The Crisis of Crisis

Rethinking Epidemics from Hong Kong

Bibliographic Data

ID15027040
AuthorsRobert Peckham (0000-0001-8370-609X, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume94
Issue4
Pages658-669
Publication date2020-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueBulletin of the history of medicine (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0007-5140 • E-ISSN: 1086-3176
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/bhm.2020.0088
PMID33775945
OpenAlexW3144555010
LanguageEN
Citations received2

Writing in the late 1980s in the midst of the AIDS crisis in the United States, historian Charles Rosenberg suggested that epidemics furnished "useful sampling devices" for examining "fundamental patterns of social value and institutional practice." This paper reconsiders Rosenberg's seminal essay and the central question it addresses-what is an epidemic?-from the vantage of a historian in Hong Kong working on colonial and postcolonial Asia in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper begins by setting Rosenberg's essay in its historical context and then considers whether explanatory models developed in a Northern American context may be applicable (or not) to other non-Western settings. The paper makes the case for a re-interrogation of the "epidemic" as an epidemiological and social category, and it concludes by suggesting that COVID-19 is challenging underlying assumptions about what a "crisis" is to the extent that the pandemic may be understood as a crisis of crisis itself

Colonialism · Context (archaeology) · Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) · Criminology · Development economics · Economics · Pandemic · Political economy · Political science · Sociology · Value (mathematics) · Health Promotion and Cardiovascular Prevention · History · Law · Medicine · Public Health Policies and Education · Race, Genetics, and Society