When the plague hit Marseille in 1720, officials began a misinformation campaign—even hiring doctors to claim it was only a fever.

The Morning News https://ift.tt/3bYn8Yz

Then, as now, people viewed diseases as coming from faraway lands, from “them,” not “us.” By the 1700s, the plague was sometimes even referred to as “la peste Levantina” or the Levantine plague, referring to the region of the world occupied by present-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, and much of Turkey.

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