140 RüdigerKunow
cholera epidemic, it was indeed often the military that was called upon
toguardbordersandprovideprotection.Oneofthefirstcaseswhenthis
wassystematicallysetinplaceinmoderntimesoccurredin1831,when
the Prussian military was charged with stopping the progress of the
cholera from Russia (Briese 234-59). That such attempts at establishing
amilitarycordonsanitairewereoftenfutilemayevenhaveaddedtothe
overall tendency of demonizing strangers and outsiders. Not
coincidentally, and long before the term "Trojan" became popular in
computer lingo, it was used to identify these unwelcome biomedical
trespassers bringing infectious diseases with them. In 1912, F. M.
Meader, writing in theNew York State Journal of Medicinesounded a
cautionary note: "a man may become a Trojan horse and his
unsuspecting neighbors... welcome him in their midst, and if their
defencesareimpaired,welcomehim to their sorrow"(qtd.in Wald 75).
The "Typhoid Mary" case, discussed above, illustrates very well the
social and cultural impact of the "Trojan" model of biological mobility
anddiseaseintervention.
In the 1880s and 90s, in times of mass migration to the United
States, the association of infectious disease with immigrants became a
general cultural obsession. Alan Kraut in hisSilent Travelers: Germs,
Genes, and the "Immigrant Menace"(1994) offers a detailed historical
account of the almostvisceral connection in the public domain between
migrant mobility and the mobility of infectious diseases—all this, of
course,regardlessofthefactsinagivencase.Concerningthepernicious
social and cultural work thus performed, Kraut speaks of "medicalized
nativism" (Silent Travelers 3); one might also call it biological
xenophobia. The Honolulu/San Francisco plague narrated above offers
vividillustrationsofthisprocessandshowshownarratives"ofcleansing
and of the fight against the invisible enemy... again and again
structured 20th century politics" (Sarasin et al. 42; my trans.). And
today,thesestoriesoftenfocusonAfricawhichwas,andstillis,seenas
the most diseased space of all–an idea captured in the famous opening
sceneoftheEbolaeposOutbreak(1995;WolfgangPeterson,dir.),with
its long shot of a helicopter flight over the ominously brooding jungle.
All this is not really new; a hundred years earlier, Joseph Conrad had
conceived of Africa as a space of infection, this time infection of a
moral nature: the "jungle" contaminated Kurtz, the European who
answeredtothebeckoningofthe(moral)Africanjunglebecausehewas