There has been little as divisive in this pandemic as the debate over face masks. It’s a battle waged on many fronts, some political, others scientific. It raises not only thorny issues about identity politics and the culture wars that plague us but important questions about the way in which we weigh and act on scientific evidence. As the winter approaches and we are pushed indoors, expect the battle to intensify as we look for ways to mitigate transmission of the virus in offices, and even our homes. The history of face masks should provide all sides with a degree of solace. We can surely all agree it is amusingly appropriate that the first person to study the dynamics of mucous droplets was a chap called Carl Flügge. And we should note that ours is not the first generation to squabble over masks. As the journalist and historian, Ben Macintyre has observed: this is a Hundred Years’ War. “Three Shot in Struggle with Mask Slacker,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported during the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic after James Wisser, a blacksmith and mask refusenik, got into a drunken tangle with a local “flu squad” whose job it was to enforce what was then law.
