2024-01-01 14:39:58
In May 1980, the World Health Organization declared smallpox eradicated, the success of an unprecedented history of health policy tracking and recording. The trail of the devastating epidemic ended with the “last patient,” a cook from Somalia. Four years later, a new, mysterious infectious disease is affecting humanity, AIDS, officially known as “Patient Zero”, Gaëtan Dugasenters the stage and, due to its initially “deviant” sexual transmission paths, provides diverse material for collective imaginations.
The cultural scientist Andreas Bernard, who teaches in Lüneburg, chose the two events as the overture for his study “on the narrability of epidemics since the 18th century”. The title “The Chain of Infections” already reflects a double interest, the superficial history of infections and their poetological interpretation, which, according to Bernard, also determines the ability to combat epidemics. However, anyone hoping for a reconstruction of the corona pandemic will be disappointed, because this last globally raging disease only plays a marginal role in the epidemics. Such a “break in an epoch,” the reasoning goes, “cannot yet be summed up today.”
The book
Andreas Bernard: The chain of infections. On the narration of epidemics since the 18th century. S. Fischer, Frankfurt aM 2023. 315 pages, €28.
© S. Fischer Verlage
In the different narrative styles about smallpox and AIDS, Bernard initially reveals two opposing motifs: If the eradication of smallpox was about demographic encirclement and containment, the fantasies in the early days of AIDS were characterized by the threatening blurring of boundaries of the disease, when it became clear that the “immunological time bomb” was not only ticking for “risk groups”. “The fear was faster than the disease.”
In Dugas, the media found the illustrious perpetrator figure who combined beauty, promiscuity and death. Stigma became the social marker of the disease, not only the body is infectious, but also the signs.
The fight against the infectious diseases that were rampant until the early 20th century – first smallpox, then cholera, tuberculosis, influenza and diphtheria – which the author pursues in the following chapters, was in a certain sense a battle of faith that gave rise to a new experimental discipline, bacteriology emerged. While adherents of the miasma theory believed that geographic environmental conditions—airborne, invisible “miasmas”—caused epidemics, contagionists believed that diseases were transmitted from person to person.
In the common will to get hold of the pathogen, this dispute simmered with varying degrees of emphasis until the beginning of the 20th century. While entire “illness travel books” were told about miasmas, the abstract “microbes” that were successively experimentally proven in the laboratory initially eluded narration.
Above all, however, both narrative forms generated different measures: in the first case, health and social policy prophylaxis – such as draining swamps, improving living conditions and infrastructure such as water pipes in the case of cholera – or it was about the detective tracking of the germ through the chains of the carriers away. This proved all the more difficult when it became clear that healthy people could also be infectious, like the first “superspreader” Mary Mallon, who became a “harbinger of death” in New York in 1889 as a healthy carrier of typhoid bacilli. A case of rigorous epidemic policy exclusion.
Bernard not only traces the restless and detour-driven hunt for the pathogens associated with names like Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch and Emil von Behring, but also the role of the communication media. The letter plays an important role, as it transported not only data but also germs and only lost its epidemiological significance with the invention of telegraphy, i.e. with the decoupling of data and goods traffic. What remains is the experience that “those who don’t communicate are immune.”
In the last part, the author searches for the narratives of immunity, starting with the early vaccination experiments, some of which were carried out on outsiders, up to modern experimental setups in the laboratory. In doing so, he puts the epidemiologist on an equal footing with the metropolitan figure of the stroller or detective. Bernard’s parallel between the modern crisis of storytelling and the futile attempt to reconstruct chains of infection in growing cities is one of the interdisciplinary highlights of the book.
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Even if the author only gives an outlook on the corona pandemic at the end, his scientifically informed look sheds an illuminating light on the narrative patterns of the pandemic, which range from conspiracy to its apodictic infection policy management to the subsequent admissions of ignorance. The fact that his book itself reads like a detective novel guarantees him an open-minded readership, despite the occasionally cumbersome material.
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