without even washing myself. What was the good of washing in this filthy water, what was the good of disinfecting myself when everybody and everything around me was infected, the food I ate, the water I drank, the bed I slept in, the very air I breathed! Often I was too frightened to go to bed, too frightened to be alone. I had to rush out into the street again, to spend the remainder of the night in one of the churches. Santa Maria del Carmine was my favorite night-quarter, the best sleep I have ever had on a bench in the left-side aisle of that old church. There were plenty of churches to sleep in when I dared not go home. All the hundreds of churches and chapels of Naples were open the whole night, ablaze with votive candles and thronged with people. All their hundreds of Madonnas and saints were hard at work night and day to visit the dying in their respective quarters. Woe to them if they ventured to appear in the quarter of one of their rivals! Even the venerable Madonna della Colera who had saved the city in the terrible epidemic of 1834, had been hissed a few days before at Biancho Novi. But it was not only of the cholera I was afraid. I was also terrified from the first to last of the rats. They seemed just as much at home in the fondaci, bassi and sotterani of the slums as the wretched human beings who lived and died there. To be just, they were on the whole inoffensive and well-behaved rats, at least with the living, attending to their business of scavengers, handed over to them alone since the time of the Romans, the only members of the community who were sure to get their fill. They were as tame as cats and almost as big. Once I came upon an old woman, nothing but skin and bones, almost naked, lying on a rotten straw mattress in a semi-dark sort of grotto. I was told she was the ‘vavama’, the grandmother. She was paralyzed and totally blind, she had been lying there for years. On the filthy floor of the cave sat on their haunches half-dozen enormous rats in a circle around their unmentionable morning meal. They looked quite placidly at me, without moving an inch. The old woman stretched out her skeleton arm and screamed in a hoarse voice, “Pane! Pane!” But when the sanitary commission started on its vain attempt to disinfect the sewers, the situation changed, my fear grew into terror. Millions of rats who had been living unmolested in the sewers since the time of the Romans, invaded the lower part of the town. Intoxicated by the sulphur fumes and the carbolic acid, they rushed about the slums like mad dogs. They did not look like any rats I had ever seen before, they were quite bald with extraordinarily long red tails, fierce blood-shot eyes and pointed black teeth as long as the teeth of a ferret. If you hit them with your stick, they would turn round and hang on to the stick like a bull-dog. Never in my life have I been so afraid of any animal as I was of these mad rats, for I am sure they were mad. The whole Basso Porto quarter was in terror. Over one hundred severely bitten men, women and children were taken to the Pellegrini hospital the very first day of the invasion. Several small children were literally eaten up. I shall never forget a night in a fondaco in Vicolo della Duchessa. The room, the cave is the better word, was almost dark, only lit up by the little oil-lamp before the Madonna. The father had been dead for two days but the body was still lying there under a heap of rags; the family having succeeded in hiding him from the police in search of the dead to be taken to the cemetery, a common practice in the slums. I was sitting on the floor by the side of the daughter, beating off the rats with my stick. She was already quite cold, she was still conscious. I could hear the whole time the rats crunching at the body of the father. At last it made me so nervous that I had to put him upright in the corner like a grandfather clock. Soon the rats began eating ravenously his feet and legs. I could not stand it any longer. Faint with fear I rushed away.

More reading on epidemics:

Physician’s Perspective on the Cholera epidemic of 1884-1911: Naples in the Time of Cholera, 1884-1911, Frank M. Snowden.

Study Questions

1. Compare a personal illness narrative, such as the ones accessed in the other units of this website, with the story of an epidemic. How are they different?

2. Describe the physician’s experience in Naples, “among the dying in the slums.” How does the author portray the fear of the community? How did people cope with their fear?