In October of 2020, amidst mounting resistance to public health measures, I read Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). In this description of London’s 1665-66 epidemic, a familiar experience unfolded. Quarantines were greeted with resistance. “Quacks and Mountebanks” peddled “pills, potions, and preservatives,” and people died by the score, sometimes poisoned by purported remedies. For survivors, Defoe said it could “bring us to see with differing eyes than those which we looked on things with before.”