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An eye-opening discussion of the ways disease shapes urban society

Disease may not discriminate, but it helps those who do. In this fascinating book, Susan Craddock examines the role of disease and health policy in the construction of race, gender, and class, and in urban development in nineteenth- and twentieth-century San Francisco. An absorbing look at the role of disease and health policy in the construction of race, gender, and class in urban development during nineteenth- and twentieth-century San Francisco. Susan Craddock considers tuberculosis, plague, smallpox, and syphilis as diseases whose devastations were derived in part from their use as political tools and disciplinary mechanisms

An examination of early American literature that highlights how racial divides exacerbated—and were exacerbated by—the spread of infection

In April of 1721, the HMS Seahorse arrived in Boston from the West Indies, causing a smallpox epidemic that would plague the city for the next year. Of its 12,000 inhabitants, nearly fifty percent were infected, and 900 people died. Like the coronavirus pandemic that began in 2020, the outbreak also brought to the surface deep divides in the social fabric of colonial New England and laid the groundwork for racialized political inequities that we continue to grapple with today.

In Contagion’s Wake examines a range of American outbreak narratives, both historical and fictional, written between the early 1700s and the early 1900s—from the rise of inoculation through the advent of germ theory. Author Kelly L. Bezio argues that during this period, literature about communicable disease was dominated by white authors, such as Cotton Mather and Edgar Allen Poe, who tended to privilege white suffering and survival while obscuring Black suffering and vulnerability. Black authors, however, such as Olaudah Equiano and Frances E.W. Harper, developed variations on plot structures, metaphors, and imagery that drew upon contagion to represent racial injustice and further the cause of Black liberation.

The diverse texts Bezio analyzes vary extensively in genre and geographical location, and in the illnesses that feature in their pages. Significant disorders from the era, including yellow fever, smallpox, consumption, and cholera, make frequent appearances, as do less culturally dominant diseases such as St. Anthony’s Fire. In Contagion’s Wake contends that representations of communicable disease should not be understood only as within their own historical moment; rather, they function more like a DNA code for our present time.

Medical Misinformation in Early Modern Germany examines how doctors, writers, and printers in sixteenth-century Germany responded to the rapid expansion of print and its implications for medical knowledge. The spread of printed texts generated widespread suspicion about print’s reliability as a conduit of information and led writers to reflect on questions of audience, vernacularity, and medical authority in their responses to disease. The book investigates literary texts alongside popular vernacular medical pamphlets on the major epidemic diseases of the period––plague, syphilis, and the English sweating sickness––to reveal a widespread concern with the impact of printed texts on public health. During the 1529 outbreak of the English sweating sickness, this concern culminated in writers’ use of a “rhetoric of virality,” explicitly comparing the circulation of texts to the spread of disease, as they confronted the parallel contagions of disease and information.