By JAMES ASHER, D.O.
(Editor’s Note: Dr. Asher holds a 1973 degree from University of Osteopathic Medicine and Health Sciences in Des Moines, followed by University of Nebraska Medical Center residency. He has served at the Carl T. Hayden Veterans Administration Medical Center in Phoenix and the Phoenix Indian Medical Center. He is retired but works with the Mission of Mercy here, which serves low-income people. He is married to Rosie, with seven grown children, and teaches catechism to grade-school youngsters.)
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Awash as our culture is in antibiotics, and as germ-free and disease free as we are, death or the threat of it almost seems foreign to our experience. If I or any of my family gets sick, we’ll merely go to some health-care facility — almost any health-care facility — and be given the cure. Of course there will be a cure. Surely if one thinks he has the coronavirus — an unexplained cough, sniffle, or sneeze — we’ll just go to the doctor like we always do and get what we need, including massive antibiotics like we always do.
Well, maybe not. There is no cure other than the body’s own immune system — and our own devices, including prayer. Antibiotic use could be harmful in getting rid of what may be protective bacteria.
Panic is not useful in coronavirus. For instance imagining you can’t breathe when you’re complaining about it non-stop in full paragraphs. Emergency departments are full of sick people — stay away unless the benefit outweighs the significant risks. Be suspect of crowds, especially confined in small spaces like an auditorium or an airplane. Masks are unlikely to do much good unless you’re a health-care giver.
One ponders Yersinia pestis — a bacteria now stopped with antibiotics, being brought by fleas riding on rats, in a day when everyone had to deal with fleas and rats. And death. Y. pestis or something like it caused the Black Plague in fourteenth-century Europe and Asia, killing some 100 million people worldwide back when the world population was estimated at only 475 million. It may not have been the rats or fleas or even the bacteria, but it surely wasn’t the “miasma” as was originally thought by the doctors.
“Bring out your dead,” one would hear from the shouting attendants of the corpse wagons as they gruesomely rumbled down the streets daily. One could be tempted to wonder, where was God? Surely then, there were prayers, and processions, and expositions, and every kind of offering and pious promise being made in solidly Catholic Europe. Well, at least with coronavirus we aren’t anywhere close to the Black Plague.
On the other hand, we’re only a few generations away from a time when many families buried one or more of their children. Antibiotics, which we’ve had only since the 1930s, have delayed huge numbers of funerals for many years. And here we are now, with a fabulous infrastructure against contagious and other diseases, instantaneous worldwide communications, and medical care that can overcome a vast array of maladies. And if we need anything else, we’ll just throw billions of dollars at it…and get it “poof.”
But it’s noteworthy that we don’t see so much of God in all the coronavirus goings-on. Governments are all tending toward atheism, in fact working mightily to eliminate the influence of religion. So…are we better off with improved science and no faith like today, or increased faith and no science like, perhaps in the fourteenth century?
Doctors don’t watch the ravages of disease as hopelessly as they once did, but hopeless disease still happens. Death eventually wins. Then what? Modern-day people, immersed in a Godless culture, tend to react with shock, disbelief, and unbridled grieving. How could it be that they have a terminal illness or that a loved one has died? Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance — has it always been like this?
One could wonder if there was such shock, disbelief, and grief in the fourteenth century. Or rather, was there more of a quiet and relatively peaceful resignation like Job’s, that the Lord had given, the Lord had taken away, and blessed be the name of the Lord — His will be done.
We all, then and now, are in God’s hands. None of what swirls around us — plague, or otherwise — happens without His keen awareness. If we do not survive whatever it is, He is there with welcoming arms. May we attain the spiritual maturity of our ancestors, contented with the life we’ve had and with a happy accommodation of our sooner or later mortality.
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