128 RüdigerKunow
media. As Huntington shows, "the mass popular press and the cheap
magazine were the vehicles of Progressive Reform.... They promoted
human-interest appeals, relished scandal, exposed corruption, created
newswhereithadtobecreated..."(AmericanPolitics100).
The "creativity" of which Huntington is speaking here found a
particularly amenable object in outbreaks at that time of infectious
diseasesinsideandoutsidetheU.S.Whereasthe1878Memphisyellow
fever epidemic discussed in the previous section had, aside from
President Rutherford B.Hayes and the Congress, remained pretty much
amatterofregionalinterest,sucheventswerelaterbecomingtheloreon
which the emergent mass media were increasingly dependentfor their
economic survival and for which they duly functioned as cultural echo-
chamber. This was even more so because the epidemics which had
broken out after a relative lull in medical mass events presented a
challenge to the prevailing optimism of the times—a challenge which
themediacouldharponand"explain."
The last decades of the 19thcentury saw the emergence of new
discoveries and technologies which forever changed the practice of
human medicine. At the same time, they also had the effect of
strengthening the cultural content of infectious diseases. The germ
theory of disease, based on a series of discoveries by Robert Koch and
Louis Pasteur, for the first time offered not only a biologically correct
butalsoculturallyplausibleexplanationforthepassingonofbiological
pathogens from person to person, place to place.^79 This sea-change in
biological and biomedical knowledge was going on while the public
sphereunderwentchangesthatwereasradicalasthoseinthebiomedical
sector. Previously popular forms of mass communication such as
pamphlets and newspapers for the educated middle classes were facing
stiff competition from new, now truly mass, media. Made possible by
innovations in print technology (the linotype) which drastically reduced
thecostofmakinganewspaper,thepennyorpopularpressalsoinitiated
(^79) My narrative here is based on Grub (188-90), Markel ("Reflections" 17-31),
Sarasin et al. (15-25), especially on the latter's insistence on the political, more
specifically "biopolitical resonances" of the new paradigm, the effects of which
manifested themselves "less in the rather meager medical weight this new form
ofknowledgewouldcarrythanitspolitico-imaginarydimension"(25).