An epidemic of yellow fever struck Philadelphia in August 1793. Eyes glazed, flesh yellowed, minds went delirious. People died, not individually, here and there, but in clusters, in alarming patterns. A plague mentality set in. Friends recoiled from one another. If they met by chance, they did not shake hands but nodded distantly and hurried on. The very air felt diseased. People dodged to the windward of those they passed. They sealed themselves in their houses. The deaths went on, great ugly scythings. Many adopted a policy of savage self-preservation, all sentiment heaved overboard like ballast. Husbands deserted stricken wives, parents abandoned children. The corpses of even the wealthy were carted off unattended, to be shoveled under without ceremony or prayer. One-tenth of the population died before cold weather came in the fall and killed the mosquitoes.
The plague mentality is something like the siege mentality, only more paranoid. In a siege, the enemy waits outside the walls. In a plague or epidemic, he lives intimately within. Death drifts through human blood or saliva. It commutes by bugbite or kiss or who knows what. It travels in mysterious ways, and everything, everyone, becomes suspect: a toilet seat, a child's cut, an act of love. Life slips into science fiction. People begin acting like characters in the first reel of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They peer intently at one another as if to detect the telltale change, the secret lesion, the sign that someone has crossed over, is not himself anymore, but one of them, alien and lethal. In the plague mentality, one belongs either to the kingdom of life or to the kingdom of death. So the state of mind glints with a certain fanaticism. It is said that when children saw the telltale sign during the Black Death in the 14th century, they sang "Ring around a rosie!" That meant they saw a ring on the skin around a red spot that marked the onset of the Black Death. "A pocket full of posies" meant the flowers one carried to mask the ambient stench. The ditty ended in apocalypse: "All fall down." The Black Death eventually took off half the population of Europe.
During the American Civil War, more soldiers died of typhoid than died in battle. The epidemic of Spanish influenza in 1918-19 killed more than 500,000 Americans. Before the Salk vaccine, nearly 600,000 Americans were infected by poliomyelitis, and 10% of them died. The polio epidemic caused memorable summers of trauma, during which swimming pools and shopping centers across the U.S. were closed.
In the past four years, some 6,000 people have died of AIDS in the U.S. From a statistical point of view, AIDS is not a major plague. Still, one begins to detect a plague mentality regarding the disease and those who carry it. Paradoxically, homosexuals are both victims of the plague mentality and themselves perpetrators of it. Because 73% of those who have AIDS are homosexuals, the general populace tends to look with suspicion on all homosexuals. Because the virus is transmitted by homosexual intercourse, homosexuals themselves bring to their intimate lives a desperate wariness and paranoia.