Communicable (Literature and Medicine 2013-2018).

Abstract

Communicable (Literature and Medicine 2013–2018) Catherine Belling (bio) I find my present position here in 2022 a strange one from which to think back on my time editing Literature and Medicine from 2013 to 2018, years both catastrophic and oddly empty. I must now read the issues I edited through the intervening retrospective lens of 2020. People joke about "the before times," but they're not wrong. 2020 is an especially distorting lens, in part I think because things too easily relegated to peripheral vision came suddenly into shockingly clear focus: medical things, sociopolitical things, the fact of human health as an interconnected biocultural compound. Since 2020, surely no one can argue that it's possible to understand health without thinking about history and justice, or to understand disease without thinking about economics and rhetoric. To this extent, it seems that our point—the humanities are essential to health—has been proven. Perhaps we can stop worrying about relevance at last. The two goals I had for the journal while I was editor were to keep our attention on the discourses, literary or otherwise, representing and negotiating health care, and to continue expanding the journal's focus spatially and temporally beyond the Anglo-American nineteenth- to twentieth-century literary texts that had become a kind of canon. Through the lens of 2020, a minor observation at the end of my first editor's foreword feels more meaningful than it did at the time, and connects these two goals in a way I couldn't see then. I was looking for patterns in the topics covered by that general issue, a wide-ranging mix because the articles in an editor's first issue are necessarily a collaborative combination inherited from the process of transition. I made an almost accidental observation, a "pattern will emerge if you read this issue through as a single volume," I said: "infection."1 I had been asking readers to consider the journal's primary concerns—What does "literature" mean? What does "medicine" mean? What does the "and" do?—but now I noticed an unintentional subtext linking the articles [End Page 222] in this issue: "plague, contagious stories, quarantine, bacteriology, TB, AIDS" (x). Disease spread by invisible entities through a community or across the globe, exacerbated by social structures, controlled (or not) through public health measures, and made sense of (or not) by cultural rhetorics. Nothing new, but those accidental 2013 connections surprise me now. I'm not saying, of course, that this was in any way pandemic-prescient, because surely we all knew that something like Covid-19 was going to show up sooner or later, but that it was embedded in an almost-random set of articles covering a wide range of genres and historical periods and methodologies, not lurking, hidden, but already inherent in all our work. Because infection is of course always metaphorical: something has an effect on something else by entering it, by infiltrating or invading it, or instilling itself into it. In its historical etymology, the word begins cleanly—I might in-fect you with a neutral idea or desire—but soon the word came to mean the pernicious—what infects is what corrupts or sickens. (Perhaps the positive antonym would be inspires, which we don't use for microbes, though it certainly implies inhalation?) In any case, literature-and-medicine always has in it that tension between invisible pathogens and communicable ideas. I remember struggling to choose the right noun. Contagion? Disease transmission? I was seeking, I suspect, something like "communicable disease" to resonate with my sense that "literature and medicine" is about transmissible ideas and transmissible suffering, but of course the elegant noun from "communicable" is "communication," which isn't helpful if you mean the sharing of infection, by contact or vector, before you mean linguistic communication. Except, of course, that disease transmission is about communication. And not only infectious diseases, either. I noticed, of the pattern in my first issue, that "as they run through the texts, [infection tropes] also return us to our worrisome marriage: literature and medicine have shared interests in transmission and dissemination, in the forms by which contagious pathogens and infectious ideas are...