Here’s the wild part, the thing from 2020 to 2020: That schism – that conflict between public health and private well-being, between personal freedom and common good – is as old as pandemics. The germ of the idea was, of course, the idea of the organism.
In the mid-1800s, doctors and scientists were beginning to get around the long-held idea that a disease could be caused by small, invisible rapists jumping from person to person – “contagium animatum,” as 16th century thinkers put it. They did not know what viruses or bacteria were, but they did know that something was causing illness.
The contagionists had the other number: scientists who named the researcher Edwin Ackerknecht in 1948 “anticontagionists. “Oh, they believed that some diseases were spread by some agent, face-to-face. Smallpox and syphilis, perhaps. Those were contagious. But he didn’t epidemics– severe fever, cholera, or the plague, things that seemed to spread every season, or in certain places, or just among certain people. Nobody knew how. Little did they know about food and waterborne pathogens, about the differences between viruses and bacteria, about surface-borne “fomites” that in some cases transmitted disease, while in which drips and aerosolas would produce in others. Without that? Well, maybe it was something atmospheric – a cloud of sickness, a miasma, maybe even a “filth” of poverty and pre-sanitary cities. (He notes that scientists are still fighting over the idea of contagium animatum in the air, even today.)
But the anticontagionists knew one thing for sure. These three major diseases – sometimes accompanied by typhus – were the ones that, since the 14th century, have forced governments to take population – level measures to control them. That meant quarantines, travel restrictions, business closures – something we call locks today. And that made nuts the anticontagionists. They said locks were, then as now, bad for business; resulting losses were higher than those caused by the illness itself. In the middle of the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, anything that hindered industry was a barrier to freedom itself. “Quarantines meant, for the fast-growing class of merchants and businessmen, a source of losses, a limit on expansion, a bureaucratic control tool that it was no longer willing to accept,” Ackerknecht wrote. “Contagionism, through its links to the old bureaucratic powers, would be under the suspicion of all Liberals, trying to minimize state bans. So anticontagionists were not just scientists, they were reformers, fighting for individual freedom and trading against the shackles of dishonesty. ”
Also, by saying that disease came from lack of sanitation and poor hygiene, the pro-filth group was sometimes quietly and sometimes strongly associating disease with ethnicity and socioeconomic status. It was immunosocial social Darwinism; if poor or inhuman people became ill first, or more often, this proved to some “reformers” that these people had made bad personal choices (rather than showing a failure in the systems around them). In that light, by identifying filt as a generator of epidemics, it set the stage for a hygienic movement, demonstrated the moral and physical dominance of external insects, and provided a philosophy for “slum cleaning”. and residential zoning laws. Squint at redesign and you will see not only the geography of racism but also colonization sanonire cordon.
To be fair, as one historian points out, paltry science suggested that quarantines caused epilepsy. worse, as they increased the immune and lousy conditions that spread the disease. And if you read “miasma” as “the conditions that make a disease spread,” well, that’s also the point I’m trying to make, so… yeah. These were well-intentioned scientific arguments that also happened to be politically and economically motivated, philosophical, racist.