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Wald traces how changing ideas about disease emergence and social interaction coalesced in the outbreak narrative. She returns to the early years of microbiology--to the identification of microbes and "Typhoid Mary," the first known healthy human carrier of typhoid in the United States--to highlight the intertwined production of sociological theories of group formation ("social contagion") 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 by--or reflected in--the advent of virology, Cold War ideas about "alien" 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 imagines--or refuses to imagine--the next Great Plague.
Author: Priscilla Wald
ISBN-10: 0822341530
ISBN-13: 9780822341536
Publisher: Duke University Press
Language: English
Published: 01/09/2008
Pages: 392
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.19lbs
Size: 9.03h x 6.41w x 0.95d
Priscilla Wald is Professor of English at Duke University. She is the author of Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form and the editor of the journal American Literature, both also published by Duke University Press.
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