[Artemisia] A New Discussion - SCA Skills in a Modern Plague

[Mary Hodges]

Greetings.

We would need you.  Geometry and trigonometry are basic tools for things like gravity fed plumbing and irrigation.  

Here's a good non-fiction book recommendation:  
The Great Influenza: The story of the deadliest pandemic in history, By John M. Barry.  

If this book doesn't scare you, nothing ever will. 

OTOH, I think that some of us are more alarmist than we might need to be-governments functioned just fine over vast areas with communication by messenger on foot or on horseback. In the nineteenth century, European countries built huge empires with sailing ships, cannons, and really primitive fire arms.  Trust me, if there is a doomsday scenario that you can imagine, the fine folks in the military have imagined it, too, gamed it to the max, and then made a plan.  It is true that things would be nasty for a while, in cities especially, but martial law works really well when there are large numbers of trained, well-armed troops around, all of whom get vaccinated first for every thing you can think of, which was the lesson learned in the 1918 flu epidemic.

A plague would be terrible, but would probably engender a period more like the late nineteenth century than the middle ages, at least in this country.  Here in BOTE, even if we had 50% mortality, more than a 10 or 20 % of the survivors would be skilled trades, engineers, scientists.  So unless you simultaneously had a plague and somehow eradicated all the books in all the local libraries and in all of the households, there would be people around who are used to figuring things out and solving problems.

However, knowing how to make your own clothes and grow your own food could only be a plus.  Knowing how to feed and handle livestock could be the difference between walking and riding, or being the seller of wool and meat opposed to the buyer of wool and meat.  

One more thing to think about-lack of transported goods could mean lack of birth control-do you know how to make cloth diapers?  :)

shutting up now,
Jehane