Editor's Preface

The decision to focus this special volume of Literature and Medicine on notions of infection and contagion was made long ago, in the spring of 2000. This topic appealed to me essentially because it seemed so capacious and inclusive, allowing us to encompass a spectrum of issues, ranging from the physiological to the social, the moral, the epistemological, and the ideological. Likewise, I felt that the literary horizons for this topic were no less wide, since testimony might come from Sophocles, the Book of Job, Boccaccio, Defoe, Camus, and Kushner, to mention some of the most prominent writers who might be addressed. Because the issue was conceived well before the events of September 11, 2001, the contributors, as well as the editors, could hardly avoid a feeling of "the uncanny" as submissions arrived for our consideration. Although only one of our articles, Tina Young Choi's, deals overtly with issues of anthrax and smallpox, it is fair to say that the entire volume seems timely in a way we could never have anticipated, nor desired.

I still believe in that cornucopia of issues and writers. But the post-September 11 world in which this volume will appear has inevitably sharpened and honed our collective views on the reach and significance of these two issues: infection and contagion. Our themes now preoccupy many people in the United States and elsewhere who have very little interest in "literature and medicine." What may have seemed an academic topic has now become a concern for the person in the street, largely because of the bioterrorism ramifications of these issues. And yet, this is a journal devoted to the intersections of literature and medicine, not to discussions of foreign policy or the nightmares of chemical and biological warfare as such. What, then, I wondered, would our final set of articles actually look like? Just how topical were we going to be?

What I found is that the gravity of our topic required no political drum-beating, no overt rhetoric of "relevance" and "warning." To be sure, parallels with our uneasy moment are drawn in many of these articles, and they are spelled out still more insistently in my own concluding essay. Yet, these scholarly close-grained analyses of the discourse of disease and infection in early modern England, of the ways in which plague—as disease and as trope—is enlisted by such writers as Shakespeare, Defoe, and Dickens, make unmistakably clear just how rich, complex, and far-reaching these matters have always been. It seems fair to say that every one of the articles in this volume is, at bottom, speculative, engaged precisely by the difficult-to-measure extensions and cultural ramifications of our topic. William W. E. Slights and Louis F. Qualtiere—professors respectively of English and pathology—show us how the "pox" is variously represented in literature and medicine at the very moment when it first emerges on the English scene, constituting a challenge that is at once medical and rhetorical. Both Margaret Healy and Roger Lund focus their sights on the "plague tradition" in eighteenth-century England and help us to understand how echoing and resonant such a tradition is, how much social and doctrinal and ideological business gets done, thanks to this target-filled discourse. Tina Young Choi elects a nineteenth-century English text, Dickens's Bleak House, as her primary "exhibit" for a discussion that centers ultimately on the diagnostic crises that epidemics can bring about, and she suggestively prefaces her analysis by revisiting the anthrax scares of recent memory. All four of these articles circle willy-nilly about the debates (and mysteries) concerning the nature of disease transmission, and it is not far-fetched to see in this cluster of articles the actual gathering form of a centuries-long engagement with disease in England as well as a spectrum of representational strategies that carry out the peculiar traffic which is charted in this volume: the transformation of disease into discourse. Together, these essays constitute a range of vistas...