Pandemics and the Media in Historical Perspective
At this point in the current pandemic, it is difficult to say what the media’s historical account of COVID-19 will be. Despite this, it is not too soon to begin examining the stories that are (and are not) being told about the past in the media’s coverage of this public health crisis, for, as historians have shown, journalistic reporting both informs popular understandings of disease and contributes to the shaping of public responses to this. Since the late nineteenth century, the newspaper industry has been a particularly active participant in the chronicling of American medical history, and in constructing stories of health and illness that connect “then” and “now,” the popular press has advanced a remarkably consistent thesis—one that emphasizes humanity’s progressive triumph over disease. According to historian Bert Hansen, this celebratory narrative crystallized in the 1920s and 30s, when newspapers began regaling readers with biographies of history’s “health heroes,” praising past medical luminaries such as Ephraim McDowell, Florence Nightingale, Louis Pasteur, Sister Elizabeth Kenny, and (later) Alexander Fleming for their therapeutic innovations and the humanitarian spirit undergirding their work. Presenting medicine as a dignified profession, these stories engendered an increasingly optimistic outlook on doctors’ ability to vanquish disease, convincing readers that medical science would produce “ever-more-powerful and ever-more-numerous practical innovations.”[As Hansen demonstrates, newspapers were largely responsible for the growing cultural authority of the medical profession over the course of the twentieth century.
The notion of historical progress in medicine, then, is one that has historically been ingrained by media organs. We can see this not only in twentieth-century hagiographies recounting the great deeds of long-dead doctors, but also in coverage of more recent developments. In her analysis of the Canadian press’ reporting on the SARS outbreak of 2003, for example, historian Georgina Feldberg finds that journalists fit this novel virus into a timeline of events showcasing science’s steadily increasing power over infectious disease. Reporters predicted that just as earlier epidemics of typhoid fever, cholera, and tuberculosis were laid low via the bacteriological and chemotherapeutic breakthroughs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so too would this new contagion ultimately fall at the hands of medical science. The message communicated with SARS, Feldberg observes, was that scientists and medical doctors had learned and profited from earlier generations’ struggles with mass illness, developing new drugs and vaccines that could now be utilized as a first line of defense against disease.[ii] Thus, Canadians need not fear SARS. Providing readers with a sense of security, the disease histories produced during this pandemic stressed humanity’s gradual triumph over disease in a way designed to reproduce faith in biomedicine and its achievements.