Status Updates From Peste & Cólera

One day the century turns thirty-three. The age at which Christ and Alexander the Great died. Centuries, however, are fated to live to a hundred.

(…) there can be no real progress save in and through the individual. Yersin is a loner. He knows that nothing great has ever been achieved by the multitude. He hates groups, rating their intelligence as being in inverse proportion to the number of members making them up. Genius always stands alone. The committee has the lucidity of the hamster. The stadium the perspicacity of the paramecium.

Friendship is the only paradoxically rational feeling that is not a passion. (…) A portrait of a friend is invariably a self-portrait, attributing to the friend the virtues one would like to see in the mirror.

From microscope to tele-scope, he becomes aware of the astonishing geometric proximity of the infinitely large and the infinitely small. And we humans float like jellyfish between the two.

The time of science and thought is not the same as that of clocks and calendars.

Yersin will travel no more. (…) He is a tree now. Being a tree is a life, too, and it does not involve moving on. He is approaching that fine, infinite solitude. That marvellous listlessness.

No one knows it at the time, but those years are already ripe for numbering backwards, to measure out the time left to run before the ‘14 disaster.

And each time the boat calls in at the bay the Ali Baba hold is unloaded, a crew of sailors row towards Fishermen's Point out of a purple sunset, and a line of porters, bearing bundles and crates on their heads, advance along the jetty towards Dr Nam's house, where the doctor awaits them in the shelter of the veranda.

The history of science is often rolled out as a broad avenue leading straight from ignorance to truth, but that is false. The history of science is a network of dead ends in which thought loses its way and ties itself up in knots. An anthology of pitiful failures, some quite ridiculous. Not unlike the early days of aviation in that respect.

The twentieth century opens without anyone knowing that it will be the worst yet, a century of infinite barbarity coming right after one of dreams of infinite progress.

Yersin becomes the first doctor to save a victim of bubonic plague.

The consul and the bishop each undertake to bear witness to the extraordinary event. Well-nigh miraculous, murmurs the bishop, whose word is to be believed. The Lord does indeed move in ways so mysterious that a Swiss Prot will on occasion snatch a Chink Holy Joe from the jaws of death.
However, there was to be no St Yersin (…)

It is warm inside a chicken, as everyone knows. Forty-two degrees. Far warmer than inside a sheep. Even with its woolly jumper on.

In an earlier age, when people used to walk everywhere, horses worked the land, bullocks drew carts with creaking wheels and ships sailed under canvas, plague advanced at a gentle pace but mowed down all betore it nonetheless.

This is back in the day when nature is still something man must master and possess. When nature, now a fragile old crock in need of protection, was a redoubtable foe to be subdued.

He is still young, Yersin, and he is in a hurry. He bores easily. Having learnt to walk barefoot through jungle, he is loath to go back to the footwear of the sedentary researcher.

That year, on the liners, the word 'posh' is coined, from the initial letters of 'port out, starboard home', because it is deemed the height of fashion to attune one's reservation to the direction of the ship. One can thus, on both legs of the trip, enjoy from one's cabin a view of the changing coastline, while the rest, who are not 'posh' and lack proper foresight, see only ocean.

There is a risk involved in taking a stance like Yersin, always trying to wash one's hands of politics. Turning one's back on History and its awful fruit. An individualist, as altruists often are. It is later in life, from loving others too much, that a person becomes a misanthrope.

Soon all will be clear, one need only explain, instruct, repeat the experiments. How could they possibly have known that, a hundred and fifty years later, half the world’s population would still argue for creationism?

In Morges in the canton of Vaud the Yersin household, like those of their neighbours, though hardly destitute, observes strict frugality.