Abstract
We had a routine. Every night when I awakened Lenny for his 4 a.m. AZT, I would shake his left shoulder and quickly jump back from his bed. He always woke up swinging while assuming the shooting position. Then he would ask, “Did I get you?” Lenny served as a marine in Vietnam during the early 1970s. He was not so sure if his platoon was in Cambodia fighting, but he was positive that he acquired his powerful addiction to heroin during those countless nights of deafening gunfire, unbearable levels of humidity accompanied by relentless insects, and a palpable hunger to survive. The heroin enabled him to survive by deadening the shock of this reality.
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Notes
See Robert S. Gottfried, The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe (New York: The Free Press, 1983), pp. 130–133. He discusses these plague recurrences throughout Europe after the mid-fourteenth century one.
John Lydgate, “A Dietary, and a Doctrine for Pestilence,” in The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken, The Early English Text Society (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), lines 2, 5, 8, 16, and 24. I translate all lines from this poem into modern English.
See Philippa Tristam, Figures of Life and Death in Medieval English Literature (New York: New York University Press, 1976), plate 25.
See Carol Rawcliffe, Medicine and Society in Later Medieval England (London: Sutton Publishing Limited, 1995), plate 15.
Raymond Crawfurd, Plague and Pestilence in Literature and Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914), pp. 157–158.
Barbara Howard Traister, The Notorious Astrological Physician of London: Works and Days of Simon Forman (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 44–47.
A. Lloyd Moote and Dorothy C. Moote, The Great Plague: The Story of London’s Most Deadly Year (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), p. 19.
Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A Selection, ed. Robert Lantham (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1985).
John Dryden “Annus Mirabilis, The Year of Wonders, 1666,” in Selected Poetry and Prose of John Dryden, ed. Earl Miner (New York: The Modern Library, 1969).
Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, ed. Cynthia Wall (London and New York: Penguin Books, 2003).
See Graham Twigg, The Black Death: A Biological Reappraisal (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), p. 117.
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© 2012 Gina M. Bright
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Bright, G.M. (2012). Fifteenth- through Seventeenth-Century Europe. In: Plague-Making and the AIDS Epidemic: A Story of Discrimination. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137011220_4
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