James Joyce and Germ Theory: The Skeleton at the Feast

Abstract

In Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach recollects that Joyce was afraid of thunderstorms, heights, the sea, dogs, and infection.' A healthy fear of germs and contagion would not be surprising among the members of the Irish population born in the nineteenth century who were lucky enough to survive. At least 775,000 people died in Ireland during the famine years (1846-1851), mostly from contagious disease, especially cholera.2 There were four influenza epidemics from 1890-1894 that spread from Europe to England, Scotland, and Ireland, and during the week ending on 23 January 1892 alone, medical historians estimate 1,858 Londoners died of influenza and the probable complications of bronchitis and pneumonia.3 Even in the absence of acute epidemics, tuberculosis routinely ended the lives of between one in ten and one in seven Europeans; infant mortality and childhood deaths from all causes were worse in Dublin than in Calcutta, and five of Joyce's siblings did not survive into adulthood.4 To complicate matters, the incidence of infectious disease was accompanied by a perceived, steady rise in lunacy that was alarming the British and Irish populations. A generation later, while Joyce was writing Ulysses, the great influenza pandemic of 1918-1920 dwarfed these epidemiological figures and killed fifty to one hundred million worldwide.5 The fear of infection in the early twentieth century, especially in someone who was attuned to medical issues, would hardly have been phobic. In Joyce's younger days, germ theory was still the subject of serious debate, both among scientists and members of the medical profession. For much of the nineteenth century, disease was thought to be miasmic, that is, caused by a poison that lurks in the environment: in the water, air, or soil. The theory of contagious disease transmission devised by Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, and other bacteriologists was not monolithically accepted, and even among proponents of germ theory, there was an active discussion about the agents of infection. It was debated whether bacteria caused diseases or whether diseases