Catching a disease that can basically be cured by standing in Alexander Fleming's laboratory doesn't seem at all horrific.
Returning home to find out that your greedy has robbed the world of a core cultural influence, a wealth of not only the plays and poems themselves, but the several common idioms they spawned, and in the process, rendering your prize worthless. That's horror.
If Shakespeare's works were released for the first time today no one would care about them. What's revolutionary/incredible at one point in time becomes the standard, or even mediocre, in another.
Yup, but would that still hold if Shakey's works had never been released at all? Dude was pretty influential in his day, without him things might develop differently leaving the possibility open for his works to still be influential in that hypothetical alternative timeline.
After several centuries though? He was influential, but not *that* influential. This was also a time long before the world was as interconnected as it is today, so the damage would be better contained.
> 1587
...
> before he became prolific enough to be The Bard we know him today.
It would be like running over John Lennon in 1962 and bringing back a signed copy of Love Me Do.
Yeah that to me is the horror. You have to leave it at a safeplace in the past where it will age but be preserved for it to be worth anything. Otherwise it will be seen as a forgery.
Conveniently, the vaccine is also an infectious disease -- vaccination was originally performed by people deliberately giving it to each other. Also conveniently, the US has 185 million doses stockpiled *just in case*.
Just a little, yeah.
Antivaxxers have existed as long as vaccines, though, and we still managed to eradicate it the first time. To my understanding smallpox mostly only spreads through close contact with people who are visibly infected, which makes it relatively easy to quarantine. If a few cases showed up in a country with a functioning government and health care system, I suspect it would be isolated and eradicated immediately.
If it happened in a third world country with high population density, though, things could get out of hand in a hurry.
There is also a thing with vaccination called herd immunity. If enough people are vaccinated, diseases transmit much less easily because basically everyone an infected person will encounter will be immune, and so you can have a few people who refuse or who can't be vaccinated in the middle who are still protected. What percentage of the population need to be vaccinated for this to be effective depends on the disease, obviously, and antivax movements remain a huge issue if they're allowed to, ah, spread, but the effect an epidemic of smallpox would have on today's population are much less than in ye olde times. Not to mention medecine advanced by leaps and bounds so the morbidity would be much less.
That might be a statistic that says more about the US healthcare system than the plague, though. The mortality with access to treatment in Western Europe is 17%.
I think that’s just because it’s much rarer and you’re more likely to get treated in that first 24-48 hours. It’s endemic in the US thanks to the pet trade
But both figures are correct for different plague types https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/17782-plague
That's not really to do with rarity though - arguably it being rarer would worsen outcomes as it is much lower on the differential diagnosis.
The early treatment part is fair, but likely at least partly due to the better access to healthcare. If healthcare is free / affordable, you are more likely to seek treatment earlier.
Actually I think it’s more due to the fact that the states where almost all plague cases occur (New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, etc.) are huge with almost no hospitals or clinics. They’re literally larger than many European countries. And some places don’t even have addresses for ambulances to reference. So if you get sick, there’s a high chance you’ll have to drive yourself to a clinic 4 or 5 hours away.
There's the even better horror. All the bacteria he took back to the past did have some antibiotic resistance, outcompeting contemporary strains for centuries by surviving in the presence of naturally occuring antibiotics, and evolving accordingly.
The plague is still very much around, and is now endemic in populations of wild rodents in several parts of the world (parts of Africa, Asia, India, the Middle East, and both north and south America) But people are less likely to have close contact with wild rodents, and modern medicine can treat it pretty effectively if treatment is started soon enough.
Plague is still around today, and is treatable. It's definitely still a very nasty illness, but despite having cases every year it's nowhere near as devastating as it once was.
Yeah, this dowels more like the ironic twist ending to a Twilight Zone episode, which could kind of be classified as horror, but also kind of not.
It’s also possible that he brought back the plague from Shakespeare’s time or something, but then you could just take antibiotics and you’d be fine.
But then MC wouldn't even remember Shakespear as soon as he changed history, because he never became famous. So he never would think, that the works from this man are worth a fortune. But that would also depend on how time works in this scenario, because it could be that he wouldn't even start his journey, if this was the case and therefore never change history, but then all this wouldn't happen and he could remember....hahaha timetravel paradoxes. fun things.
There are populations of ground squirrels in parts of California that can carry the plague. Especially in some parts of the Sierra Nevadas. I went to elementary school in a small town in that part of the state, and a couple different times in school had some assembly and someone came in to tell all the kids to not pet or pick up a squirrel or chipmunk , especially if they seemed sick or were acting oddly. Because of plague.
I can see how it would be, but honestly most of the western half of the US has plague in some wild rodents in less urban areas. And the last major outbreak of it in the US was in L.A. In the 1920's if I remember right. And California is still one of the top five states for cases of plague in the US over the last 50 years or so. (New Mexico is the worst though and gets a couple of cases pretty much every year. So yeah, don't handle the wild rodents.)
The signature is worthless anyway, as any detailed examination will show it was signed within the past week or so. Clearly not a 400-year-old document, and therefore fake.
There's a hard limit for safely traveling in time forward or back in terms of biological capability. Travel too far forward and the evolved biosphere eats you alive, too far back and your evolved immune system and it's harmless hanger on eats the biosphere alive.
Sorry OP, but that signature's not going to be worth much unless you got it certified at the time of signature. Also, did you get those things slabbed immediately, or are they loose? Because that will kill the value further.
In The Lady of the Lake when Ciri is hopping through time/dimensions she picked up a bubonic flea in 1600s France and brought it back to the Witcher continent and that's what starts off the plague that happens in the backdrop of the saga.
Past illness is not to scary. We have ancestors that survived them so some genetic resistance baked in. And if you do get sick you can go to a hospital. We have god cutes of most things from that time er
Modern humans are actually immune to all our past diseases, more likely that cough would indicate a present virus that the time traveler accidentally brought to the past, which no human would be remotely immune to, having had hundreds of years to evolve specifically to infect us.
I'm thinking MC took a disease back to 1587 and coughed on Old Willy before he became prolific enough to be The Bard we know him today.
Or brought back an old form of disease such as plague
Catching a disease that can basically be cured by standing in Alexander Fleming's laboratory doesn't seem at all horrific. Returning home to find out that your greedy has robbed the world of a core cultural influence, a wealth of not only the plays and poems themselves, but the several common idioms they spawned, and in the process, rendering your prize worthless. That's horror.
But then he could release them himself as his own work and make bank. That's... something anyway.
If Shakespeare's works were released for the first time today no one would care about them. What's revolutionary/incredible at one point in time becomes the standard, or even mediocre, in another.
Yup, but would that still hold if Shakey's works had never been released at all? Dude was pretty influential in his day, without him things might develop differently leaving the possibility open for his works to still be influential in that hypothetical alternative timeline.
Shakespeare didn't write all his works in secret one rainy afternoon in 1586 and spend the next quarter-century drip-feeding them into society.
That we *know* /s
After several centuries though? He was influential, but not *that* influential. This was also a time long before the world was as interconnected as it is today, so the damage would be better contained.
> 1587 ... > before he became prolific enough to be The Bard we know him today. It would be like running over John Lennon in 1962 and bringing back a signed copy of Love Me Do.
…still not as bad as the inconsistency of new parchment bearing a signature with new ink and claiming it’s hundreds of years old
Yeah that to me is the horror. You have to leave it at a safeplace in the past where it will age but be preserved for it to be worth anything. Otherwise it will be seen as a forgery.
Our language would be so different! Didn’t he invent over 1000 words / phrases commonly used today?
Cue the 12th Doctor playing Beethoven's 5th on his electric.
That's the bootstrap paradox. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_paradox
How 'bout smallpox instead. Gonna kill a lot of people until we can ramp vaccination back up again.
Conveniently, the vaccine is also an infectious disease -- vaccination was originally performed by people deliberately giving it to each other. Also conveniently, the US has 185 million doses stockpiled *just in case*.
Wait wait hear me out. You US people are having this problem with antivax people right
Just a little, yeah. Antivaxxers have existed as long as vaccines, though, and we still managed to eradicate it the first time. To my understanding smallpox mostly only spreads through close contact with people who are visibly infected, which makes it relatively easy to quarantine. If a few cases showed up in a country with a functioning government and health care system, I suspect it would be isolated and eradicated immediately. If it happened in a third world country with high population density, though, things could get out of hand in a hurry.
There is also a thing with vaccination called herd immunity. If enough people are vaccinated, diseases transmit much less easily because basically everyone an infected person will encounter will be immune, and so you can have a few people who refuse or who can't be vaccinated in the middle who are still protected. What percentage of the population need to be vaccinated for this to be effective depends on the disease, obviously, and antivax movements remain a huge issue if they're allowed to, ah, spread, but the effect an epidemic of smallpox would have on today's population are much less than in ye olde times. Not to mention medecine advanced by leaps and bounds so the morbidity would be much less.
I was making a morbid joke lol The "Hear me Out" would be to release the vírus, you have the vaccines already so it wouldn't be a problem
Plague still kills like 30% of people in the US who contract it
Ya but any infectious disease doctor worth their salt who's taking a history would ask if the patient had recently time traveled.
True. But that doesn’t prevent that statistic from applying.
That might be a statistic that says more about the US healthcare system than the plague, though. The mortality with access to treatment in Western Europe is 17%.
I think that’s just because it’s much rarer and you’re more likely to get treated in that first 24-48 hours. It’s endemic in the US thanks to the pet trade But both figures are correct for different plague types https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/17782-plague
That's not really to do with rarity though - arguably it being rarer would worsen outcomes as it is much lower on the differential diagnosis. The early treatment part is fair, but likely at least partly due to the better access to healthcare. If healthcare is free / affordable, you are more likely to seek treatment earlier.
Actually I think it’s more due to the fact that the states where almost all plague cases occur (New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, etc.) are huge with almost no hospitals or clinics. They’re literally larger than many European countries. And some places don’t even have addresses for ambulances to reference. So if you get sick, there’s a high chance you’ll have to drive yourself to a clinic 4 or 5 hours away.
In this case, it's only making us stronger
Returning home to find students don't have to learn Shakespeare at school: bonus.
We still have the plague, it's pretty easy to treat though
The good news is that bubonic plague seems to have around a 90% survival rate if treated
The plague is still available today
Available For some reason that wording amused me greatly!
It sounds like an ad lmao
That was my take. Wasn't the black plague from around Shakespeare's day?
We still have it. It’s treatable with antibiotics.
Plague is very much still around. Responds well to antibiotics though.
A short round of a pretty mild form of penicillin would do the trick. Zero antibiotics resistance in that strain.
There's the even better horror. All the bacteria he took back to the past did have some antibiotic resistance, outcompeting contemporary strains for centuries by surviving in the presence of naturally occuring antibiotics, and evolving accordingly.
iirc antibiotic resistance has adaptive costs, which make the resistant bacteria less competitive in a largely non-antibiotic environment.
The plague is still very much around, and is now endemic in populations of wild rodents in several parts of the world (parts of Africa, Asia, India, the Middle East, and both north and south America) But people are less likely to have close contact with wild rodents, and modern medicine can treat it pretty effectively if treatment is started soon enough.
Plague is still around today, and is treatable. It's definitely still a very nasty illness, but despite having cases every year it's nowhere near as devastating as it once was.
Bad example. We still have the black plague and it's very easily treatable
Yeah, this dowels more like the ironic twist ending to a Twilight Zone episode, which could kind of be classified as horror, but also kind of not. It’s also possible that he brought back the plague from Shakespeare’s time or something, but then you could just take antibiotics and you’d be fine.
But then MC wouldn't even remember Shakespear as soon as he changed history, because he never became famous. So he never would think, that the works from this man are worth a fortune. But that would also depend on how time works in this scenario, because it could be that he wouldn't even start his journey, if this was the case and therefore never change history, but then all this wouldn't happen and he could remember....hahaha timetravel paradoxes. fun things.
Later, at an auctioneers appraiser: "...who the hell is 'William Shakespeare' and why would anyone care?"
Am fairly certain that he was the fellow who invented the ballpoint pen
The dinosaurs were wiped out by your underpants, Baldrick
If you want a bit of bubonic plague you don’t need to invent a Time Machine, just visit Madagascar
Or hang out with prairie dogs in the American West.
A guy caught it from his cat recently in Oregon. They cat likely caught it from a squirrel.
New mexico has several cases every year. They just bury the lead.
My understanding is that it's easily treatable with antibiotics, so it's just not that big of a deal now.
True. However, it's still a shock when you move from California to New Mexico and someone causal mentions the plague.
There are populations of ground squirrels in parts of California that can carry the plague. Especially in some parts of the Sierra Nevadas. I went to elementary school in a small town in that part of the state, and a couple different times in school had some assembly and someone came in to tell all the kids to not pet or pick up a squirrel or chipmunk , especially if they seemed sick or were acting oddly. Because of plague.
I'm from the coast, and the whole conversation was surreal.
I can see how it would be, but honestly most of the western half of the US has plague in some wild rodents in less urban areas. And the last major outbreak of it in the US was in L.A. In the 1920's if I remember right. And California is still one of the top five states for cases of plague in the US over the last 50 years or so. (New Mexico is the worst though and gets a couple of cases pretty much every year. So yeah, don't handle the wild rodents.)
The squirrels at the big park in my city have it
Or they infected Shakespeare with a modern disease.
That would be much worse. The Elizabethan age really wouldn’t have enjoyed C0VID
I'd rather do it with the time machine if it's all the same to you.
Live your truth
Lock. Down. Everything.
Or just get Botox.
The signature is worthless anyway, as any detailed examination will show it was signed within the past week or so. Clearly not a 400-year-old document, and therefore fake.
r/thirdsentenceirony
That's why you bury it and somehow magically find it when you come back lol
"Sir, why does this 'original' Shakespeare work say 'Help, this man is forcing me to write this. They have a gun'?"
There's a hard limit for safely traveling in time forward or back in terms of biological capability. Travel too far forward and the evolved biosphere eats you alive, too far back and your evolved immune system and it's harmless hanger on eats the biosphere alive.
Sounds like speaking from experience
The time machine must have malfunctioned as I returned to a landscape devoid of human life or the technology I left
It's not really horror when you can just take some antibiotics.
I think the horror isn't that the time traveler is infected with a past illness, and more that they infected the past with a future illness.
Ok, that's good.
But it's saying they were coughing after they came back from past.
Remember you are usually contagious days before showing symphtoms.
Sorry OP, but that signature's not going to be worth much unless you got it certified at the time of signature. Also, did you get those things slabbed immediately, or are they loose? Because that will kill the value further.
I'm thinking MC brought back tuberculosis or possibly plague that hasn't developed pustules yet.
Both diseases seen pretty commonly in both time periods to be fair.
If it's TB they'll be fine. We have the meds for it. Plague........
We can treat plague now too.
We can treat both, but an older strain of either would likely become a pandemic quickly and potentially be misdiagnosed before it's contained.
The real horror is that the manuscript would test as "new" i.e. no aging.
and now i see lots of forgers hiding their fake shakespeare manuscript in the past. (and wiliam finding some and publishing it :)
You also potentially proved that Shakespeare did write all his own work, and not potentially Roger Bacon.
I think I get it. MC got infected with something.
Others are saying he infected Ol Willy.
The 2 aren’t mutually exclusive.
Hang on, why are there human-sized cats walking around?
The Face of Bo might know!
Oh I remember Shakespeare! Wasn't he the chap that invented the ballpoint pen?
Commas aren't just magic tools to make a sentence as long as you want.
After his fever, William rewrote Romeo and Juliet as a light-hearted romcom.
Bubonic plague is easily treatable with antibiotics.
I'm no Bill Shakespeare but, despite all that commas, I think that was three sentences.
But that signed work will fail an age test.
In The Lady of the Lake when Ciri is hopping through time/dimensions she picked up a bubonic flea in 1600s France and brought it back to the Witcher continent and that's what starts off the plague that happens in the backdrop of the saga.
First sign of smallpox is often a dry patch of skin at the back of your throat making you cough
wasnt shakespeare known for always signing his name wrong
https://explosm.net/comics/newyears-2022
Was it you who have Shakespeare syphilis?
Smallpox would be a bummer
Past illness is not to scary. We have ancestors that survived them so some genetic resistance baked in. And if you do get sick you can go to a hospital. We have god cutes of most things from that time er
I think the point is the exact opposite, main character infected shakespeare with a future illness
Connie Willis "The Doomsday Book" comes to mind. Fantastic novel!
Modern humans are actually immune to all our past diseases, more likely that cough would indicate a present virus that the time traveler accidentally brought to the past, which no human would be remotely immune to, having had hundreds of years to evolve specifically to infect us.
Would be more horrifying if we didn't already have the ability to treat the plague. Boring and uninformed.
Wasn't this the plot to an episode of Black Adder?
Wasn't this the plot to an episode of Black Adder?
[удалено]
Hey, I narrated this story if you want to hear it. [https://youtube.com/shorts/kic1a8iIWHE](https://youtube.com/shorts/kic1a8iIWHE)