In ancient China, most regimes adopted the policy of attaching importance to agriculture and restraining commerce, which tied the people firmly to the land, and the bottom people could only make a living by harvesting for a few minutes. If the weather is fine, the whole family may be able to fill their stomachs. If there is drought, flood and locust plague, most people will not be able to eat. At that time, if there was enough food, they were rich households and could not expect to hoard surplus food at all. If there is no harvest, they can only beg and beg.
The film "1942" directed by Feng tells the story of the drought in Henan Province and the suffering of the people fleeing from it. Even the landlord has to sell his daughter, which makes people feel very uncomfortable. At that time, it was the Republic of China, and people were still so helpless in the face of natural disasters, let alone ancient society.
There is an old proverb? Will there be a great epidemic after the great disaster? This is the law summarized by the working people according to historical facts, because people have no food after large-scale natural disasters. In order to survive, they ignore dignity, decency and disgust. Everything they can eat is stuffed into their stomachs, and the grass roots and bark are dug out, so they eat rats and even people eat people.
In the famine years, rats have nothing to eat, so they can only eat human bodies. Rats are dirty, and they are the hosts of all kinds of viruses. They also feed on corpses and have more viruses on them. When they walk through people's living areas, they may infect people with viruses, not to mention people eating mice. If there is anything more disgusting, please make up for it yourself. In this way, it is strange that there is no plague.
At the end of the Ming Dynasty, a large-scale plague broke out. The reason was that there were no crops for four consecutive years, and the victims fled and ate mice. The plague broke out. Infected people will get pimples and vomit blood, and people who have a rapid onset will die within a few minutes.
The most terrible thing is that the plague spreads very fast. Often after a person gets sick, the whole family is infected, and the contacts are not immune. It is very appropriate to describe the situation at that time with ten rooms and nine vacant rooms. The plague soon spread to the capital, and the funeral procession crowded the city gate every day. The saddest thing is that the teams that bid farewell to their loved ones will have more infected people when they come back, and even accompany the deceased directly to rest in that cemetery.
The plague also spread to court officials and the garrison in Beijing, which made people panic, so some people attributed the demise of the Ming Dynasty to this large-scale plague.
Then, under the condition of limited material and technology, how did the ancients control the epidemic?
In fact, the way is similar to that now, mainly isolation, cutting off the route of transmission and reducing transmission.
It is mentioned in Hanshu that once an epidemic occurs among the people, the sick people will be separated from the healthy people, and the court will provide medicines to the sick people free of charge. In the Jin dynasty, the court also stipulated that if an official was infected with an epidemic disease at home, even if the official himself was not infected, he should stay at home for observation and not go to court.
However, ancient plagues generally originated from the people. If the infection of a village and a county is found to be a plague, the government will directly seal off the villages and counties, and only they can't get in. The government supplies rice porridge and herbs, and will also send doctors to see the epidemic and come up with countermeasures.
The bodies of people who died of the plague must be burned. At this time, we should ignore the concept of being buried in the grave. We should take care of the living first, control the plague, and even destroy the utensils used by the dead to prevent the spread of the virus. If the whole family dies, the house will burn down together and the village will burn down with torches.
If the situation is particularly serious, ten rooms are empty, and the risk of transmission is high, it is cruel to burn the village directly, even for the safety of more people.
Ancient villages are relatively far away, with inconvenient transportation, small mobility of people and relatively small probability of spreading out. If it is found early and well isolated, the plague can be controlled in one village and one town at most. After all, it is not common for the plague to sweep across the country like the end of the Ming Dynasty.
There was no specific medicine for plague in ancient times, but vaccines were produced for some common epidemics. For example, smallpox, which was often popular in the Qing Dynasty, can be cured today, but it was basically a fatal disease in ancient times. Emperor Kangxi was in good health and had smallpox when he was a child. Although he became pockmarked, he somehow saved his life and was elected as the heir to the throne because of his good health.
Kangxi was deeply hurt. During his administration, he ordered vaccination against human pox, which probably stopped the epidemic. 1796, Chen Na, England invented the human pox vaccine, which was introduced to China in 1805 to replace the human pox vaccine.
So is the current pneumonia epidemic. There is no specific medicine, we can only rely on our own immune resistance. We are unable to struggle in the front line, at least try to stay at home, which is our own contribution. I believe that the day of defeating the epidemic will come soon.