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Like the previous essay, this chapter was a product of the academic world's collective response to AIDS. More generally, however, I was intrigued by the challenge of trying to define and describe an epidemic. We have come to use the term so casually and metaphorically that I felt the logical way to think about the root meaning of epidemic was to see it historically, to create an ideal-typical picture of an epidemic based on repetitive patterns of past events. And in the following pages I have tried to abstract and present the narrative structure of an epidemic as historically experienced.
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Charles E. Rosenberg (2010) studied this question.