Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 60

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Popular Culture Review

during the Enlightenment it is probably inevitable that metaphors from science
should enter the discussion of such issues. Late-nineteenth-century scientific ad
vances forced a radical reconstruction of our sense of personal borders and thus
offered writers a powerful new metaphorical template for casting anxieties over
cultural borders. Stunning discoveries in the emergent field of bacteriology and
virology brought images of porous personal membranes and ambiguous identities
that have permeated our literature and popular culture ever since. Fears of invis
ible invaders and insidious change from within run in a common thread through
out our history, but the new science made it possible to frame those fears by bio
logical analogy as “natural.” Germ theory provides such an effective metaphoric
vehicle, and such a useful lens through which to view the American experience,
because it establishes in the realm of scientific fact the kind of border violation,
the fearful invasion by an Other, that has long characterized American insecurities
about identity.
Contagious disease has been with us since human history has been able to
record it, and long before; fossils of early humans and even of dinosaurs show
signs of infection (McNeill 15, Karlen 14). Plague literature traces its ancestry at
least to the Babylonian Epic o f Gilgamesh and Egyptian texts of similar age (circa
2000 B.C.) which - like the Bible - show considerable familiarity with pestilence
and its sometimes devastating effects. In the West the literary tradition dates from
Thucydides, who chronicled the outbreak in 430 B.C. of a plague that killed a third
of Athens’s people, and in Europe from Boccacio. who at age 35 watched the
Great Plague of 1348 decimate Florence (the infamous “Black Death”) and used it
to frame his Decameron. The critic David Steel observes that in this sense “the age
of modern fiction was ushered in by a virus” (90).
In early modern times, epidemics of Old World diseases swept through North,
Central, and South America with the arrival of European explorers, helping clear
the way for settlement and expansion (and lending an air of godlike invincibility to
the largely immune invaders). Smallpox, diphtheria, measles, mumps, cholera,
malaria, and other contagious agents killed far more natives than did swords or
guns - as was typical of warfare until WWII (Diamond 197).
Periodic waves of contagious disease, lethal or merely disfiguring, continued
to assault European and American populations into the present century. What plague
had been to the 14th century, smallpox and the tropical diseases were to the 17th
and 18th, and tuberculosis and cholera to the 19th. Cholera, unknown outside the
Far East as late as 1817, blanketed the world a few years later and panicked U.S.
cities in 1832, 1849, and 1866. In the same period tuberculosis, while less dra
matic in its onset, was the leading cause of death in the United States; in Britain it
killed more people than all other diseases combined (Rothman 2, Pool 247). World
wide, the devastation did not stop once germ theory began to provide explana-