152 RüdigerKunow
jungles, he is bent on fighting the complacencies of the political and
medical establishments and saves the community of Cedar Creek (read
"little America") from being obliterated in a process of public disease
control run wild. While instantiating the "microbe hunter" figure, this
filmic narrative is more than peripherally related to a host of other
cultural models, here especially the "lone ranger" who fights for the
greater good of his country without receiving proper recognition or
reward.
Right now, the medical Sherlock format is very much alive, a fact
acknowledged by no less a luminary than Richard Preston ofThe Hot
Zonefame, one of America's premier disease thriller writers. In one of
his more recent pieces,Panic in Level4(2008), he even insists on the
parallel. Writing on the work of scientists in USAMRIID's level four
laboratory,hesays:"Thiswasdetectivework.Theprocedurewasthatof
Sherlock Holmes: you rule out possibilities until only one possibility
remains" (xxxi). What needs to be said, however, is, regardless of the
perspective offered by Preston on this type of disease detective work,
Holmes's premier instrument was the single mind of an individual,
whereas today such work is based on technological intelligence and
epidemiologicalfieldwork.
This shift from what one might call the artisan stage (Sherlock
Holmes)tothemachineageofdiseasedetectivework(Outbreak)brings
into play a form of what might be called a bio-technological sublime,
probably dating back to the Science Fiction craze of the 1960s (Star
Trek), focusing on new super-secret and super-efficient laboratory
technology, biomedical SWAT teams and super drugs. Scott Sigler's
bestsellerInfectious(2008) features all these elements. The plot reads
like an undated version of theInvasion of the Body Snatchers(1955):
aliens have introduced a strange pathogen that transforms ordinary
human beings into killing machines, and a special team is deployed to
"savethisfuckingworld"(417).
The three different scripts I have presented here are not to be
understood as designating ideal types of narrativizing a collective
disease. In point of fact, they cannot be separated neatly from one