The El Dorado Pandemic

ABSTRACT

Recent experiences with COVID-19 has been a sobering reminder of how, despite advanced medical knowledge and technology- disease can scramble a society, from its economic trajectory to when and how its citizens should leave their houses. As the coronavirus's qualifying adjective notes, the experience has been novel in one sense, but in a wider context it is not. Microbes and pandemics have shaped the history of the US from its start. Early contagions opened the way to the first colonial settlements by devastating Native peoples along the Atlantic coast. In the 1780s, the smallpox that raged from Boston to the Pacific Northwest helped secure the American Revolution and open the far West to the US exploration and colonization. The global influenza pandemic of 1918 began in Kansas and claimed an estimated hundred million lives worldwide. The nineteenth century saw other pandemics. Arguably, the most dreadful was Asiatic cholera. It originated in India and spread to Europe and the US in three deadly doses--in 1832-34, in 1848-52, and in 1866-68.