The Plague Village: In 1665, this English town chose to self-quarantine

[TexasTowelie]

While “social distancing” and “self-quarantine” were previously unfamiliar concepts for many of us, they are hardly new. Even people who lived before the discovery of microbes believed such actions could mean the difference between life and death. The English village of Eyam (pronounced “eem”), a favorite travel stop for retired McLennan Community College English Professor Carol A. Lowe and her husband Phillip, provides a notable example.

A bolt of cloth ordered by tailor’s assistant George Viccars arrived in Eyam, a village nestled in the Derbyshire Dales of England, in 1665. Viccars died days later, Eyam’s first victim of the plague, the Black Death that would ravage London and the village of Eyam.

The plague, spread by fleas carried from London in the bolt of cloth, sickened and killed first the family with whom Viccars boarded and then other villagers. Eyam’s rector, the Reverend William Mompesson, devised a plan. Knowing he could not save his own village, he proposed the villagers self-quarantine to prevent the plague from spreading to nearby communities.

As people began to die, some citizens fled the village — perhaps to a place with no reported plague or perhaps to a place that developed plague because they brought the contagion with them. Even the Reverend Mompesson’s wife Catherine asked her husband to take her and their children away from the stricken village. He refused to leave his parishioners. He did, however, urge her to flee with their children. She, in turn, refused to leave him.

Amid growing fear and panic, Mompesson appealed to his villagers’ sense of compassion and charity. In what is perhaps one of our world’s best examples of selflessness and love for one’s neighbor, the people of Eyam agreed to isolate themselves for as long as it took for surrounding villages to be safe. For over a year, no one left Eyam to spread the plague.

Read more: https://www.wacotrib.com/waco_today_magazine/the-plague-village-in-1665-this-english-town-chose-to-self-quarantine/article_f60e274b-b24f-5dda-83ae-f7c083639ec4.html
(Waco Tribune-Herald)

[FirstLight]

1. wow...over a year?

And here we had people bitching after 6 weeks for a haircut. :eyeroll:

All the current portests and stuff have me wondering if we have truly let the cork out of the bottle. I don't think people will go back on quarantine willingly, especially anytime soon.

Meanwhile nnumbers are still going UP

[TexasTowelie]

2. Yes, mentioning that they kept to themselves for over a year is remarkable,

but considering that back in those days most people rarely left their villages or traveled more than a few dozen miles also becomes a factor. They were lucky that the people in the other towns helped with provisions while they quarantined since the village was not self-sufficient.

[LisaM]

4. And they wouldn't have had worries about rent and bills

I feel as if we could have stopped it here in two months if we could have allayed those worries for people (and obviously, we would have to figure out food and sanitation).

[Arkansas Granny]

3. I had heard of this village a few years ago in the context of immunity to HIV.

In 1996 researchers found 14% of direct descendants of the citizens of Eyam had the CCR5-delta 32 mutation. This mutation had previously been studied because those with one copy of the CCR5-delta 32 mutation are resistant to HIV and those with two copies are immune to HIV.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/hekint.org/2017/02/01/quarantining-souls-the-impact-of-plague-village/amp/