Historians' overarching framework about pandemics is wrong...
No evidence that rats were involved with the Black Death...
Sharing a bit of history today. Dr. Merle Eisenberg, a historian of pandemics and former Princeton history PhD, just published his most recent journal “The Justinianic Plague and Global Pandemics: The Making of the Plague Concept” in the American Historical Review. Pretty big deal, and many fascinating ideas that may “shatter” your previous conception of pandemics.
“The Plague Concept”
One interestig idea that Dr. Eisenberg brought up to me was: When you think of the the Bubonic plague and the Black Death in the 14th century, the first thing that comes to your mind is probably rats. However, there is actually NO empirical or scientific evidence proving that rats were involved in spreading the Bubonic plague in the Middle Ages. Historians in the 19th and 20th century debated about rats’ involvement and achieved no consensus, but somehow rats still ended up dominating our imagination. In the battle of narrative & imagination vs. evidence & science, the latter two lost bigtime.
Dr. Eisenberg refers to all this as “the plague concept”:
“The creation of the plague concept is best examined through the lens of Reinhart Koselleck’s conceptual history approach, in which an event can evolve and develop its own explanatory powers as a concept. Scholars have studied the transformation from event to concept in other fields, such as the change from revolution as event to revolution as concept to revolution as actor. Such a change required appealing to human emotion, investing the idea of revolution with authority, and turning it into a mythic concept with its own explanatory agency.”
In other words, plagues have evolved to become something much larger than the virus and bacteria themselves – plagues have gradually become an agent with their own power to shape our perception and imagination.
Scholars created the composite plague concept at the turn of the 20th century, and they periodically added new evidence and reinforced the concept without challenging it, thus contributing to the rise of this “plague concept” through cultural myths.
Did the historians simply ignore evidence to arrive at false conclusion?
Dr. Eisenberg’s journal documents how major historians arrived at their classification and conclusions of pandemics in flawed manners. For example, the terminology used to describe historical plague was established by the first decade of the 20th century. Somehow, historical plagues are commonly, and problematically, divided into three pandemics:
The first pandemic (ca. 541–ca. 750) is colloquially known as the Justinianic Plague.
The second pandemic (ca. 1346 to the mid-nineteenth century) begins with the Black Death (ca. 1346–ca. 1353).
The last pandemic (the mid-19th to the mid-20th century) is dubbed “The Third Pandemic.”
The issue is – such seemingly simple classifications obfuscate more than clarify how plague actually struck humans, and it ends up becoming a big, unclear system. This “tripartite classification” hindered the nuances for scholarly research. Specifically, the Justinianic Plague and “first pandemic” terminology are used to describe the same event, even though the Justinianic Plague is also used to refer only to the first phase of the first pandemic.
It ends up being a big negative feedback loop: the more unclear the terminology, the higher the tendency for scholars to simply group everything under some big umbrella term, and this all contributed to the rise of the overarching “plague concept” by expanding and exaggerating plagues’ actual effects in history.
Treating Covid-19 like past pandemics is dangerous
In my podcast interview with Dr. Eisenberg this June, he talked about the ways in which our thinking about historical pandemics (the Black Death, Influenza, etc.) and disease at large has changed over the 20th century. There are a series of distinct ways in which people thought about disease in 1920 vs. 1960 vs. 2000 vs. today, which have to do with scientific changes but also just how people approached disease. You may listen to our interview on any of your preferred podcasting platform.
I initially interviewed Dr. Eisenberg because he wrote the column below for the Washington Post:
Reading the article again today, I realize that it pretty much predicted exactly how the outcome and process have been playing out in the past few months:
Since the mid-1990s the media, scientists, government, the security apparatus and eventually historians began to perpetuate an “outbreak narrative” about pandemic disease typified in popular culture, for example by the 1995 movie “Outbreak.”
Each of these groups had its own reasons — whether generating more stories, fundraising or identifying new national security threats. The result was a feedback loop: studies emphasized potential dangers from infectious diseases and it led to more research, preparedness exercises and media attention to infectious diseases, which in turn led to more research funding.
We have internalized this cultural narrative to such an extent that we replay it as a script with each new outbreak — whether real or fictional. Once the pathogen’s identity is revealed to the public, a new name will become commonplace. The government will reassure the public that everything is safe (until it isn’t). Dissenters will critique the government for failing to prepare adequately. The media will publicize the identity of the source (almost always foreign), trace the pathogen’s transmission and headline the number of infected and dead. Doctors will heroically risk their lives to fight the disease and cure the pandemic.
You may learn more about Dr. Eisenberg’s work through his podcast “Infectious Historians,” where he interviews many interesting voices in history and beyond to talk about pandemics, epidemiology, and public health at large.
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