How China Became the "Cradle of Smallpox": Transformations in Discourse, 1726-2002

We often distinguish between the knowledge of the past and that of the modern world . . . We could say that ancient falsehoods and modern truths relate to each other like the two revolutions of a single spiral.

—Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France

From the perspective of the twenty-first century, the World Health Assembly's 1980 declaration that smallpox had been completely eradicated looks naive—even hopelessly so. Not only has the declaration been compromised by the threat of bioterrorism, the narrative conceit of humanism on which it was grounded (the romance of man over nature, the desire for an unambiguous resolution) has been severely undermined. The declaration reveals a deep-seated desire on the part of its authors to bring an end to a horrible disease, but it also conceals an impulse to apply narrative closure on a grand scale, to make of smallpox a story with a conclusion—or a conclusion with a story, as the case may be. At least some of the unsettling power of the bioterrorism threat, in other words, goes beyond the material threat of the reeruption of the disease to the substantially troubling symbolic or ideological lack of narrative closure that such a reemergence implies.

From a historiographical perspective, the interesting thing about this anxiety is what it suggests, almost incidentally, about the residual relationships between ideology and disease. We may declare smallpox a thing of the past and put that declaration in writing, but the mere threat of its reemergence—the anxiety sans disease—shows that its symbolic and ideological associations, like antibodies, are still present in the historical unconscious.¹

Such narratives of anxiety and closure take on even more ideological freight when paired with understandings of premodern China and its historical relationship to disease. Here, narratives of disease could be said to exist in a coaxial relationship to narratives of national identity, complicated by the colonial imperatives that shaped relations between China and the West and the highly contextual scientific fictions that emerged to describe and to determine these relationships. In the nineteenth century, for instance, China in the Western popular imagination became not only the "Sick Man of Asia," but, more specifically, the "original home of the plague," the perceived source of the cholera in Europe (also known as "the pestilence of the East"), and for some—not coincidentally—the "cradle of smallpox."² At the same time, medical-colonial ideologies of race and national character, introduced to China in the early 1800s by medical missionaries, were developing simultaneously with germ theory, anesthetics, and, later, concepts of hygiene. These ideologies worked to symbolically fuse the association of China with various diseases both with narratives of modernity and with a sort of scientific neonationalism.³ Carol Benedict has noted, regarding images of the plague, that "in the eyes of many nineteenth-century Europeans and Americans, plague marked China as a hygienically 'backward' country that continued to incubate a medieval disease in the modern era. For them, plague was yet another indication of the deterioration of the so-called Sick Man of Asia."⁴ Conceptualizations of health and hygiene in this formative period thus became thoroughly imbricated with conceptualizations of modernity, so that the presence of disease in China—cholera, plague, smallpox—was interpreted both as corresponding to, and evidence of, a lack of modernity. The legacy of this discourse can be found in (Western) narratives about SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and its origins today.

Tracing the ways that ideas about smallpox and Chinese identity circulated between China and the West will lay the groundwork for the larger question of what happens when ideas about illness and identity meet ideological imperatives. How were ideas about cultures—more specifically, ideas associating Chinese culture with illness—circulated between China and Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? How were sources subsequently used or appropriated and why? And what was the product of this appropriation—what is its legacy today? Here I investigate the historical context of Father Martial Cibot's seminal late-eighteenth-century essay "De la petite vérole" ("On...