Microbiography and Resistance in the Human Culture Medium

Perhaps it is not an accident . . . that, in the case of diphtheria,—in the control of which modern bacteriological methods have been most effective since the late [eighteen-]nineties, thus creating interference with normal evolution,—we are just beginning to observe the return of excessively toxic and deadly cases. . . . It is not at all unlikely that the successful control of an epidemic disease through several generations may interfere with the more permanently effective, though far more cruel, processes by which nature gradually immunizes a race.

—Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History (1934) ¹

For the past fifty years medical training had been built on the assumption that microbes were dumb.

—Patrick Lynch, Omega (1998) ²

Writing at the very beginning of the antibiotic era, Hans Zinsser observed signs of bacterial resistance to human efforts at fighting disease. He identified a rise in "excessively toxic and deadly" strains of diphtheria in response to "modern bacteriological methods" such as vaccination with serum antitoxin (p.67). This observation leads him to try to recount the control of epidemic disease from a perspective wider than that of a single human generation. To convey this perspective, he takes the biomedical concept of immunization and makes it a metaphor for the evolutionary relationship between nature, which he figures as a kind of physician, and its patient, the human race. The effect of this metaphor is to diminish the perspective of the individual human. In order to avoid disease's long-term revenge on the species, Zinsser implies, humans should become patients, relinquishing the project of active disease prevention to another agent, a personified nature. My interest here is in how the human role in infection narratives seems constantly threatened with this kind of displacement, both by the infectious agent's microscopic spatial scale and by the disease's evolutionary temporal scale. Thinking about microbes can pose challenges to anthropocentrism. How do stories about microbial disease respond to these challenges?

I will consider four narratives, two nonfiction works of popular science and two novels, medical thrillers. The nonfiction works try to provide the microscopic perspective. Zinsser does this, as we shall see, offering the experience of "looking at the germ's life from its own point of view" (p. 19). The novels I have chosen use a kind of evolutionary scale. They place their action within a plot of mutual and antagonistic resistance between human and microbe. These two kinds of narratives, with their different strategies, point to one reason for the particular fascination evoked by stories of infection: narratives about interactions between microbes and people lead readers to imagine themselves in relation to nonhuman spatial and temporal scales. These scales, the narratives imply, may conceal plots in which human individual subjectivity is endangered.

What Zinsser calls nature's "vaccination program," the gradual evolutionary process by which the less susceptible survive and the disease's effects become milder within a population, is "cruel" because it makes no special allowances for the individual (p. 68). Most humans will always act to reduce the suffering of those with whom we can identify before we will concern ourselves in any practical way with the health of future generations of our species. The human response to microbial evolution, then, tends to be shaped by individualist points of view, based on imaginative identification embedded in narratives. To resist this response by attempting to identify with the race or the species or nature is, sooner or later, no matter how rational, to seem cruel.

At present, apparently on the brink of a post-antibiotic era, we may find that Zinsser's observation about the return of defeated pathogens has renewed significance, not just because of its apparent prescience but because it exemplifies the way in which thinking about epidemics can destabilize our perspectives on human illness and its causes. Promethean tales about egocentric meddling are always close to the surface when we think about our methods being resisted by microbes. Have we, in...