Human Response to Plague: a Literary and Sociologic Perspective

Abstract

As COVID-19 pandemic, other plagues struck people in the past, provoking potentially dangerous social reactions in mankind. Luckily, these reactions are quite constant, even in different eras and cultures, and famous novelists accurately reported them in their books. Starting from the meticulous description of people reactions reported in Manzoni's novel "The Betrothed", this article analyzes what we could learn about human response to plagues reading the great classical books, to plan a correct disaster response to infectious diseases.