By

March 20, 2020

LONDON — There are times when the planet resets its course with a cruelty that seems as capricious as it is implacable. The coronavirus pandemic, spreading octopus tentacles into every crevice of society, is one of them, pitting the vanity of human assumptions against nature’s almost casual ability to destroy them. It is not the first time.

Calamities and the mass destruction of populations and lives stretch back to biblical times and on through the days of plague in medieval Europe. Wars, too, have brought a Darwinian pruning of entire societies. Technological advance, from siege engines to long bows, from gas chambers to weapons of mass destruction, has magnified the process, culminating in the Cold War’s calculations of mutually assured destruction.

But, as these photographs show — and as the pre-photographic chronicles of history, faith and mythology confirm — the Earth and its people have long been prey to the invisible pathogens that bring their victims low with equal efficiency.

In the annals of conflict, dating to the Plague of Athens from 430 to 426 BC during the Peloponnesian War, disease molded national fates as much as — sometimes more than — competing armies.