World

Will health trump freedom in our post-coronavirus world?

15 August 2020

4:45 PM

15 August 2020

4:45 PM

Bernard Henri Levy’s latest book, The Virus in the Age of Madness, contains a striking quote from Rudolf Virchow, the 19thcentury father of pathological anatomy: ‘An epidemic is a social phenomenon that has some medical aspects’. He was right. Catastrophes are society’s great illuminators. From Pompeii to coronavirus, the governing axiom is clear: if you want to discover the essence of something, stress test it.

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