Professor Andreas Bernard, Lüneburg
The global struggle against Covid between 2020 and 2023 has shown that fighting a wide spread infectious disease demands not only medical knowledge and vaccination programs, but also includes questions of narration and mimesis. The pandemic can only be mastered when its ways of dispersion and contagion can be represented reliably. My talk would outline a view on the younger history of epidemics which combines medico-historical and narratological perspectives. I would especially discuss how the replacement of the „miasma“ doctrine (which was the leading theory of infection in the first two thirds of the 19th century) by the triumph of bacteriology in the 1870s implied a new narratability of the epidemic – from the simultaneous infection of a whole population through the effluvia of the miasma to the „chain of infections“ from person to person. This shift 150 years ago, which established new forms of individual guilt and responsibility, determines epidemiological narratives until today.
The College of Arts