Microbiography and resistance in the human culture medium.

Abstract

Writing at the very beginning of the antibiotic era, Hans Zinsser observed signs of bacterial resistance to human efforts at fighting disease. He identified a rise in "excessively toxic and deadly" strains of diphtheria in response to "modern bacteriological methods" such as vaccination with serum antitoxin (p.67). This observation leads him to try to recount the control of epidemic disease from a perspective wider than that of a single human generation. To convey this perspective, he takes the biomedical concept of immunization and makes it a metaphor for the evolutionary relationship between nature, which he figures as a kind of physician, and its patient, the human race. The effect of this metaphor is to diminish the perspective of the individual human. In order to avoid disease's long-term revenge on the species, Zinsser implies, humans should become patients, relinquishing the project of active disease prevention to another agent, a personified nature. My interest here is in how the human role in infection narratives seems [End Page 84] constantly threatened with this kind of displacement, both by the infectious agent's microscopic spatial scale and by the disease's evolutionary temporal scale. Thinking about microbes can pose challenges to anthropocentrism. How do stories about microbial disease respond to these challenges?