Get Well Soon - Jennifer Wright

I read this book last year and really enjoyed it. So much that I recommended it to a few friends, Jen included. Well Jen read it and loved it! She has recommended it to so many people and even insisted her husband listen to it on audio book with her. Her enthusiasm was so great that we decided we needed to share the book with the Cover to Cocktails fans as well.

Get Well Soon is a non-fiction that takes us through some of the worst plagues in history. And it is done in a very easy to read way with more than a few humorous asides thrown in. There is also some great commentary on the leaders of the period and how they handled the plague. I wonder what the author might have said about covid had the book been published after our pandemic.

Each chapter takes you through a different plague. I won't go through them all here, but I will hit the highlights (seems a bit inappropriate to call them highlights doesn't it?).

I'll start with the Bubonic Plague since our cocktail was inspired by this one. Jen and I were both fascinated and horrified by the remedies used by doctors at the time. I understand the fear people had and the hope that the latest remedy will work, I think we all understand this a bit better after going through covid, and we are a much more educated society and should know better. Jen's favourite part was the exploding frog cure. Plague doctors (dressed as super creepy birds by the way, which surprisingly did help them from getting sick) would place a frog belly down on a patient's buboes. The frog would absorb the poison, swell up and explode. They would keep doing this until the frogs stopped exploding. If a frog didn't explode it meant the patient would die. How crazy is that?

The next plague we both found shocking and scary was the Dancing Plague. This plague started in 1518 when a woman started dancing in the street. Now that doesn't sound too unusual in 2024....I'm sure more than one of us has danced in the street, but that was not common in 1518. And what made it so much stranger was that she danced and couldn't stop. She danced until she passed out from exhaustion, then woke up and kept dancing. Soon others followed and started dancing as well. The town, amazingly, tried to help. First by providing music for the dancers, then later they asked that the dancers stay inside, hoping to prevent others from coming down with the same disease. They even outlawed dancing and enacted a law requiring people to take care of their servants if they came down with the dancing plague. They tried sending the dancers to the shrine of St. Vitus where priests said mass over them, and amazingly this sort of worked. It is thought that this plague was a hysterical outbreak, something that has been seen many times since, noted most recently in the media in 2012.

Typhoid was another plague we found interesting. You may have heard stories of Typhoid Mary, well she was real and she caused many deaths. Mary worked as a cook in New York and was known for her peach melba ice cream dessert. She also carried the bacteria that resulted in typhoid fever. She was asymptomatic, so she could transmit it to others without being sick herself. This was easily done as a cook handling food. Mary didn't know she was transmitting the disease to others and as she moved from household to household, she passed the disease on to twenty-two people. Eventually doctors figured it out and Mary was isolated. She spent years before appealing to the court to be released. When she finally was allowed out, she had no other skills to support herself and went back to cooking, at one point in a maternity ward. Now at this point Mary knew that she could infect people, so it's a bit tough to feel sorry for her when she is isolated again.

The last plague I'll talk about here is Lobotomies. Now if you've been following us for awhile you might remember the book we read in 2022 called The Lobotomist's Wife, which while fiction, gave some pretty accurate descriptions of how lobotomies came to be. So we already knew a bit about this topic. I am still horrified at this human made plague and the horrors inflicted on so many people, especially women deemed hysterical by their husbands or fathers. While it seems that at first lobotomies were helping people, it is shocking to know how long they carried on doing them even after the results showed otherwise.

There are thirteen plagues discussed in this book and so many interesting facts in each of them....I am having trouble stopping here. How do I not talk about Syphilis or Leprosy, or The Spanish Flu, or Encephalitis Lethargica? Luckily for us, many of these plagues have been wiped out and will never return. Unluckily for us there are a few still out there. I think someone was recently diagnosed with the bubonic plague. And if we continue down the path of fearing vaccines I wonder if some like polio could make a horrific return. But I will leave that to the experts. Our own experiences with the pandemic have certainly influenced how we related to this book and I found myself nodding at more than a few of the comments on leadership, fear, and false cures.

We both highly recommend this book. And if you enjoy this one, you should check out some of Jennifer Wright's other books. They all have the same easy, humorous approach to them that makes learning about history a little bit easier.

Jen - 📘📘📘📘📘

Until next time, have a drink, read a book, and be happy!