Case Histories—An Introduction Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz (bio) plagues, as everyone knows, lead to the erection of barriers— cordons sanitaires and quarantines that separate the sick from the well with the intention of enhancing both the letter and spirit of security. Less often considered is the measure of confidence lent to new voices of authority in time of plague. Public concern about the dangers of AIDS and the social impact of this unanticipated epidemic have, for example, prompted the media to ask historians about plagues of the past. Most often the question asked is quite general: "Are there precedents for the AIDS epidemic?" And most often historians shape their answers to meet the limitations of their own professional knowledge. We learn that outbreaks of bubonic plague in Europe and England from the late fifteenth to the late seventeenth centuries occurred in the context of constrained economic as well as scientific resources, and that religious belief shaped the responses of those in authority as well as popular sentiment. And historians of the nineteenth century explain that when cholera swept from the East to the West, an environment in which population density generated public sensitivity to social disorders paved the way for new concepts of disease causation and transmission. But not surprisingly, the question of whether there were "precursors" to AIDS remains unanswered, and the notion that natural history or human social history generates precedents revealing predictable patterns seems at best inadequate. One fundamental and striking novelty of the late twentieth century is the expectation of near-perfect protection from contagious disease. [End Page 373] The papers that follow approach the history of past diseases from different perspectives, but the authors—two historians and a scientist—share the view that there is much to be learned about the order of human societies and values from popular and medical responses to epidemic diseases of the distant—and not so distant—past. Paul Slack, Baruch S. Blumberg, and Allan M. Brandt also indicate that the impact of epidemic disease has been affected by human actions, sometimes by interventions that are deliberate as in the effect of quarantine, but also in instances where the course of epidemic disease is altered as a consequence of less direct intention, as in reaction to altered nutritional status. These interactions of man and microorganism are not, of course, interactions that have patiently awaited recent developments in the biomedical human sciences, nor have observations and explanations of the complex interplay of man and disease waited for contemporary historical research. The papers in this section associate the varied history of human responses to the threats of dangerous disease with more general social and moral values. Despite the distance of the bubonic plague or cholera in time and feelings, the historian's skill in restructuring what Slack calls "the interpretive system" that provided peoples of the past with the emotional and intellectual apparatus for giving meaning to experience shows how understanding and confidence were constructed in the absence of scientific knowledge. Is there in the historian's reconstruction of dread disease an implied analogy to the current threat of AIDS in the context of its fatal course, resistant to known therapies? The answer is, most firmly, no. The personal and public uncertainties and accommodations that surrounded much contagious disease even half a century ago seem intolerable today in the context of preventive and therapeutic achievements. If the AIDS epidemic has made us conscious of the limitations of current social and scientific controls of contagion, it is perhaps inevitable, but certainly misleading, to draw simple lessons about ecologic and moral imbalance from the unanticipated eruption of a new and lethal disease. [End Page 374] Through these carefully researched accounts we are exposed not only to a modest understanding of the interaction of man and microbe in history but also to the contemporary historian's caution not to distort the impact of the explanatory system that fit into the world of Daniel Defoe with the implication that seventeenth-century Englishmen made sense of fearsome events much as we do today. The ordinary vices that tempt us to make simple sense of history are, not surprisingly, embedded in our culture. They offer the same temptations...
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Sep 23, 2024
Daniel S Goldberg 
Open Access