Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative

“The word contagion” Priscilla Wald notes, “means literally ‘to touch together’, and one of its earliest usages in the fourteenth century referred to the circulation of ideas and attitudes” (12, emphasis original). This definition gives us the flavour of Wald’s analytic approach to the “outbreak narrative” (2), which is the infectious touching together of explanatory tropes. This narrative has (re)emerged in successive projects that have attempted to understand and control communicable disease. As an explanatory device, the idea of the narrative allows Wald to explore these projects by drawing together literatures that are commonly taken to be disparate.