Feel free to ignore this post because it is a little niche, but my brain wouldn’t let me rest until I wrote out my thoughts and I wondered if other people might find this interesting too.
So, I am a medical history nerd. I am more familiar with the Victorian era and some of the advancements (and failures) from that era, however the setting of this game during the Regency era in the middle of a pandemic got me thinking about germ theory.
Germ theory is the basic understanding of how disease spreads and it’s what we understand today as the cause of infections. Basically that microbes like bacteria, viruses, parasites, etc cause disease. Before this, the prevailing theory is that miasma, or bad air, caused disease. At least in Western society, there wasn’t really a shift from miasma theory to germ theory until the mid-1800s with one of my favorite historical figures Dr. John Snow.
It’s sort of hard to pin down who exactly came up with the idea of germ theory. There’s references to people being unclean and exiled from society because of disease in Mosaic Law, thus implying an understanding that there is person to person transmission of Something that causes others to get sick. Romans and Greeks had some understanding of an infectious something as well, and so did Ancient India. Islamic scholars in the Middle Ages articulated the idea of transmissible, infectious seeds. Anton van Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch man, finally observed microorganisms under the microscope in the 1670s.
I hear you saying, “Sure, all this is cool, but what does it have to do with Romancing Jan?” I’m getting there.
Long story short, if a pandemic similar to the one we are experiencing now happened in the Regency era of our world, miasma theory would most likely influence the rich elite to flee the city centers and hold parties on their estates, thinking that they were fleeing the ‘bad air’. (Which some of the elites did do during the Victorian era, check out the Great Stink of 1858.) However Romancing Jan is an alt history, so I think it would be just as reasonable to expect that germ theory has caught on more quickly in this world--probably with better international relations and trade of knowledge between Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East--and would have been vaguely more responsible about mask wearing, keeping safely apart and limiting gatherings.
TLDR-- Germ theory did exist in the Regency era and with the wiggling of the Romancing Jan timeline, our characters probably didn’t throw Masque of the Red Death parties.
Bonus fact: With the change in the timeline, we still almost certainly had vaccines. The idea for the smallpox vaccine in Western society came from a Cotton Mather, who learned the technique of variolation from the enslaved person Onesimus, teaching a practice that has been done in Africa for generations. In Romancing Jan, without the slave trade, this information would likely have been shared much more freely and attributed to the actual discoverers/refiners in Africa.
MIASMA!
Okay, but for real, if you want to get a hang of the transition between miasma theory and germ theory becoming the more widely accepted line of thought, Extra History did a really good series about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLpzHHbFrHY
Thank you for this! I'm a history nerd but pretty ignorant of medical science throughout history, so reading this was a delightful education as well as empowering me with Sophrona's likely perspective on this quarantine.
CW: disease spread, mentions of death and mortality
I’m adding to this post because it’s interesting to me and just so to keep my ramblings all in one place.
First a history of the Plague (aka Black Death, attributed to Yersinia pestis now). This is likely not the cause of our game’s current outbreak but it’s a good overview of how ancient and medieval people dealt with diseases: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6i0u-flpTE
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that outbreaks happened earlier in our Romancing Jan setting especially as our world has more bi-directional movement of trade, people, and ideas. Basically in order to have a global disease, you need to be connected globally. Some of the main players disease-wise during the 1800s were cholera and tuberculosis. European powers met several times during the later half of the century to try to determine how to best prevent disease spread, and most of these discussions were indeed about cholera, however I am not convinced it works for the idea of Romancing Jan.
Cholera is a fecal-orally transmitted infection, usually coming from contaminated water, and it would not quite require the full level of lockdown that we’re seeing in Romancing Jan, or indeed during the current pandemic. Granted, there almost certainly is an element of fantasy to our disease outbreak too, which lends it more to a nebulous respiratory illness and thus requiring the need of avoiding people in general, which would make it more like tuberculosis (a respiratory infection) than cholera. Tuberculosis, however, usually doesn’t kill as fast as cholera either. A disease I haven’t talked about yet would be influenza, of course another respiratory illness.
We know influenza was out and about causing problems, but it didn’t hit the level of pandemic until the infamous 1918 Influenza outbreak. I think again, we can be flexible with the timeline here, given how connected the world of Romancing Jan is, and especially with England’s focus on trade. England might even have been the main cause of this outbreak’s spread to the rest of the world.
As to quarantine, this is another ancient idea, referenced in the Biblical book of Leviticus. Ideas of quarantine were also described in the Medieval Islamic world, especially in relation to tuberculosis. The word quarantine comes from Venice and the idea of having a ship with known disease being required to wait 40 days prior to docking.