Camus' The Plague & Portrayal of Plagues in Society

One of the most famous plagues, "The Black Death," first swept through Europe in the midfourteenth century. This plague was a combination of bubonic and pneumonic plague, and as a calamity was comparable in terms of death and destruction, with the two world wars of the twentieth century.

This paper will use the 1947 book by Albert Camus, The Plague, as a case study in the portrayal of plagues in modern societies. After briefly summarizing the book, the paper will look into the basic historical accuracy of the novel, with particular emphasis on etiology, epidemiology, and clinical causation. The paper will then analyze the historical validity of Camus' portrayal of plague looking at administrative policies, public health measures, economic consequences, and sociological and psychological reactions to the epidemic. Finally, the paper will conclude by assessing the novel's place as both a work of fiction and a psychohistory of events that stress population groupings.

Albert Camus was born in 1913 and was an Algerianborn French philosopher, novelist, dramatist, and journalist. He is known as an existentialist, and had

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c System, 15001820, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 567. 4 Camus, 14. population itself. The plague bacilli bread rapidly in a fleas stomach, and as rats carry fleas to areas of human habitation, the fleas bite humans and thus infect them. "To increase the flea's problems, its rat host dies of plague and goes cold. The starving flea looks for a new host of correct temperature and finds one on one of the rat's human neighbors. As it attempts to feed on human blood, it disgorges plague bacilli into the victim's blood, and the infection is transmitted."5 The only hope of countering and preventing the spread of bubonic plague lay in administrative policies that would limit contact with infected areas. Until the invention of antibiotics, then, there was no known cure for the plague. In fact, there is a growing corpus of evidence that points to the limitation of the plague through human organization. Some civil and medical authorities. . . observing the process of infection, in particular its arrive in a community after some indication of its prior existence in some other place with which the community shared a boundary or had a commercial connection, proposed various forms of isolation in an effort to break
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1566
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)