Professor Sam Cohn (University of Glasgow, IASH Honorary Fellow):
Towards A Conclusion
Epidemics: Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS
Taking its cue from a wide array of scholars and pundits on AIDS from the 1980s to the present, my book began as bent on hate. I sought to investigate a consensus: invariably, epidemics in past times provoked class hatred, blamed the ‘other’, and victimized the victims of epidemic diseases. Such hate and violence, moreover, more readily erupted when diseases were mysterious without known cures or preventive measures. The evidence for these proclamations rested, however, on a handful of examples--the Black Death, the Great Pox at the end of the sixteenth century, cholera riots in Europe during the nineteenth century, and AIDS, centred almost exclusively on the U.S. experience. Now, after investigating thousands of descriptions of epidemics from ones reaching back to an epidemic during Pharaoh Mempses’s First Dynasty (c. 2920 BCE) to the distrust and violence evoked with Ebola in 2014-15, this book turns on its head the essential plot of epidemic’s socio-psychological consequences across time. First, historians post-AIDS have missed an essential ingredient of the history of Epidemics. Instead of sparking hate and blame across time, epidemics have shown a remarkable power to unifying societies across class, race, ethnicity and religion. Second, instead of spurring hate and violence when diseases were mysterious, that is, almost without exception before the ‘Laboratory Revolution’ of the late nineteenth century, modernity was the great incubator of a disease-hate nexus. Third, even with those diseases that have provoked hate as with smallpox, poliomyelitis, plague, and cholera, blaming ‘the other’ or victimizing diseased victims was rare. Instead, this history of epidemics and their socio-psychological consequences is much more varied and richer than historians and pundits have heretofore allowed.
Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities Work in Progress talk