Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (a John Hope Franklin Center Book)

8vo, br. ed. How should we understand the fear and fascination elicited by the accounts of communicable disease outbreaks that proliferated, following the emergence of HIV, in scientific publications and the mainstream media? The repetition of particular characters, images, and story linesóof Patients Zero and superspreaders, hot zones and tenacious microbesóproduced a formulaic narrative as they circulated through the media and were amplified in popular fiction and film. The ìoutbreak narrativeî begins with the identification of an emerging infection, follows it through the global networks of contact and contagion, and ends with the epidemiological work that contains it. Priscilla Wald argues that we need to understand the appeal and persistence of the outbreak narrative because the stories we tell about disease emergence have consequences. As they disseminate information, they affect survival rates and contagion routes. They upset economies. They promote or mitigate the stigmatizing of individuals, groups, locales, behaviors, and lifestyles. Wald traces how changing ideas about disease emergence and social interaction coalesced in the outbreak narrative. She returns to the early years of microbiologyóto the identification of microbes and ìTyphoid Mary,î the first known healthy human carrier of typhoid in the United Statesóto highlight the intertwined production of sociological theories of group formation (ìsocial contagionî) and medical theories of bacteriological infection at the turn of the twentieth century. Following the evolution of these ideas, Wald shows how they were affected byóor reflected inóthe advent of virology, Cold War ideas about ìalienî infiltration, science-fiction stories of brainwashing and body snatchers, and the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Contagious is a cautionary tale about how the stories we tell circumscribe our thinking about global health and human interactions as the world imaginesóor refuses to imagineóthe next Great Plague. From the Publisher: "Contagious is a magnificent book, notable for its prose, its expansiveness, its courage, and its creativity."--Rita Charon, founder of the Program in Narrative Medicine, Columbia University Medical Center "Rippling across the span of the twentieth century, Priscilla Wald's book traces the trajectories of `outbreak narratives,' stories about the spread and conquest of contagious diseases. With beautifully crafted prose, Wald shows how the scientific and fictional, social and microbial intermingle as outbreak narratives confront an essential paradox, that human connectedness both imperils and saves us. Contagious is essential reading for science studies, for the field of literature and medicine, and indeed for anyone interested in the social, discursive, and cultural implications of epidemiology."--N. Katherine Hayles, University of California, Los Angeles "Priscilla Wald demonstrates how epidemics are forms of cultural autobiography, telescoping stories of outbreak and contagion that are reflected in our myths, symbols, archetypes, and social networks. Beautifully written and passionately argued, Contagious is required reading for those interested in learning how our diseases shape the ways we think about ourselves and our relationships and how our desires to be close to other people overlap with our anxieties about being infected by them."--Jonathan Metzl, author of Prozac on the Couch: Prescribing Gender in the Era of Wonder Drugs