Re-Writing Pandemic Histories

The COVID-19 pandemic, much like the generation-defining HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, has generated renewed public interest in the history of pandemics, especially their beginnings and endings. Indeed, over the past few years there has been an avalanche of reflection pieces on what past pandemics can offer as mediating devices between past and present, and what clues they offer about the effectiveness of public health measures and containment strategies. Others have drawn on historical examples to make sense of the current social response to particular epidemic outbreaks: igniting forms of racial prejudice, deepening mistrust of experts, and widespread resistance to government mandates to vaccinate.1 The killer germs genre of epidemic story-telling has gone into viral overdrive, framing COVID-19 as the realization of some of the worst fears of the last thirty years.2 For historians, the COVID-19 pandemic has also offered an opportunity to pause and categorically rethink the methods, approaches, and utility of studying pandemics, and to parse out the epistemological and practical delineations among epidemic, pandemic, and endemic, which are often conflated in popular and even scholarly literature.3 Robert Peckham, for instance, has warned against a “lessons approach” to studying past pandemics, one that reduces our methodological work to neat and tidy analogues.4 By contrast, recent scholarly work drawing from anthropology, ecology, environmental history, and human-animal studies has sought to broaden our thinking about pandemics, from ideas of syndemicity and webs of causation to human-animal relations and planetary health.5

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) · Infectious disease (medical specialty) · Pandemic · History · Internal Medicine · Medicine · Migration, Health, Geopolitics, Historical Geography · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies