Epidemics old and new, real and imagined I
The Bubonic Plague of 1596 in Northern Spain:
Sanitary policy, medical treatments and religious perceptions
The work cited under this title is a qualitative study that analyzes the different strategies developed in this particular region to face the worst bubonic plagueEurope suffered in the modern age.
It is focused on the different tactics the authorities (political, spiritual and medical) introduced to contain the disease. What was the level of success of the containment mechanisms? To respond to it, we need to deepen into mentality aspects: How population perceived the epidemic and face it? In the context of Counter Reformation, people defined this sick mostly under religious imaginary, so human remedies imposed by doctors had to deal with divine remedies imposed by ecclesiastic authorities. The study suggests that most of the population trusted and obeyed the advices of the church more than the actions of doctors. In this sense, it is intend to show the different remedies they used and try to analyze different levels of effectiveness, taking in to account the status of medical expertise and the superstitious mind of this period.
The ways in which early modern society of northern Spain struggled the problem of this bubonic plague, helps us to understand not only how these societies of the Ancien Regime organized health measures or how doctors dealt of with the catholic ethic, but also other aspects of their own cultural imagery, particularly their perception of health, illness and death.
Alba Fernández Caballé.
UC Universidad de Cantabria (Spain).
Swine Flu and Other Apocalyptic Productions
In June 2010 the Council for Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly published the results of a long awaited inquiry into the World Health Organization’s handling of the 2009 'swine flu’ pandemic. Questioning the independence of the WHO’s scientific experts, European legislators accused the WHO of a ‘lack of transparency’ and of ‘faking’ the pandemic in order to trigger the activation of national pandemic preparedness plans for the benefit of vaccine manufacturers. In the words of one European MP swine flu was ‘the pandemic that never really was’.
In this paper I do not intend to discuss the claims made by the Council of Europe or the more outlandish conspiracy theories surrounding the WHO’s decision to declare a ‘phase six’ pandemic alert in June 2009. Rather, I wish to examine how swine flu disrupted and destabilized scientific narratives about influenza, revealing them to be so many historical productions.
The central argument of this paper is that the modern notion of a pandemic is largely the result of historical epidemiology and new ways of ‘knowing’ influenza that first emerged in the late nineteenth century. These narratives owe much to retrospective analyses of health risks and the Victorian dread of infectious microbes – discourses that, I argue, first begin to be applied to influenza in the 1890s following the experience of the ‘Russian’ influenza pandemic. At the same time, the Russian flu established influenza’s ‘modern’ identity as a globalized disease causing widespread morbidity – one whose transmission became linked (narratively) to modern forms of transportation and communication.
However, the key turning point came in the 1920s and 1930s with revisionist analyses by British and American epidemiologists of the mortality due to the 1918-19 ‘Spanish’ influenza, a pandemic that, according to the latest estimates is thought to have killed as many as 100m people worldwide. Although such discourses employ scientific terminology and aspire to a sort of actuarial neutrality, that neutrality is continually being undermined by prognostications about future pandemic events – prognostications that draw on the historiographical ‘lessons’ of 1918 while raising the spectre of the emergence of new ‘Armageddon’ strains of virus. The result is what Susan Sontag calls ‘the inflation of Apocalyptic rhetoric’: a permanent modern scenario in which ‘apocalypse looms… and it doesn’t occur.’
Mark Honigsbaum: Doctoral candidate. Queen Mary, University of London.
“I feel like an Allien [sic]”:
Gaétan Dugas’s View of the Early North American AIDS Epidemic
Much has been written about Gaétan Dugas, the flight attendant at the centre of the “Patient Zero” myth of AIDS, who was described by journalist Randy Shilts as “the Quebeçois [sic] version of Typhoid Mary”. Dugas’s reported refusal to give up sex – in the face of slowly mounting evidence suggesting the sexual transmissibility of AIDS – is still often cited as proof of his profound disregard for social responsibility.
Shilts’s popular history, And the Band Played On, the only source for much of the subsequent discussions about Dugas, has drawn repeated criticism for its reliance on rumour and hearsay. Yet even those who have criticized the book’s depiction of Dugas suggest that it would be unworkable to reconstruct the flight attendant’s perspective. There are, they fear, no historical records revealing his thoughts or actions.
This presentation argues that sufficient evidence does exist to offer a “patient’s view” of the early North American AIDS epidemic from Dugas’s perspective; it draws upon a combination of archival documents and oral history interviews to articulate a more nuanced account. The presentation emphasizes the difficulties faced by the earliest AIDS patients, including a lack of effective treatment, information, and support. It demonstrates that the selective manner in which Shilts gathered and wrote up his information about Dugas substantially influenced the latter’s posthumous reputation. Finally, it argues that Dugas’s actions and legacy can be better understood within a wider context of scientific uncertainty, gay resistance to medical authority, and discrimination within the gay community itself.
Richard McKay
ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow, January – December 2011
Department of History & The Centre for the Humanities and Health
King’s College London