Contagiousness as a Problem in Social Epistemology

Abstract

The theory of infection, although it arose in parallel with the advance of positive knowledge, has never embodied only the logic of the laboratory, in which a “clean” experiment can be devised in order to expose the true causes or symptoms of a disease. To the contrary, both the advent of laboratories and the way they work have come about as the result of a clash between the old paradigm for infection (miasma) and the new one (particular forms of life). The structure of an infection is primarily a structure of social relations, in which the history of an infection and the factors that contributed to its spread are reconstructed. The uncertainty about how an epidemic spreads led to the vindication of the autonomous knowledge which arrived at original ways of representing itself and could prove the soundness of its approach. Any discursive accuracy was regarded as questionable and unable to result in a treatment that would be superior to letting the infection run its course. The efforts of such leading epidemiologists in the modern era as Justus von Liebig, Carlos Juan Finlay, Patrick Manson, and the staff of the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg brought about a reconstruction by professionalizing the stages in handling epidemics. It is argued that laboratories asserted their autonomy from universities not because of anything distinctive in their nature, but more because of a general understanding of cause and effect relationships in matters of need and famine. That counted for much more than any shortcomings in the previously established logistics and expansion of production. In addition, the development of forms of colonial, industrial and scientific expansion coupled with new types of enterprise, such as the Panama Canal or Germany’s trade with its colonies, fostered a new vision of epidemics not as natural disasters, but as a complex situations that can be managed and neutralized.