By Priscilla Wald
Wald lines how altering rules approximately disorder emergence and social interplay coalesced within the outbreak narrative. She returns to the early years of microbiology—to the id of microbes and “Typhoid Mary,” the 1st identified fit human provider of typhoid within the United States—to spotlight the intertwined creation of sociological theories of crew formation (“social contagion”) and scientific theories of bacteriological an infection on the flip of the 20th century. Following the evolution of those rules, Wald indicates how they have been affected by—or mirrored in—the introduction of virology, chilly conflict rules approximately “alien” infiltration, science-fiction tales of brainwashing and physique snatchers, and the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Contagious is a cautionary story approximately how the tales we inform circumscribe our wondering worldwide healthiness and human interactions because the international imagines—or refuses to imagine—the subsequent nice Plague.
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Additional resources for Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative
Sample text
Meanwhile, the mainstream media, fiction, and film were bringing the epidemiological sensation of disease emergence to a broad public. Outbreak was but one of many fictional and nonfictional accounts of emerging-disease outbreaks that dramatized the scenarios that infectious- and tropicaldisease specialists were debating in their meetings and publications. Nonfiction bestsellers—such as Richard Preston’s 1994 The Hot Zone, which first appeared as a New Yorker article entitled ‘‘Crisis in the Hot Zone’’ in 1992, and Laurie Garrett’s 1994 The Coming Plague—heralded the danger of these species-threatening events, and they were quickly supplemented by novels and films, including Carriers (Patrick Lynch, 1995), Contagion (Robin Cook, 1995), The Blood Artists (Chuck Hogan, 1998), Twelve Monkeys (dir.
Appearing in key scenes in Outbreak from hospitals and military bases to the situation rooms of the highest echelons of government, for example, they serve as technological counterpoints. ≤∞ In Patrick Lynch’s Carriers, maps convey the helpless desperation of Brigadier Sutami, who keeps a record of new outbreaks of the epidemic burning through Sumatra by placing small black pins on the map each time a new case is reported. S. technological knowhow, which (as he will never know) caused the problem in the first place.
The narrative springs naturally, as he explains it, from the systematic thinking of scientific observers; it represents the discovery and expression of the epidemic’s own logic. Langmuir identifies ‘‘an attentionwinning pattern’’ that makes Roueché’s stories so useful as well as engaging, and, in doing so, he articulates the formula of an outbreak narrative from ‘‘a single patient placed in an exact time and location, and with vividly described symptoms’’ to ‘‘the main epidemiological question’’ of the source, means, and routes of transmission ‘‘until all of the pieces of the puzzle fall into logical place and the problem is solved’’ (xvii).