The Historical Upside of Pandemic Diseases

While epidemics have ravaged human societies throughout recorded history, global health challenges have also sparked progress in culture, economics and civilization, ultimately changing the lives of the survivors for the better.

Bubonic Plague Pandemic

For instance, after the massive losses to serfdom labor resulting from the Black Death of 1347, agricultural workers were able to demand better pay and working conditions from their manorial lords. In urban areas following the Plague, authorities became more aware of the importance of public sanitation in curbing pandemics, spawning the precursors to modern concepts of public health.

Yellow Fever Epidemic

In 1793, following a yellow fever epidemic that swept through Philadelphia, then the largest city in America and the nation’s temporary capital, the pandemic caused sweeping changes by the Founding Fathers. Home to such notables as George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, the yellow fever epidemic convinced them that the social, economic and political health of the nation was inextricably tied up with public health, leading to vast improvements in both policy and law.

Spanish Flu Pandemic

In the 1920s, following the heavy losses to the flu pandemic of 1918, governments around the world embraced new concepts of preventive and socialized medicine, putting in place centralized healthcare systems that exist to this day, while in the United States, employer-based healthcare insurance plans were put in place for the first time in the nation’s history.

The flu pandemic of 1918 also inspired physicians and scientists to focus on the occupational and social conditions that promoted illness, not only to cure the illness in question but to install epidemiological practices to further study the patterns, causes and effects of infectious disease transmission.

The repeatable nature of pandemics also led to increased vaccination, against recurrent diseases such as measles, malaria and polio to name just a few. Following the flu pandemic of 1918, the concept of social distancing further influenced residential building design, prompting legislation by Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s that required all apartments to have fire escapes, wider hallways and separate bathrooms. Social distancing also found its way in fashion, when the advent of hoop skirt dresses provided a much-needed distancing tactic from men.