Reading Contagion: The Hazards of Reading in the Age of Print

By Annika Mann

Eighteenth-century British culture was transfixed by the threat of contagion, believing that everyday elements of the surrounding world could transmit deadly maladies from one body to the next. Physicians and medical writers warned of noxious matter circulating through air, bodily fluids, paper, and other materials, while philosophers worried that agitating passions could spread via certain kinds of writing and expression. Eighteenth-century poets and novelists thus had to grapple with the disturbing idea that literary texts might be doubly infectious, communicating dangerous passions and matter both in and on their contaminated pages.

 

In  Reading Contagion, Annika Mann argues that the fear of infected books energized aesthetic and political debates about the power of reading, which could alter individual and social bodies by connecting people of all sorts in dangerous ways through print. Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, Tobias Smollett, William Blake, and Mary Shelley ruminate on the potential of textual objects to absorb and transmit contagions with a combination of excitement and dread. This book vividly documents this cultural anxiety while explaining how writers at once reveled in the possibility that reading could transform the world while fearing its ability to infect and destroy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Nov 27, 2018
• ISBN: 9780813941783

Annika Mann

Annika Mann is an assistant professor of English at the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University. Her primary fields of research are eighteenth-century and Romantic British literature, with special interest in the history of medicine. She has been published in Eighteenth-Century Fiction and is a coeditor of Transforming Contagion: Risky Contacts among Bodies, Disciplines, and Nations (Rutgers University Press, 2018).

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Reading Contagion

Reading Contagion

The Hazards of Reading in the Age of Print

Annika Mann

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2018 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2018

ISBN 978-0-8139-4177-6 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-8139-4178-3 (e-book)

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this title.

Cover art: Early nineteenth-century engraving of a plague doctor. (Wellcome Collection/CC BY)

For my family

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Theorizing Reading in the Age of Print

1. Reading Contagion in Eighteenth-Century Medicine

2. Infection: Inspiring Alexander Pope’s Dunciad

3. Inoculation: Tobias Smollett and Remediation

4. Propagation: Regeneration and William Blake’s Visible Form

5. Extinction: Sanitation and the End of Plague in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man

Afterword: Germs, Circulating Libraries, and the Great Book Scare

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

This book was made possible by the generous support of mentors, colleagues, friends, and family, and I am thrilled to have the opportunity to thank them here.

I first discovered a love for British literature and literary criticism as an undergraduate at Northwestern University, one of the very best places for an undergraduate to complete a degree in English. I thank in particular Lawrence Evans, whose sharp eye first shaped the writing of a rather ill-prepared freshman and whose kindness made me feel at home in Evanston, where he is surely much missed. I also thank Helen Thompson for her excellent class on the eighteenth-century novel, which first inspired me to go to graduate school and make the eighteenth century my research focus. Finally, I thank Christopher Lane, who directed my senior thesis and who taught me so much about literary criticism and theory while also patiently listening to all my ideas about Jane Eyre.

I feel incredibly fortunate to have attended graduate school at Indiana University, Bloomington, a veritable hotbed of collaborative scholarship on the eighteenth century. I am enormously grateful to the faculty at Indiana who carefully mentored me during my time in graduate school, most especially my dissertation director Mary Favret and the members of my dissertation committee: Jonathan Elmer, Dror Wahrman, and Nicholas Williams. I thank these four scholars for their generosity and their toughness, for giving me an intellectual home, for teaching me how to ask generative questions, for inspiring my dissertation, for reading it, and for recommending such crucial revisions. I also thank them for their care and attention while I was on the job market, which ensured I would have the financial support to turn that dissertation into a book and to make my home in this profession.

I thank Indiana University as well for providing necessary financial support for this project as a dissertation, particularly the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the College of Arts and Sciences, which each awarded me dissertation year fellowships. Thanks also to the center for allowing me to present a portion of what would become chapter 3 at its annual summer workshop in 2009—the comments I received and the papers of the other attendees I was able to read during that workshop on media and mediality were formative for the project as a whole.

I thank as well my fellow graduates of Indiana University, in particular dear friends Patrick Maley, Andy Oler, and Jennifer Smith, whose work ethic and good cheer have proved indispensable during such a lengthy writing project. I also owe a deep debt of gratitude to the women in my dissertation writing group: Tracey Metivier, Rebecca Peters-Golden, Erin Pryor Ackerman, Maura Smyth, and Sarah Withers. I thank these women for reading every line of my dissertation and for continuing to read and recommend necessary revisions to the project well past its dissertation stages. Finally, I also thank Kyoko Takanashi and Siobhan Carroll for their thoughts on conceptualizing the project in its later stages and for generously sharing their own work.

Ultimately, this book has benefited in innumerable ways from the financial, intellectual, and personal support I have found since coming to Arizona State University. In particular, I thank ASU’s New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences for two generous Scholarship, Research, and Creative Activities grants, which afforded me the necessary time to complete this project. I also thank Marlene Tromp and Louis Mendoza for their superior mentorship and support of this project, and Lucy Berchini and Tracy Encizo for their most necessary help. My deep thanks as well to Dennis Isbell for tracking down difficult to find sources (particularly in the case of the afterword) and for his patience and help throughout this entire project.

I wish to thank the wonderful group of interdisciplinary scholars that make up the School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies at ASU’s New College, whose dedication to research, artistic production, and teaching is an absolute inspiration. More particularly, I thank my colleagues and mentors in English across the campuses of ASU for commenting on this book in its various stages, most especially Duku Anokye, Patrick Bixby, Ronald Broglio, Patricia Friedrich, Christopher Hanlon, Darryl Hattenhauer, George Justice, Mark Lussier, Francine McGregor, Michael Stancliff, and Eric Wertheimer. I also thank Natasha Behl, Ilana Luna, Jessica Salerno, Julia Sarreal, and Matthew Simonton for their personal support. Finally, I owe a special debt of gratitude to scholars and mentors Sharon Kirsch and Devoney Looser, who provided aid and advice at crucial moments during the writing of this book. Without their mentorship it would not have been possible for me to finish this project, and I am enormously grateful for their guidance, kindness, and time.

I would also like to thank those who organized and participated in those conferences and events that have helped shape this project since I came to ASU. In 2012 I was lucky to participate in a conference on systems of life at the Huntington Library, and I thank Warren Montag and Richard Barney for including me in that conference and subsequent edited collection, as well as for their comments and those of my fellow attendees on this project. I also thank my own Transforming Contagion conference team—Breanne Fahs, Eric Swank, and Sarah Stage—for their boundless energy and enthusiasm and for their crucial suggestions on this book’s introduction. Finally, I thank Priscilla Wald and Lennard J. Davis, whose generous comments and suggestions during their visits to ASU added enormously to the project.

Ultimately, this book has been greatly improved by the tough and cogent readings provided by the University of Virginia Press. My thanks most especially to Angie Hogan for her insight, generous attention, and shaping suggestions for revision. I thank as well the editors of Eighteenth-Century Fiction, for allowing me to reprint a portion of chapter 3, and Fordham University Press and the editors of Systems of Life: Biopolitics, Economics, and Literature, 1750–1859, Richard Barney and Warren Montag, for allowing me to reprint a portion of chapter 4.

I also wish to thank my family, to whom this book is dedicated, although it will be impossible to do so fully here. I have the enormous good fortune to be the youngest in family of academics and artists, who collectively made the writing of this book possible. Thank you to my father, John Mann, and stepmother, Tama Baldwin, for teaching me how to be a working writer, which they would point out requires great toughness as well as great generosity toward one’s work. Thank you to my brother-in-law, Guy Ortolano, for your keen wit and eye toward all revisions great and small. Thank you to my elder sister, Jenny Mann, for serving as my mentor in all things, for teaching me about early modern sympathy and the occult, and for reading so very many drafts of the introduction and chapter 1. Thank you also for Annika and Sam, perpetual sources of wonder and delight. And thank you to my mother, Karen Mann, for far too many things to list here, but for reading every line of every draft of this book, for a start, and for being an alternately wholly enthusiastic and deeply skeptical reader when I needed it the most.

Finally, to Joe and Faye, for bringing more joy into my life than I would have ever believed possible: thank you.

Reading Contagion

Introduction

Theorizing Reading in the Age of Print

In a number of key scenes scattered across his two plague texts, Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) lingers over the hazards of reading. Both A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) and Due Preparations for the Plague, as Well for Soul as Body (1722) were written during the reappearance of the plague in Marseilles in 1721 but set in England during the Great Plague of 1665, which killed an estimated one hundred thousand people.¹ Defoe’s Journal is narrated by the saddler H. F., thought to be the initials of Defoe’s uncle, Henry Foe, who remained in London during the plague and yet managed to survive. Early in the text, H. F. recounts the myriad dangers of reading during a time of plague. During this period, Londoners "were more addicted to Prophecies, and Astrological Conjurations, Dreams, and old Wives Tales, than ever they were before or since: Whether this unhappy Temper was originally raised by the Follies of some People who got Money by it; that is to say, by printing Predictions and Prognostications I know not; but certain it is, Book’s frighted them terribly, such as Lilly’s Almanack, Gadbury’s Astrological Predictions; Poor Robin’s Almanack and the like (22). These books are dangerous because they are emotionally disruptive; they agitate and disorder their readers’ bodies, thus making it more likely they will catch the disease. H. F. initially distinguishes patently fictional texts (Prophecies, and Astrological Conjurations, Dreams, and old Wives Tales) from the bills of mortality, governmental documents organized temporally (by week) and spatially (by parish) that were used to track the progress of the disease by listing burial numbers by cause. However, it soon becomes clear that reading the bills is even more acutely dangerous than perusing hack prognostications—deadly dangerous. H. F. remarks that it was seldom, that the Weekly Bill came in, but there were two or three [persons] put in frighted, that is, that may well be call’d, frighted to Death and that besides those, who were so frighted to die upon the Spot, there were great Numbers frighted to other Extreams, some frighted out of their Senses, some out of their Memory, and some out of their Understanding" (56).

The avid reading of prognostications and the weekly bills are not the only kinds of dangerous interpretive activities to be found in Defoe’s Journal. Just a few pages after we learn about those who are frightened to death or left insensate, H. F. records that during the height of the infection, people were poreing continually at the Clouds and so it was no wonder that [they] saw Shapes and Figures, Representations and Appearances, which had nothing in them, but Air and Vapour (23). Plague-bound Londoners search the clouds for signs of God’s will, attempting to read their futures in the skies. These Shapes and Figures, Representations and Appearances might be only Air and Vapour, but they are the very media that carry the plague from one body to another, through infected breath. Or so Defoe’s readers believed. This image of cloud reading thus underscores the perverse cruelty of the plague: attempts to interpret one’s surroundings only further subject the body to contagion. Londoners may take in further infection through air expelled from the bodies of others when they mistakenly believe, for example, that the plague might be distinguish’d by [a person] breathing upon a piece of Glass, where the Breath condensing, there might living Creatures be seen by a Microscope of strange monstrous and frightful Shapes, such as Dragons, Snakes, Serpents, and Devils, horrible to behold (195). Such fervid scenes of interpretation demonstrate that during times of plague, the medium of air and the presence of other bodies infect the act of reading, such that it too becomes dangerous.

Defoe’s more didactic Due Preparations for the Plague provides explicit and extended recommendations for surviving a plague; it reveals why attempting to read the air is so dangerous.² The threat derives from the nature of the disease and its mode of transmission. As the narrator explains, plague constitutes a contagion, one spread, in part, by verbal communication: the Sound are infected by the Sick . . . by Effluvia from other Bodies; by Animalcula mixt and drawn into our Bodies with our Breath, so that conversing with those who are Infected gives the Infection, which is propagated in that manner, from one to another (114). Conversation transmits infection, and the dangers of speech extend to written communication as well. A scene of almost comical excess unfolds in the description of the peculiar cleansing ritual that a serious pious good man (82) and careful Father (83) carries out upon receiving letters from friends—letters that he receives privately, sharing neither content nor pages with his family:

His Letters were brought by the Post-Man, or Letter-Carrier to his Porter, where he causd the Porter to Smoke them with Brimstone, and with Gun-powder, then to open them, and then to sprinkle them with Vinegar; then he had them drawn up by Pulley, then smoak’d again with strong Perfumes, and taking them with a pair of Hair Gloves, the Hair outermost, he read them with a large reading Glass, which read at a great Distance, and as soon as they were read burn’d them in the Fire; and at last the Distemper raging more and more, he forbid his Friends writing him at all. (84–85)³

The father is worried about both content and contents. He fears that the subject matter of his letters might disturb his wife and children, and he is also worried that contagious particulates might have been absorbed by the very pages on which that matter is written. Thus, through his deep-cleaning process, with the use of smoke and gunpowder, vinegar, perfumes, pulleys, gloves, and a reading glass, he attempts to gain physical distance from the medium of his correspondence. But even this exhaustive process proves an inadequate prophylactic to contamination, and the father eventually forbids all writing from entering his house.

When we pause over these assembled scenes, a number of questions about reading and its dangers present themselves. Most pertinently, we might ask, what exactly constitutes reading as it emerges across these scenes? More specifically, what is it about the act of reading that the threat of contagion marks as newly dangerous?

Reading during a plague entails dangers that are immanent in a text’s subject matter and its pages, revealing the hazards of reading as both an affective and haptic activity. Under the threat of contagion, Defoe’s plague texts insistently remind us that reading is an operation of minds and hands, an activity both emotional and physical, immediate and mediated, known and insensible. And it is precisely those aspects of reading that cannot be seen—that we might discount or forget to notice—that can prove deadly.

Defoe’s scenes of reading expose the operations of what this book terms reading contagion, a theory of reading that makes its first virulent appearance in the early part of the eighteenth century, when writers like Defoe draw on emerging medical theory in order to conceptualize reading as infectious contact with the passions and material particulates of others. This contact has potentially devastating results. As Richard Mead (1673–1754), physician to George II and an expert on contagion, explains in A Short Discourse concerning Pestilential Contagion (1720), during a plague, "the greatest Danger is from such Goods as are apt to retain Infection, such as Cotton, Hemp, and Flax, Paper or Books, Silk of all sorts, Linen, Wool, Feathers, Hair, and all kinds of Skins" (24). Indeed, it was this fear over objects held close to the human body, which are porous enough to absorb and retain contagious matter, that motivated the criminalizing of rag gathering for paper mills, the closing of rag shops, and the burning or burying of their contents during an outbreak of the plague in September 1636.⁴ As Defoe’s careful father knows, textual objects, Paper or Books (which are made from recycled cloth), are as absorptive as air and thus just as apt to render disease communicable.

Appearing in texts that are specifically about the plague, Defoe’s scenes highlight reading as a zone of invisible and transformative bodily contact that cannot be controlled by human authors. In claiming reading as a threat to health, however, Defoe is certainly not alone: Alexander Pope (1688–1744), Tobias Smollett (1721–71), William Blake (1757–1827), and Mary Shelley (1797–1851) all come to position reading as contagious. These diverse writers expose the particular potential of textual objects to absorb and transmit contagion as they circulate among a large number of reading bodies. In so doing, they also expose reading’s ability to create embodied collectives and produce large-scale epidemics. This book argues that reading contagion thus becomes a primary means for articulating the somatic dangers of reading during the age of print, that time when printed texts are circulating ever more widely—from London to Great Britain to the globe. In excavating the peculiarities of the eighteenth-century belief that books can be infectious, Reading Contagion realigns the eighteenth century within contagion’s own theoretical history. Eighteenth-century theories of contagion refuse rather than uphold binary oppositions such as human versus nonhuman, healthy versus diseased bodies, safe versus dangerous spaces. Instead, those theories interrelate, even intermingle, porous bodies, media, and objects, including texts. Further, and perhaps more uncomfortably, Reading Contagion widens our scholarly view of eighteenth-century aesthetics: although utilized by poets and novelists, reading contagion operates as a toxic, corrosive theory of reading that reserves no special place for literary texts.

Theorizing Contagion

Contagion is most simply defined as both a communicable disease and its means of communication, a means that is transformed by the disease in turn. Contagion has been of particular interest to literary scholars and theorists because the term provides such an apt model for how language itself works, how meaning is transformed by its means of communication. This contagious view of language is especially evident in the operations of figures of speech such as metaphor, which communicate more than one meaning at once. But while twentieth-century theorists have long recognized the intersections of contagion and language, particularly metaphor, there has been disagreement about the scholar’s role in examining contagion. Some scholars have argued that the critic’s job is to debunk metaphors of contagion and to confine the term exclusively to biomedical definitions; others instead excavate metaphors of contagion to demonstrate that biomedical discourses can never extricate themselves from other realms of meaning, particularly literary realms. Recent scholarship inspired by the posthuman turn has productively shifted the grounds of this disagreement. The scholar’s gaze has been turned from the relationship between medical and nonmedical discourses to the relationship between language and the real: new materialist work offers contagion as a particularly potent example of the inextricable links between language and matter.⁵

I take the time in this introduction to recount this theoretical history of contagion because the reorientation provided by the new materialist turn has tended to leave the eighteenth century behind—or, rather, to leave it in the same place. Although it has enabled scholarship on contagion to more freely traverse the intersections of language and biomedical disease, this theoretical paradigm often uses the eighteenth century as a metonym for acts of categorization (such as that between human bodies and nonhuman objects, as well as healthy and diseased bodies or locations) that are used to justify state intervention. But Reading Contagion tells a different story, both about eighteenth-century theories of contagion and the politics of their use by literary writers during this period. This book argues that emerging theories of contagion disrupt the place-bound certainties and operative binaries of eighteenth-century medical discourse. Those theories are then applied to texts by literary writers in ways that heighten awareness of the toxic, potentially infected, and uncontrollable nature of reading. Importantly, literary writers raise such awareness even when that application is itself motivated by the desire to organize and hierarchize printed texts. For Reading Contagion argues that contagion imperils the primary mechanism for the production of knowledge about disease: print.

René Girard and Susan Sontag offer the first critique of metaphors of contagion in the modern era, arguing that those metaphors must be sharply distinguished from contagion as a biomedical reality. Writing in the decade before the AIDS epidemic, Girard maintains that the plague in the modern period operates solely as a metaphor endowed with an almost incredible vitality, in a world in which plague and epidemics in general have disappeared almost altogether (Plague in Literature and Myth, 835). For Girard, the metaphor of the plague in narratives like Journal of the Plague Year exposes fears of social disorder (834), of anarchy and the undifferentiation caused by mimetic violence. Girard argues that this plague metaphor is dangerous, because the violence it records will eventually be directed by a community (itself at the edge of disintegration) toward a scapegoat. For Sontag—writing in the midst of an AIDS crisis that exposed the continued presence and threat of epidemics—contagion retains its metaphoric dangers. Sontag argues that there is a link between imagining disease and imagining foreignness and that any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious (Illness as Metaphor, 136, 6).⁶ Further, because contagion habitually collapses agent (virus) and means of transmission (infected person), for Sontag, the accumulated metaphors and myths that figure even noncontagious diseases (e.g., cancer) as contagious predators also render contagious the bodies of those who are ill. These metaphors are incredibly damaging, because they increase the suffering of those who find themselves shunned or who are too embarrassed to seek treatment. The work of the critic, according to Sontag, is thus to demystify disease and in particular to call out the damaging metaphor of contagion.⁷

Despite the urgency of such calls to restrict contagion to biomedical definitions, theorists of deconstruction have pointed out that extricating contagion from metaphor is nigh on impossible. Indeed the defensive reaction against metaphor (particularly metaphors of contagion or contamination) has its own long and problematic history. In Plato’s Pharmacy, Jacques Derrida argues that Plato first identifies writing with the Greek word for medicine—pharmakon—defined simultaneously as both remedy and poison. Derrida argues that, in attempting to defend speech from the contamination of writing, Plato finds that contamination to be contagious, which brings about a transformation through the operations of metaphor itself (as that which translates or transfers meaning into an improper realm). Famously, Derrida writes that according to a pattern that will dominate all of Western philosophy, good writing (natural, living, knowledgeable, intelligible, internal, speaking) is opposed to bad writing (a moribund, ignorant, external, mute artifice for the senses). And the good one can be designated only through the metaphor of the bad one. Metaphoricity is the logic of contamination and the contamination of logic (Dissemination, 149).⁸ And so, as Lee Edelman painfully sums up in his analysis of the Silence = Death slogan utilized by ACT UP and other activist organizations in response to the AIDS crisis, even the defensive reaction against homophobic discourse, which identifies homosexuality with contagion, contains and potentially propagates that which it would defend against. For Edelman, this slogan makes such transformation especially clear: its prominent equal sign aligns that formula, despite its explicitly antihomophobic import, with the logic of self-identity implicit in Plato’s binary oppositions, a logic that provides ideological support for the homophobic terrorism Plato himself endorsed (Plague of Discourse, 313). Thus while Edelman is wary of the way that the horrors of AIDS can be transformed into material for intellectual arabesques that inscribe those horrors within the neutralizing conventions of literary studies, he identifies the literal as an equally dangerous seduction (316). He warns, contra Sontag, that we must be as wary, then, of the temptations of the literal as we are of the ideologies at work in the figural; for discourse, alas, is the only defense with which we can counteract discourse, and there is no available discourse on AIDS that is not itself diseased (316).

Subsequent scholars of contagion have likewise acknowledged the inability of the sciences (particularly medicine) to cordon themselves off from the potentially unruly workings of language, even as they have highlighted the dangers that follow from deconstruction’s seeming relocation of the problems of biomedical disease to language. Erin O’Conner argues that the imagery of contagion and disease circulates freely in contemporary discourse, where it provides a sort of all-purpose figure for cultural, authorial, and textual influences (Raw Material, 55). In the context of postcolonialism, O’Conner suggests that this imagery of contagion collapses a scholar’s method and her object of study, thereby getting in the way of an examination of how particular contagious diseases have operated on both bodies and discourses in various historical periods. As she puts it, "the critical fascination with contagion as a figure for the colonial encounter has gone hand in hand with a failure to appreciate how real diseases such as cholera have helped to structure the imperial imagination" (55, my emphasis). O’Conner argues that the easy alignment of contagion and communication prevents an exploration of how the material movements and embodied consequences of specific diseases during particular historical periods (in her case, Victorian Britain) exert a shaping force on ideas, on literary and medical discourses themselves.

Despite these trenchant critiques of contagion as a metaphor, recent studies of contagion in divergent historical periods have shifted away from the dangers of collapsing contagion "as a figure and contagion as a real disease. Instead, these studies treat contagion as a particularly potent example of the inextricable relations among matter, technology, and language. They pivot from what Donald Beecher describes as the epistemological anxiety inherent in the term’s semantic wandering in order to historicize and thereby reject any distinctions that such anxiety might inspire (Afterword on Contagion," 248). Influenced by theoretical work that refuses to conceptualize agency as solely located in the living, human individual,⁹ as well as philosophical work on biopolitics,¹⁰ this scholarship regards contagion as a variable, historical phenomenon that can highlight beliefs in the materializing force of culture or reveal the politics of matter.¹¹ In an example of the latter, Stacy Alaimo treats toxic bodies—bodies that carry pollution as a chemical stew in their blood and tissue—as a primary example of what she terms trans-corporeality, the time-space where human corporeality . . . is inseparable from ‘nature’ or ‘environment’ (Trans-Corporeal Feminisms, 260, 238). The traffic in toxins, Alaimo argues, allows us to reimagine human corporeality, and materiality itself, not as a utopian or romantic substance existing prior to social inscription, but as something that always bears the trace of history, social position, region, and the uneven distribution of risk (261). Contagion in this case becomes a particularly apt means of illuminating those networks of agency that structure and saturate our world, giving scholars purchase on both inequality and difficult ecological problems—those without individual, human actors that can be blamed or combated—in a time of catastrophic climate change.

In the midst of all of this useful theoretical refashioning, however, the eighteenth century occupies a noticeably static, and often negative, position. As the period long identified with the creation of those damaging binaries (human and nonhuman, nature and culture, subject and object, mind and body), that the new materialism aims to undo,¹² the Enlightenment is understood to restrict the definition of contagious diseases in ways that facilitate narratives of heroic human intervention and state control.¹³ That is, the conceptual delimiting of the term contagion itself can be seen as aiding these narratives and this control. Historians of medicine have shown that contagion has historically encompassed a host of referents, meanings, and modes of transmission but that these contract in the work of experimentalists and physicians, beginning in the early modern period. As Vivian Nutton explains, while the Greeks had no word for contagion, "contagio, contagium, and related verbs and adjectives appear frequently in Latin, from at least the second century BC onwards (Did the Greeks Have a Word for It?, 138).¹⁴ Such terms combine what contemporary scholars might distinguish as contagion and contamination, since they encompass . . . notions of direct touch, of person-to-person transmission, and of the dangers of proximity, as well as of pollution and defilement (138). Accordingly, the Latin writers simply use the words contagio/-um, both literally and metaphorically, without in any way revealing how, in their view, contagion works (150). Margaret Pelling also attests to this conceptual looseness, arguing that contagion was never purely medical but had had a wide currency in a range of areas of thought and practice, which is reflected in an accretion of metaphor and analogy, including folk belief and practice, practical experience in agriculture, horticulture, animal husbandry and technologies such as dyeing and wine-making (a primary denotation of the term infection), as well as modes and metaphors of reproduction, in the immaterial as well as the material world, among other usages (Meaning of Contagion," 17).

Contagion from the ancient through the early modern period may be characterized by conceptual lability, but the experimental work of chemists and anatomists during the so-called scientific revolution is understood to precipitate a long process of semantic or conceptual winnowing that continues through the Enlightenment and culminates in late nineteenth-century bacteriology (when scientists can finally see and identify microbes). And this refinement proceeds alongside increasing interventions into bodily health and disease by physicians and politicians during the eighteenth century. That is, during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the advent of corpuscular matter theory, the development of techniques for inoculation and vaccination, and the perceived dominance of miasmatic (rather than contagious) theories of disease, contagious disease is argued to undergo a transformation that facilitated governmental intervention and control—the increasing application of state power to biological life. Indeed, famously for Michel Foucault, just as the late eighteenth century marks the end of worries about large-scale epidemics, it also marks the transition from disciplinary powers to those of security.¹⁵ Biopower comes into being in order to regulate a population not conceived as a collection of subjects of right but instead as a set of processes to be managed at the level and on the basis of what is natural in these processes (Security, Territory, Population, 70). For Foucault, biopower intervenes in the processes of life, working toward a progressive self-cancellation of phenomena [detrimental to life] by the phenomena themselves or simply a delimitation of phenomena within acceptable limits (66) best exemplified by inoculation. In order to achieve this progressive self-cancellation, Foucault argues that a secular governmental bureaucracy is required, which will use techniques [that] are at once enlightened, analytical, calculated and calculating (71)—such as the collection of birth and death rates. For Foucault at least, it is during the eighteenth century that contagious disease becomes an opportunity for intervention, management, and normalization.

One of the primary aims of Reading Contagion is to revise this image of the medical terrain of the eighteenth century through a close examination of medical theories of contagion, which do not operate in such fashion. As this book’s first chapter explains, eighteenth-century theories of contagion posit that infectious corpuscles arise out of and are transformed by imperceptible, contagious contacts among infected bodies, media, and other porous objects. These theories of contagion could themselves be situated within theories of miasma, which contend that infectious particulates derive from polluted air generated by the climactic conditions of particular locations (specifically, the tropics). Healthy and diseased spaces (particularly England versus its far-flung empire) could thus be identified by measuring and recording climate data and incidences of disease. Yet theories of contagion habitually disrupt such work. They assert that invisible, mediated contacts cause material transformation, even while they do not themselves rise to sensory perception. This contention displaces the human body in space and renders causality difficult if not impossible to calculate.