Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 65

Culture of Contagion

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Medical Society in 1864 might stand for the fear and bewilderment felt by physi
cians and laymen alike when confronted by plague in the days before germ theory.
Gangrene spreads, wrote the doctors, by “a mysterious, propagable, depraved, ter
rible something, we know not what” (Rosenberg Explaining 92-3,99).
At both highbrow and popular levels, ideas about contagion, a medical fact,
have for over a century now reacted with and shaped ideas about non-medical
realities such as class, gender, and race. Germ theory provided - required, nearly new ways to talk about such matters, because it highlighted the borders between
and even within individuals. The notion of a new class of beings that inhabit us,
change us, and pass between us is a bold and frightening one; a century ago it was
nearly unthinkable. In 1800, physicians still