Epidemic

The term epidemic (from the Greek epi-, for “upon,” and -demos, for a populace as a political unit) is used in modern medicine to refer to outbreaks of infectious and noncommunicable diseases affecting human communities rather than just an individual or her and his immediate social environment. Epidemics have attracted analyses and commentaries concerning their social, political, and economic impact for millennia. Indeed, the emergence of history in classical Greece as a method for examining the past coincides with such approaches to epidemics, with Thucydides’s account of the “plague of Athens” being the first historical account of an epidemic and the first work to frame a disease outbreak in sociological and anthropological terms (Orwin 1988). In both medical and nonmedical narratives articulated in Europe since the initial iteration of the term in the Hippocratic Corpus, ideas around the “epidemic” became entangled with shifting aetiological and epistemological frameworks and with associated political, cosmological, and moral configurations of “plague” and “pestilence” (Gardner 2019; Slack 1992; F. Snowden 2020). At the same time, whether through exchange and translation or through conquest and colonization, European ideas about epidemics impacted and were in turn shaped by non-European frameworks of diseases affecting human communities, such as Wab_ā (Arabic) and _wenyi (Chinese) (Hanson 2011; Stearns 2011; Varlik 2015). At the end of the nineteenth century, bacteriology provided a new ontological framework for diseases that fostered an integration of medical approaches to epidemics in Western medicine and the propagation of the latter’s framing of epidemics across the globe within the context of colonialism (Latour 1988; Worboys 2000; Chakrabarti 2012).