Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 61

Culture of Contagion

57

tions: the toll of smallpox alone since 1900 has been estimated at 300 million,
three times the number claimed by all the century’s wars (Oldstone 3).
Until very recently, then, as Lewis Thomas points out in The Lives o f a Cell,
germs were a daily menace: because of them “we moved, with our families, in and
out of death” (89). Literary culture, quite naturally, responded. Tobias Smollett
complains in a journal entry that “Snares are laid for our lives in every thing we eat
or drink: the very air we breathe, is loaded with contagion. We cannot even sleep,
without risque of infection” (Gordon 20). “Man,” agrees a character in Mark Twain’s
“The Chronicle of Young Satan,” “is a museum of disgusting diseases” (55). Writ
ers as diverse as Kipling and deMaupassant, Schiller and Poe wrote poems and
stories about pestilence; Chekhov and Keats made art of the tuberculosis that killed
them. Charles Brockden Brown saw the beginnings of a yellow fever epidemic in
Philadelphia, fled to New York, and later described the contagion’s terror in three
novels. Longfellow’s Evangeline finds her Gabriel in Philadelphia in the midst of
the same 1793 crisis (Powell 304). Henry James’s Daisy Miller treats malaria (fre
quently the “ague” afflicting Victorian literary characters) and Dickens’s Bleak
House, smallpox. Austen refers to typhus in Sense and Sensibility by its common
name “putrid fever,” and the “yellow jack” of Domhey and Son and Vanity Fair is
yellow fever - the nickname a reference to warning flags flown by stricken ships
(Karlen 106). Diphtheria, a terror of childhood until the twentieth century, kills
Eugene Lydgate in Middlemarch. Tuberculosis dispatches Little Eva in Uncle Tom \s
Cabin, after fifty pages of trying.
All the diseases that regularly beset the Americas and Europe into the present
century found their place in literature, and it would surely be strange if they did
not, given the near-constan Ёѡɕ