RAH! Podcast Episode: A Short Introduction to Contagion Narratives and Episode Transcript

Listen to the fifth episode in our new RAH! Podcast mini series – A Short Introduction to…

In this episode, Andreea Ros will be giving us an introduction to Contagion Narratives in history. We will cover:

• How quarantine was perceived in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries
• How perceptions of contagion have been affected by the social and political beliefs of each era
• And some of the language used in representations of contagion today

Read along while you listen! Find the full episode transcript below.

Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the RAH! Podcast belong solely to the speaker, and are not necessarily reflective of the views of Manchester Metropolitan University, or the speaker's employer, organization, committee or other group or individual.

RAH! Podcast Episode Transcript: A Short Introduction to Contagion Narratives

Rah! Opening Jingle 

Lucy Simpson:  Hello, and welcome to the Rah podcast at Manchester Metropolitan University, and to our fifth episode in our new mini-series. In this episode, we will be speaking to Andreea Ros about her research in contagion narratives. We will cover how quarantine was perceived in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, how perceptions of contagion have been affected by the social and political influences of each era, and some of the language used in representations of contagion today. So let's get into it. 

Rah! Mini Jingle 

Lucy:  Hello, I'm here with Andreea Ros. And today we're talking about Andreea's research interest which is contagion narratives. So welcome Andreea to the podcast. And would you like to introduce yourself? 

Andreea Ros:  Sure, so my name is Andreea Ros and I'm a PhD candidate and associate lecturer here at MMU in the English department. 

Lucy:  So what do you mean by contagion narratives? 

Andreea:  In short, they are stories about transmissible disease outbreaks, which attempt to illuminate for us their social and political causes as well as the effects of transmissible disease. 

Lucy:  So I guess the way in which contagion has been conceived has kind of changed over time, depending on various medical knowledge and politics. And so in what era did you kind of begin your study and what was life like then?  

Andreea:  My research focuses especially on the first half of the 19th century, because this was a really interesting period for medical and political debates around contagion, disease and public health. When I started the research, I expected that I would look at texts from the 18th century and see quite, unscientific understandings of disease. But then I would look at the 19th century and as the science of medicine evolves, people would take disease more seriously. But what actually found was that the opposite processes that happened. Where throughout the 18th century, although there were not plague epidemics in England after the end of the 17th century, in the 18th century that plague and the idea of transmissible disease were taken very seriously both by medical professionals and by politicians. And there were a series of Quarantine Acts passed throughout the 18th century. Then, at the start of the 19th century, due to opposition to quarantine laws, we see a strong backlash against contagionism as the medical belief. What happened in the 19th century is that a very strong lobby of merchants managed to wage this public campaign against quarantine, which then led people to not have as much anxiety about contagious disease specifically.

So this attitude of opposition to quarantine actually had a strong impact on the rest of the century. And we see even when people are campaigning for improvements in public health, it's always done with a message staying strongly opposed to quarantine. If you read Florence Nightingale’s letters or her books, she often makes fun of the idea of both quarantine and contagion. And she's very kind of decisive and harsh about the idea that contagion is almost like this folk story, this myth that people wrongly believe in, and that we shouldn't believe in it, that we should be modern and realise that disease isn’t contagious. 

Lucy:  Was quarantined kind of in place, even while there wasn't necessarily disease outbreaks and stuff then? Because you said that the last plague was in the 17th century. 

Andreea:  So the last plague in England happened in the 17th century, however, plague epidemics kept happening around the world until the end of the 18th century. And actually one of the reasons why opposition to quarantine grew so much at the start of the 19th century is because the 1805 Quarantine Act for the first time expanded quarantine to diseases that have the character of the plague rather than just a plague. So suddenly, the government could impose quarantine against ships coming from countries where there were yellow fever epidemics, for example. So that made a lot of shipowners, and merchants nervous that in the future the government would expand quarantine even further.

Although, interestingly enough, when we think about quarantine, now we think about putting people in quarantine, but in the 19th century, quarantine was mostly applied to goods. So there was a strong belief that especially feathers and wool would be able to carry the kind of germs of the plague. So it was felt that quarantine was a barrier to trade more than anything. 

Lucy:  How did that kind of change over time then from the kind of 17th to the 19th century and maybe into the 21st century now? 

Andreea:  It's very interesting because what happened in the 1850s and the 1860s, is that the UK started to have increasingly strong public health regulations. The first attempts to really legislate immigration in the UK happen at the end of the 19th century. And a lot of the discourse of people pushing for immigration legislation and kind of border policing revolved around the idea of that, in particular, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe are going to bring disease into the country, and that's why we need to restrict the borders in some way. And then over the 20th century as germ theory, which is the medical theory that says transmittable diseases caused by different pathogens, as germ theory became the primary way through which transmission of disease was understood then quarantine became sort of rehabilitated because people could see that it had a very solid basis in medical theory. 

Lucy:  So before that kind of medical theory came in then, what - how did those kind of narratives embody themselves? Because obviously they had an idea that these things spread, but did they know kind of how or why? What - what kind of reasons did they put onto that? 

Andreea:  Broadly, there were different kinds of disease categories that people understood, transmitted in different ways. So in addition to epidemic diseases, like the plague, there are also diseases called once-in-life diseases, and these were smallpox and measles and scarlet fever. Additionally, what we now call sexually transmitted diseases were also thought to be broadly transmitted through contract. But almost everything else was thought to be transmitted through a combination of people's inherent weakness to disease, so if you are already sick with something it was thought that you would be able to get sick with another one of these. And particularly in - from the 1840s onwards, there was a lot of concern around so-called filth diseases like typhus, for example, which were thought to be caused by unhygenic living conditions, especially by strong bad smells. So for example, 'malaria' comes from Italian where it literally means bad air. 

Lucy:  If there's a tie then to kind of filth and sanitation and stuff like that. Was there a kind of an idea that there was a kind of moral element to - that might make you susceptible to illness, then? 

Andreea: Yeah. There was this push to blame some groups for disease. I think it was less widespread than we perhaps imagine now purely because of the widespread experience of disease. So on the one hand, there was a strong ideological push to write about how these diseases are caused by specific people and certainly, there's a lot of texts from the middle of the 19th century, for example, that attribute disease epidemics to Irish immigrants, but equally because there was so so much widespread disease, it was often difficult almost to make these sorts of judgments just because disease, so obviously affected so many people. 

Lucy:  Have you kind of got a key text or some kind of recommendations that might kind of speak to this, the sort of thing you've been describing? 

Andreea:  Yeah, I think my first recommendation would be Dracula by Bram Stoker, because if you look at English language texts about vampires written before the 1890s, they tend to not describe vampirism as contagious. Instead, they tend to portray becoming a vampire as a result of committing some sort of horrific act that makes your soul cursed in some way. Whereas with Dracula and with a couple of other vampire texts published around the same time, vampirism suddenly becomes contagious. Suddenly, people that are bitten by vampires become vampires themselves. And I think to us, it seems like such a big part of the vampire sub-genre now, but actually it was a new element that was introduced at the end of the 19th century, which then makes you wonder how have understandings of disease but also, morality perhaps, or sinfulness or inheritance changed at the end of 19th century to make this possible?

But I also think another text is quite interesting is the Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton, which was published in the 60s, which is about an alien organism that arrives on earth and there seems to then when it's on earth behave like a contagious disease. The book in a very clever way, I think undermines all of your stereotypes or all of your preconceived ideas about what contagion is like in fiction or what contagion is like in general. So I would also recommend that. 

Lucy:  So are there any kind of parallels then with the contagion narratives you've been looking at from history and kind of now that maybe we ought to look out for? 

Andreea:  I think it's been very interesting to look at the ways in which people have written about lockdown and quarantine, a couple of months ago, when we first started to get news about China and then Italy going into lockdown. It was quite interesting to see a lot of the news articles in western newspapers really being very, very critical of lockdown and really comparing it to quarantine and comparing it to a practice that was not modern, really drawing on a lot of comparisons to the plague. And when lockdown began to be implemented in the UK, and in France and in other more Western countries, it's interesting to see how the ways in which we talk about it has really changed. And it has now, I think, been accepted as something that is necessary and we don't talk about it in the same way that we used to. I also think it's quite interesting that as far as I know a lot of governments have really shied away from using the word 'quarantine' to describe what's happening. And they've really tried to create almost like a new language to describe what's happening. Like I personally don't remember hearing about social distancing, for example, before the last two or three months. So I think it's very interesting to watch new kinds of language and new kinds of narratives being created right now. 

Lucy:  I mean, I guess social distancing sounds a bit more friendly than quarantine. So you can see why it might be something that they have given a new word to, I guess, but also, if I'm thinking about the kind of language that people are using now, to me, there seems to be a lot of kind of similarities between the language used in war, for example? 

Andreea: Definitely, I think a lot of people have used a lot of war imagery. And I think 30 years ago, a critic and philosopher called Susan Sontag wrote about how we shouldn't use war metaphors to talk about disease. And she wrote about how if we use militarised or quite aggressive language to talk about diseases, it really de-humanises the people that suffer from them. Because we no longer kind of understand their experiences on a human scale. It becomes this war of aggression between the nation in a kind of very idealised way, and the virus or the cancer in again a very abstract idealised way. Equally, I think, for a lot of people, it's been very hard to understand what's happening. And it's been very hard to find the words to talk about what's happening. And of course, I think it's good to be quite critical of governments in particular coming out with this kind of language, because it's encouraging people not to scrutinise what they're doing if they're trying to persuade us that we should just look at this as a security crisis. Equally, however, I've been surprised by how difficult I think it's been to talk about what has happened. So I find it hard to begrudge people using the tropes or the language that they are able to find. So I think as always, we should be mindful of not just the kinds of language that are used but who is using the language and with - with what purpose in mind. 

Lucy:  So, thank you, Andreea, for joining us on the podcast. 

Andreea:  Thank you. 

Rah Mini Jingle 

Lucy:  Thank you for listening. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter for future podcast updates, you can find us @mmu_rah. For more information on all the research and events we discussed in this episode, please go to the rah website for full links. Tune back in soon for more episodes. 

Rah! Closing Jingle 

Lucy:  This episode of the raw podcast was produced presented and edited by Lucy Simpson and mixed by Julian Holloway