twenty days . . . ” —that’s Ebola-level timing. A congressional act followed, but soon enough, when cholera no longer threatened from overseas, the quarantine order was lifted, never again to be used by an American president.
Opponents of quarantines against Ebola in 2014 believed that a visa-based travel ban on people from West Africa had racial overtones. We’ve heard that objection before. In 1892, when New York was faced with both cholera and an influx of Eastern European Jews, a prominent government official complained to the New York Times that “Europe is showing no anxiety to keep cholera away from us. Why should the United States accept her miserable paupers anyhow? In my opinion the President [should] ask Congress to absolutely prohibit immigration for the present.” Some advocates of travel bans today may indeed be objecting to West Africans coming into our country, whatever the circumstances. I’d simply view these bans as mistaken versions of the cordons sanitaires that effectively stopped epidemics of cholera in the nineteenth century. We’re not talking about thirty-foot walls!
THE CHAMPION OF THE cordon sanitaire was Dr. Adrien Proust (1834–1903), father of Marcel Proust. Six pandemics of Asiatic cholera ravaged Europe and spread to the United States in the nineteenth century. The disease, which originated in Bengal, reached the West by land and sea; its greatest damage was wrought at times of civil or imperial war. In France, cholera reached epidemic proportions during periods of political strife in 1830–1845 and during the German siege of Paris in 1870. In 1866, Adrien Proust, clinic chief at the Hôpital de la Charité represented France at an international sanitary conference at Constantinople. Proust, who held the official title of Inspecteur Général des Sanitaires Internationaux, persuaded both European and Ottoman officials to agree that the disease was carried by contaminated water: “Water would seem, according to the observations made principally in England by Dr Snow . . . to contribute, in certain circumstances, to the development of cholera in a locality.” To map the itineraries of earlier epidemics, Proust trekked to Persia, Mecca, Turkey, and Egypt. Since he was able to trace the origin of each Parisian epidemic to the Middle East, Proust pleaded repeatedly that vessels with disease on board be prevented from traversing the newly dug Suez Canal. Egypt was the key! In La defense de l’Europe contre le choléra he declared, “We must absolutely close the Suez Canal, to all vessels, of whatever nationality, with cholera on board or with recent exposure.” Not surprisingly, Ferdinand de Lesseps, president of the Suez Canal Company, objected strongly. (Does the airline industry today oppose a flight ban?) At the Academy of Sciences, de Lesseps opposed strict cordons as “futile and inconsistent with current enlightened opinion, which now held that emanations from local miasma” were responsible for contagious spread of disease (the story is told in LaVerne Kuhnke’s Lives at Risk).. De Lesseps and Company won out, and sure enough, the fifth cholera pandemic of 1884 arrived in France carried on ships that passed through the canal. Eventually, cordons sanitaires were set up as a second line of defense around Toulon and Marseilles to prevent spread of cholera to the rest of France. Cordons around Marseilles were so troublesome that the English gentry transferred their winter watering holes to the French Riviera: Cannes, Nice, and Villefranche became the holiday paradises of the next century.
The state-enforced cordons sanitaires saved Toulon and Marseilles from outbreaks of cholera. How about today? A cordon sanitaire had, by the fall of 2014, effectively prevented Ebola from crossing the borders of a score of African nations, while British Airways and Air France had curtailed flights. Senegal had closed its borders and suspended air flights, and Nigeria’s airline canceled flights after eleven cases of Ebola were tracked to an American passenger from Liberia. Sure enough: as of October 23, 2014, WHO had already declared these two countries free of Ebola. Meanwhile, in Dallas, Mr. Duncan’s family was free of Ebola after twenty-one days of enforced quarantine, and the two nurses he infected were convalescing after treatment in the most modern isolation units. That’s the sort of good news a cordon sanitaire can bring.
THERE’S ALSO GOOD NEWS FROM THE LAB. Basic science works: dynamin, a mechano-chemical enzyme responsible for shuttling cargo in cells (Ahearn et al.), was discovered in 1989 by Howard Shpetner and Richard Vallee, then at the Worcester Foundation (now part of the University of Massachusetts). It turned out that dynamin can choreograph the pathway of viruses in cells. Dynamin not only hobbles the sticking of the virus to the cell’s surface, but also promotes uptake of virus-filled vesicles from cell membranes. Dynamin opens the door to Ebola virus, as described in Aleksandrowicz et al., and helps unload the backpacks. Happily, we’ve moved closer from the lab to the clinic: in animal experiments, dynamin inhibitors such as dynasore already have been seen to stop the virus (Macia et al.). Better yet, the newest dynamin inhibitors (the bisphosphonates used to prevent osteoporosis) can already be found on many a woman’s medicine shelf.
Has the time come to use osteoporosis drugs for Ebola? To quote Mary McCarthy’s Pokey, “Who would have thunk it?”
Zika, Kale, and Calligraphy: Ricky Jay and Matthias Buchinger
Phocomelia (from Gr. phōkē ‘seal’ + melos ‘limb.’) = limbs reduced to a very small volume and hidden under the integument like seals’.
—Isidore Geoffroy Sainte-Hilaire (1836)
Dr. Schuler-Faccini [is] now focused on [describing] the specific brain abnormalities of [Zika-]affected babies, as well as other associated defects, including neurological outcomes, joint abnormalities, and face characteristics.
—Teratology Society (June 2016)
FETAL ABNORMALITIES CAUSED by the mosquito-borne Zika virus first came to public attention in January 2016, the same month that many of us learned of a “29-inch-tall phocomelic overachiever” named Matthias Buchinger (1674–1739). For this we can thank Ricky Jay, a popular magician of our day who found his avatar in decades of “Peregrinations in Search of the ‘Little Man of Nuremberg.’” Ricky Jay paid a fitting tribute to his hero in an exhibit of his collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which accompanied a richly illustrated, companion volume. Jay has assembled a cabinet of graphic curiosities by and about this phocomelic overachiever, replete with portraits, broadsides, family trees, and coats of arms. Several advertise the Buchinger feats of skill at magic, musketry, skittles, and musical performance; most bear the telltale signature, “Matthias Buchinger born without hands or feet.” Jay has the credentials to make Buchinger matter: Charles McGrath wrote in the New York Times that many consider Jay the “greatest sleight-of-hand artist alive, as well as a scholar, a historian, a collector of curiosities.”
JAY HAS WRITTEN ABOUT BUCHINGER BEFORE, as one in a gallery of curious historical characters. In his 2016 volume Jay addresses Buchinger’s mastery of micrography—the art of writing texts almost invisible to the naked eye—and explains how he accumulated a treasury of calligraphy by this tiny conjurer who had “two excrescences growing from the shoulder-blades, more resembling the fins of a fish than arms of a man.” A connoisseur’s passion convinced Jay that there was always more Buchinger material to be collected. His quest led him to dealers, print experts, and fans of micrography on both sides of the Atlantic. At one auction, Jay and Nicolas Barker of the British Museum competed for a grand collection but, because of its cost, were forced to divide the material. Jay tells us, “This proved surprisingly easy, as I took all the materials of armless calligraphers and Nicolas received the work of calligraphers conventionally digited.”
Enlarged images in Jay’s book show how Buchinger cunningly wove miniature texts into the crannies of calendars, portraits, and coats of arms. Two high-resolution images are exemplary. In Buchinger’s posthumous portrait of Queen
