Smallpox and the Literary Imagination 1660-1820

The Journal of British Studies, 2008

Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture

In 1722, after initial successful experiments with inoculation (on Newgate prisoners and parish orphans) encouraged medical practitioners to attempt the procedure on the children of their wealthy clients, the prominent physician William Wagstaffe expressed his public disapprobation of the method in an 'open letter' to one of his colleagues at the Royal College of Physicians, who was also sceptical about the practice. 1 THO' the Fashion of Inoculating the Small Pox has so far prevail'd, as to be admitted into the greatest Families, yet I entirely concur with You in Opinion, that, till we have fuller Evidence of the Success of it, both with regard to the Security of the Operation, and the Certainty of preventing the like Distemper from any other Cause, Physicians at least, who of all Men ought to be guided in their Judgments chiefly by Experience, shou'd not be over hasty in encouraging a Practice, which does not seem as yet sufficiently supported either by Reason, or by Fact. 2

2015

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Medical History, 2013

The idea that smallpox could be eradicated was not necessarily the ultimate aim when inoculation was introduced in Europe in the 1720s. This potentiality was not clearly articulated as an aim until the end of the eighteenth century. This article argues that during most of the eighteenth century, the main aim of inoculation was to lead people as safely as possible through what was regarded as an unavoidable disease. Inoculation became safer, simpler and less expensive from the 1760s, but the changing ideas about its potentiality had more complex roots. A new understanding was produced through an interaction between inoculation practice, more general medical theory and developments within probabilistic thinking and political arithmetic. The first part of the article explores how smallpox inoculation was incorporated into existing medical thinking based on traditional humoral pathology. Inoculation was a new technology, but as it was perceived in the early eighteenth century, the innovation did not first and foremost concern the medical principles of the treatment. The second part of the article investigates arguments about why and when to inoculate: what kind of remedy was inoculation for eighteenth-century agents? The article concludes with a discussion on changes emerging towards the end of the century, and relates them to developments during the preceding decades rather than seeing them as inspired precursors of events and ideas to come.

Medical History, 2005

This article reflects upon the recent return to linear history writing in medical history. It takes as its starting point a critique of the current return to constructivist ideas, suggesting the use of other methodological choices and interpretations to the surviving archival and textural sources of the sixteenth century pox. My investigation analyses the diagnostic act as an effort to bring together a study of medical semiotics. Medical semiotics considers how signs speak through the physical body, coached within a particular epistemology. There are no hidden meanings behind the visible sign or symptom-it is tranparent to the calculative and authoritative gaze and language of the doctor. It concerns how diseases came into being, the relationships they have constituted, the power they have secured and the actual knowledge/power they have eclipsed or are eclipsing. From such a perspective, " getting the pox " is not a bad thing. A methodological turn to medical semiotics reminds us that the history of disease should be an inquiry both into the grounds of our current knowledge and beliefs about disease and how they inspire our writing, as well as the analytical categories that establish their inevitability.

In this work, I discuss how and why certain texts, published during or immediately after cholera epidemics, opt to represent the plague instead of cholera. They are Paul LaCroix's serial novel La Dance Macabre (1832), Flaubert's short story La Peste a Florence (1836), Ainsworth's Old Saint Pauls' (1841) and Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi (1842). In order to analyse these texts, I will use tools of comparative literature and will dialogue with recent plague scholarship (Palud 2014; Cooke 2009; Totaro 2005; Boeckl 2000).

Journal of Transnational American Studies

Medical History

Yet, even as these modern epidemics were marked by heightened fears of foreigners, sharpened social divisions, and racialised policies of border control and quarantine, they could also be sources of solidarity, bringing together working classes, ethnic minorities, colonial subjects and others against state, medical or colonial authorities. While cholera, smallpox and plague are used to exemplify how epidemics could bond one group against another within society, other epidemics are shown to bond together society as a whole. In a chapter on American reactions to yellow fever, Cohn argues that the 1853 epidemic bred new forms of tolerance across class and racial lines, particularly in the American south. However, the outstanding example of unity-in-the-face-of-adversity emerges from the 1918-19 influenza pandemic. Cohn dedicates five chapters to the pandemic, tracing reactions in the United States, Canada, Britain, continental Europe and India. While epidemiologically catastrophic, Cohn's extensive newspaper analysis shows that, above all else, in every country surveyed, collective responses were characterised by 'compassion, volunteerism, and martyrdom' (p. 413), rather than blame or violence. This book exemplifies the great potential of new digital resources for disease history, but also some of the pitfalls. The sheer volume of reactions catalogued and compared is impressive and clearly demonstrates Cohn's central claim that responses within and between epidemics varied extensively. But there is comparatively less in the way of explanation for why such variation existed. A mixture of biological and cultural factors is identified. On the one hand, it is suggested that reactions could stem from the particular etiological, clinical or epidemiological characteristics of a disease; on the other hand, they could stem from particular meanings signified by a disease, the types of people associated with it, the preventive measures employed or the authorities tasked with their implementation. The conclusion that there are 'no easy answers' (p. 539) rings true, but this this not altogether satisfying. Historians of medicine and disease have developed fine-grained contextual analyses of why epidemics became culturally, ideologically and politically charged when and where they did. At turns, Epidemics delivers such analysis, but it is overshadowed by an approach that seeks to broadly delineate epidemics according to those that did or did not spark blame (or compassion). While this approach makes it possible to sift through and organise a vast array of material, the reader is left searching for why, as Cohn suggests, the diseased were generally not attacked in the ancient world, why they were in medieval (plague) and early modern (syphilis) worlds, and why some were (cholera) and were not (influenza) in the modern world. The tension within Epidemics between its breath-taking synthesis of digital sources and its narrow analytical framework makes it difficult to judge what its overall impact will be on the historiography of epidemics. It is, without question, an immensely valuable resource. I have found it especially helpful for teaching students about how online newspapers can be used to systematically reconstruct the multiple perceptions, responses and lived experiences of modern infectious diseases. But by far its most important contribution is to challenge historians to look more closely at the complex ways in which epidemics past have brought people together. This is a critical message for the moment in which we are now living and, if not already, it should be a critical part of our teaching, research and policy agendas.