Tag: David Lean

Education: Disease, History and Lit

The Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio lived through the plague as it ravaged the city of Florence in 1348. The experience inspired him to write The Decameron.

The Plague of 1665 in England was a major upheaval affecting Isaac Newton’s life.

The 1984 movie, A Passage to India (David Lean) set in 1920s India, has a scene where the ever-present lethal threat of cholera is discussed as Doctor Aziz lies sick of a fever.

The W. Somerset Maugham novel, The Painted Veil (2006 movie) is also about cholera in the Chinese countryside in the 1920s.

Manzoni’s 1827 The Betrothed, the most famous classic novel of Italian literature, centers on the plague to drive the story.

Overview:

Etymologically, the term “pest” derives from the Latin word “pestis” (pest, plague, curse). Hardly any disease had such cultural and historical relevance as the bubonic plague. Throughout the centuries, the plague was the most terrifying infectious contagious disease which generated a series of demographic crises. The plague epidemics influenced the evolution of society biologically and culturally speaking. The Black Death was one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, is estimated to have killed 30%–60% of Europe’s population, reducing the world’s population from an estimated 450 million to between 350 and 375 million in 1400. This has been seen as having created a series of religious, social and economic upheavals, which had profound effects on the course of European history. It took 150 years for Europe’s population to recover.

The plague returned at various times, killing more people, until it left Europe in the 19th century. Modern epidemiology (Dr. John Snow, London) has its roots in cholera management and water sanitation as well as waste management.

Education involves seeing disease as a major protagonist in all history and not as a footnote.

The classic Plagues and Peoples should accordingly be studied by every student: Plagues and Peoples is a book on epidemiological history by William Hardy McNeill, published in 1976.

It was a critical and popular success, offering a radically new interpretation of the extraordinary impact of infectious disease on cultures and world history itself.

Education and the Skill of Focusing

There are various names and places that float around our minds because of their mention in movies, comic books, cartoons, skits, and innumerable other mass media “contacts” with these “famous” persons and locales out there in ill-defined “media land” and hence our imaginations. Let’s use Cardinal Richelieu (died 1642) as an example and see what it would mean to go from inchoate and amorphous to “under control” somehow.

There are innumerable movies featuring Richelieu, including made-up movie titles such as The Loves of Cardinal Richelieu mentioned in the British classic movie from 1945, Brief Encounter by David Lean and Noël Coward.

The romantic pair, Laura and Alec discuss two movies to choose between, The Loves of Cardinal Richelieu and Love in the Mist, both fictional. The movie is set in 1938 and the former fictional title is based on the real movie Cardinal Richelieu from 1935.

One can of course read up on Richelieu in reference books, encyclopedia, Wikipedia and so on. The problem there is that the entry is a welter of facts and dates and kings and places so that you can’t really get a “handle” or achieve focus and come away with an intricate set of fragmentary facts which then “evaporate” from the mind as the days and weeks go by.

Here’s an alternative characterization of Richelieu that gives you a real “flashlight” of comprehension:

“The three principal ministers (Richelieu was one of them) divided among themselves the presentation of the reform program to the assembly, Richelieu significantly reserved for himself the theme of financial reform.

As he observed in his Testament Politique, finance was like the fulcrum of Archimedes, which, once established, could move the world.”

(Richelieu and Olivares, J.H. Elliott, Cambridge University Press, 1991, page 80)

Richelieu was a statesman who, like others of his time, was instrumental in the centralization of national power and saw modernized public and royal finances (taxes, spending, budgets) as the key to stable nation-building. We now call this way of management, “the fiscal stance.”

Thus Richelieu was a significant force in fusing fiscal reforms to centralized national French power looking both inward and outward. Thus, all the colorful real and imagined movie depictions are covering up his basic impetus: money and the French state.

Every student should be on the lookout for ways to bring names and places into focus and not “swim forever” in movie images.

Go back to the movie Brief Encounter for a moment. On her first trip to Milford after meeting Dr. Harvey, Laura (the female protagonist) walks past a bookstore window. On display are a range of books published in 1944 and 1945, including Something in My Heart by Walter Greenwood, A Showman Goes East by Carroll Levis, The End of the Mildew Gang by S. Fowler Wright, Capri Moon by Kelman Dalgety Frost, Winter’s Tales by Karen Blixen, Triple Mirror by Kathleen Wallace, Once a Jolly Swagman by Montagu Slater, and Grand Barrage by Gun Buster (a.k.a. John Charles Austin). The only one of these works that survives today is Winter’s Tales by Karen Blixen (born Karen Dinesen; pen name Isak Dinesen) whose works are still very current such as the famous movies Out of Africa and Babette’s Feast.

Again, the educational point is to develop the “focusing skill” and the ability to extract some “signals from all the noise.”