Epidemics in literature

On a faraway island, a sailor discovers an ideal society: There is equality among the locals, it is democratic, ownership is communal. It was the opposite of life in England at the time. And: there were no epidemics, unlike England that had suffered from the plague more than once. The above photo shows Dresden Semper Opera dancers as "Utopians" in a musical theater project based on More's novel.

Seven women and three men flee the plague to a country house near Florence. As cruel as the descriptions are at the beginning, the 100 novellas in the collection are surprisingly entertaining. To pass the time, each of the fugitives determines a topic per day and everyone has to tell a corresponding story. Subtle or crude, tragic or comical — a whole world unfolds.

Bacon envisioned a utopian island by the name of Bensalem, home to the people of the lost city of Atlantis. They are very involved in research and science, and inventions including the submarine, wind turbines and hearing aids are anticipated on "New Atlantis." Foreign seafarers were initially quarantined to protect islands from possible diseases.

Daniel Defoe, five years old and whisked away to the countryside to keep him safe during the Great Plague in London, relied on eyewitness accounts and meticulous research for his description of the devastating events. Defoe tells the tale of a city in a state of emergency, faced with hysteria, superstition, unemployment, looting and fraud.

In Camus' "The Plague," a doctor by the name of Bernard Rieux describes how first rats die of the plague, followed by thousands of citizens in the Algerian port city of Oran. Everyone takes a different approach to the fight against the Black Death, but in the end, it kills the innocent and the ruthless alike.

A mutant virus breaks out of a military research laboratory and kills almost the entire US population. Only few are immune, left to assert themselves in a depopulated world with a collapsed infrastructure. Two groups — basically the "good" and the "evil" — emerge, both headed by charismatic leaders.

The inhabitants of a nameless city go blind all of a sudden. To prevent the spread of a potential disease, they are housed in an empty psychiatric ward, and attended to by a doctor and his wife, played by Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore in the 2008 film of the same name (picture). The situation quickly escalates, but in the greatest chaos, some people regain their eyesight.

The novel is set in Newark, New Jersey in the summer of 1944 during a severe outbreak of polio. It recreates the terror, fear, poor information and feeling of powerlessness among the population faced by a paralytic disease that mainly affected children, crippling one child after the next. A vaccine wasn't available until 1955.