134 RüdigerKunow
In what follows, I will therefore take a closer look at this seemingly
symbiotic relationship. This will be done from what may seem an
unusual perspective. And so, contrary to the wonted ways of current
cultural critique, the emphasis here willnotbe onwhata given disease
narrative may or may not represent about a given infectious disease. I
have attempted such a representation-critical analytics elsewhere
(Kunow,"BiologyofCommunity,""BiologyofGeography")anddonot
want to repeat myself here. Besides, in her monographContagious
(2008), Priscilla Wald has done a superb job doing just this kind of
work,whichwouldbeahardactto follow,anyway.AsidefromWald's
magisterial text, Nancy Tomes or Paula Treichler offer further
interestingexamplesofthiskindofanalysis.^88
Instead, my analysis will be of a more formalist bent, turning to the
question of what especially the narrative form does for (mass) disease
representation. At the beginning of Western culture, the theater was the
preferred site and drama the medium in which the public nature of
public diseases was discussed, including the ethical and political
quandarieswhichemergeintheirwake.InthecontextofEuroAmerican
modernity, and perhaps parallel to the rise of the novel, infectious
diseases have come to find their representation most often in narrative
of two revolutions, one in the scientific world, the other in the newspaper
industry. The scientific revolution was precipitated by the work of Louis
Pasteur,RobertKoch,andtheircontemporaries,whoin thelate1800sprovided
convincingexperimentalproofofwhatcametobeknownasthegermtheoryof
disease, that is, the role that living microorganisms play in the cause of many
human and animal diseases.... The discovery of the germ coincided with the
late-nineteenth-century print revolution, which both cheapened the cost of
newspapers and books and quickened the pace of news reporting. The so-called
penny press pioneered a new kind of print journalism that redefined the
conceptionofnewsworthinesstoincluderegularreportageonhealthanddisease
issues"(Tomes,"EpidemicEntertainments"629).
(^88) This question could and probably would need to be amplified by looking at
non-narrative forms of representation, in painting or other visible media. For
example, Grünewald's Isenheim Altar features a scene with a leper, Routhaug
("Apollo Sending Plague Arrows into a City") or Poussin ("The Plague at
Ashdod") focus on the communal terror while in Colonial North America,
Theodore de Bry'sBrevisNarratiofeatures a plate entitled "How Indians Treat
TheirSick"whichshowsthesufferingsfromsmallpox.