Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 63

Culture of Contagion

59

any period of cultural upheaval. New England clergy used Scottish scientist John
Robison’s ravings about the Illuminati (it had taken “deep root [and] spread into
all countries of Europe”) to justify adopting the Alien and Sedition Acts just seven
years after the Bill of Rights (Davis 36-8). The years surrounding the Civil War,
another time of high tension over questions of American identity, brought more
talk of enemies within. Suggestions of hidden malignancy were common. (Law
yer and diarist George Templeton Strong called the southern states “diseased mem
bers” whose “virus will infect us no more.”) Public discourse in the period “rever
berated with accusations of conspiracy and subversion” (Heale 11).
Well before the scientific upheavals of the 1880s we can find otherness being
figured as communicable disease, if not yet as microbes. As Charles Rosenberg
has observed, “The fear of contamination far antedates the germ theory - which in
some ways only provided a mechanism to justify these ancient fears in modern
terms” {Explaining 276). Charles-Edward Amory Winslow in The Conquest o f
Epidemic Disease (1943) makes clear that ancient peoples and present-day primi
tive ones have long associated otherness with disease. Epidemics are typically