Open AccessPandemics: waves of disease, waves of hate from the Plague of Athens to A.I.D.S. *
Author(s) -
Cohn Samuel K.
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
historical research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.337
H-Index - 39
eISSN - 1468-2281
pISSN - 0950-3471
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-2281.2012.00603.x
Subject(s) - hatred , blame , plague (disease) , pandemic , modernity , history , criminology , cholera , sociology , political science , covid-19 , ancient history , disease , virology , law , medicine , psychiatry , infectious disease (medical specialty) , politics , pathology
This article briefly surveys the history of pandemics in the West, contesting long‐held assumptions that epidemics sparked hatred and blame of the ‘Other’, and that it was worse when diseases were mysterious as to their causes and cures. The article finds that blame and hate were rarely connected with pandemics in history. In antiquity, epidemics more often brought societies together rather than dividing them as continued to happen with some diseases such as influenza in modernity. On the other hand, some diseases such as cholera were more regularly blamed than others and triggered violence even after their agents and mechanisms of transmission had become well known.