Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative

From the viral alphabet soup of SARS, HIV, and H1N1 to the exotic and deadly Ebola, the worldwide transmission of a deadly virus continues to spark fear and curiosity in the general public.Contagion is also quite often the fodder for fictional or dramatized medical detective stories or doomsday scenarios in novels, film, and television.Priscilla Wald's new book, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative, examines these real and fictional diseases through the lens of what she calls the ''outbreak narrative.''The intention laid out in Contagious is to provide an account of how outbreak narratives are formed and how they help us comprehend the interconnectedness of our world.Wald writes that ''disease emergence dramatizes the dilemma that inspires the most basic of human narratives: the necessity and danger of human contact'' (2).Wald's hope is that a more critical understanding of outbreak narratives will lead to more effective and socially conscious responses.Contagious begins with an examination of myth and history through the lens of the outbreak narrative, using popular books such as The Andromeda Strain (1969) and The Hot Zone (1994) or films like Outbreak (1995) as illustrations.Following this, Wald traces the way in which a single individual, ''Typhoid Mary'' (Mary Mallon), has had a lasting effect on the way outbreak narratives impact ideas about public health and social responsibility.Wald shifts the scale from the individual to the city as she examines sociological accounts of the intersection of contagion and the ecology of urban space.In the following section, Wald analyzes the ''conceptual exchange between virology and Cold War politics'' as the language for one informed the other, noting how viruses and Communists were depicted as ''sinister and wily, sneaking into cells and assuming control of their mechanisms'' (158 -59).Utilizing the many incarnations of The Body Snatchers (1955) as