Calm down, cities are usually cured of sickness in a week or so. So if your favorite town has an epidemic, come back in a week and it'll be fine.
Or you could stick around and bury the dead/warn people away. Anyone can do those options, they seem to have a slight effect on shortening the epidemic, and you'll get enough gold to maintain a small warband.
Also, you don't
need a smithing guild in order to smith stuff. You can smith stuff at the smith's workshop in any town. Still, you'll need to visit the smiths guild from time-to-time to gain more smith skill, basically whenever you get the "crafting this gives you no experience" message for all items you know how to smith. You should notice the smith items are unlocked in order of difficulty (more or less), so as long as you're always crafting the newest stuff, you'll be maximizing your potential. If you're going the smith route (with is quite fun, I might add), I
strongly suggest choosing as much craftman as you can in your background, and definitely choosing the secret smith skills as your inheritance.
You might also wish to try the normal debug option. It gives you all crafting skills at level 20, so you can see everything that is possible to craft. Far more impressive than the starting cleaver and knife that an unskilled smith can make.