In The Gospel of Germs, Nancy Tomes opens her discussion in 1884 New York at the elegant home of Martha Roosevelt, mother of future president Theodore Roosevelt, as Martha succumbs to typhoid fever (Tomes 23). Tomes then takes the reader through a scientific history of germ theory, its architects, and the transition from a healthcare philosophy where physicians’ conclusions were based on observations of illness in the individual and the community to one where determinations are made based on evidence discovered in a laboratory (28).
Priscilla Wald also begins with a scene of disease in Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative, but this one is from Wolfgang Petersen’s 1995 film Outbreak, based on Richard Preston’s 1994 nonfiction book The Hot Zone—a bestselling story about the origins and movements of viral hemorrhagic fevers, particularly Ebolavirus (Wald 29). Wald goes on to reference numerous books, films, articles, and essays that form an archive of American disease narratives.
From these initial pages, it is evident that Tomes is interested in how ideas around disease impact individuals as they go about their everyday lives, while Wald is interested in how disease narratives are framed in popular culture and entertainment. However, these two works converge in several places, specifically and I believe most significantly, around the effects of Americanism on public health discourse and disease narratives, the role of gender in portrayals of proliferation and prevention of environmental conditions that lead to infection, and the commercialization of contagion for economic profit. Priscilla Wald and Nancy Tomes both skillfully explore the intersection of public health and popular culture in their respective books on America’s relationship with infectious disease and contagion. Though they begin at different places on the continuum and direct their focus on different themes, these two texts identify overlapping ideas that are critical to our understanding of how disease narratives are formed and perpetuated in various mediums and genres. Namely, they both illustrate that in almost every major public health crisis to affect the U.S., a prevailing narrative emerged that blamed people—not pathogens—for the devastation, and that blame was consistently targeted at racial, ethnic, and/or sexual minority groups in what Wald describes as a “moral contagion” response (Wald 114).
I revisited the impressive work of these scholars two years into the most devastating pandemic in U.S. history—a public health crisis that further exposed the deep-seated racial, ethnic, and gender inequities of America in a way that, as Priscilla Wald and Nancy Tomes have shown, only a widespread and deadly communicable disease can. I reflected on disparities in healthcare access that resulted in disproportionate disease and death among Black, Brown, and poor communities, and I ruminated on the consequences of inconsistent messaging and political partisanship at the federal, state, and local levels (Noppert; Chen and Karim). It was impossible to ignore the repetition of histories that Wald and Tomes so effectively describe in their respective books. If public health narratives were tied to Cold War politics in the 1950s, as Wald asserts, then the viral rhetoric of the last three years was certainly tied to U.S.-China trade war politics. And if the urban poor bore both the brunt and the blame for tuberculosis spread at the turn of the twentieth century, as Tomes argues, so too were low-income city dwellers situated at the epicenter of the Covid-19 outbreak over 100 years later.