Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 64

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Popular Culture Review

with the facts of an epidemic, in which symptoms are multiplied and repeated
throughout a community, and folk wisdom when confronted with this grim reality
sometimes hit closer to the mark than science.
“Man ever knew that he could catch an illness from someone or from some
thing,” notes Richard Gordon, “but only vaguely... .It took the devastating plagues
of the Middle Ages to rouse desperate suspicion that something solid must trans
mit disease from one of us to another” (16). The ancient Roman Varro surmised as
much, warning farmers not to build their houses on swampy ground because “cer
tain animals, invisible to the eye, breed there and, borne by the air, reach inside the
body by way of the mouth and nose and cause diseases” (Powell xx). The Hindu
doctor Susruta suspected around 500 A.D. that malaria, whose name (Italian: “bad
air”) betrays its supposed origin, was “inflicted not by the air, but instead by the
mosquitoes” (Gordon 25). Lucretius suggests that “just as there are seeds [semina]
of things helpful to our life, so, for sure, others fly about us that cause disease and
death.” The Old English word for epidemic disease, “onflyge” - the on-flying points in the same direction (Winslow 6,82). Fracastorius in De Contagione (1546)
declared presciently that epidemics proceed by “particles that our senses cannot
perceive,” calling them “fomites” (Gordon 17). And another two centuries along,
Diderot’s Encyclopedie claimed that contagious illnesses “are communicated, ei
ther through direct contact...or even by the air which can transmit at a considerable
distance certain miasmas or morbidic seeds,” which he labeled “semences” (Stafford
281).
Such theories generally received no support from the scientific community,
though, until the late nineteenth century. Most Enlightenment scientists rejected
the notion of “tiny monsters in the air, sinister and invisible” (Powell xx). In 1802
the American physician Charles Caldwell, for instance, recommended that swampy
seaboard land be drained rather than “subject thousands...to the malignant action
of marsh miasma, [a] deleterious poison” (Miller 44). But the idea of specific
contagious agents persisted, and the common people, says Claudine Herzlich in
Illness and Self in Society, “for whom the term contagion was synonymous with
plague, instinctively believed it.. .even if its mechanics were not understood” (13).
Until modern germ theory took hold, though, this kind of “instinctive belief’
took its place in an admixture of other theories we now find far-fetched, invoking
demons and charms and punishment for sin. Even Florence Nightingale, for all her
skill and experience, found the idea of specific disease agents anathema and in
sisted instead that disease reflected a “disequilibrium” in the “moral and social
order.” (This sort of reasoning has survived to our own day in the debate surround
ing AIDS, as Susan Sontag, Cindy Patton and others have ably demonstrated.)
Given the revolutionary nature of germ theory, perhaps we should consider it sur
prising that folk beliefs ever guessed correctly. A comment by the New Jersey