Y'all gonna pretend that while COVID-19 had us all hiding at home, a bunch of y'all didn't learn to knit, play guitar, bake bread, and all sorts of other things to pass the time and not think about the apocalypse going on outside?
Shit, Bo Burnham made a god damned masterpiece during lockdown.
Just because the largest outbreak was bot during newton's lifetime, many smaller ones were. The biggest would be the great pest from 1708 to 1714 with more than a million deaths.
Considering how casually we took covid after just a year or two, if it had been going on for the past 300 years, I don't think it would stop a guy from playing around with pieces of glass :D
For a brilliant historical fiction account of life and science during that period, read Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, The System of the World) for a brilliant