The Concept of Contagion in Medicine, Literature, and Religion (review)

Saul Jarcho. The Concept of Contagion in Medicine, Literature, and Religion. Malabar, Fla.: Krieger, 2000. xi + 98 pp. $14.50 (1-57524-159-5).

This attractive little book is a guide to resources, up to the sixteenth century, for the benefit of students of contagion. In short chapters on (1) the Greeks, (2) the Romans, (3) the Moslems, (4) religion and irreligion in antiquity and afterward, and (5) Leonicenus and Fracastorius, Saul Jarcho identifies writings and passages from author after author and, in summary form (from a paragraph to a few pages), indicates the relevance or otherwise to the notion of a disease passing from one person to another, or to the spread of, say, vices within society.

Jarcho shows that, ever since Thucydides' description of the "plague" of Athens (430-427 b.c.), the notion of disease spreading from one person to another is regularly irregular, up to the time of Fracastorius (ca. 1478-1553). It is made clear that the concept of contagion contrasts with the etiologies of disease found in the Hippocratic Corpus: (i) meteorological, geographic, and regional or local, or (ii) the effects of diet, exercise, and personal habits. In his references and quotations from literature and religion, Jarcho also offers an important reminder that early ideas of contagion referred not only to infectious disease, but also to moral issues: in the absence of being able to identify visually the seed of a disease, a close analogy exists between the spread of a disease and of moral turpitude.

Many readers may well be disappointed that Jarcho provides very little discussion on the vexatious difficulties in interpreting many passages, of which he is clearly aware. One has always to recognize that alternative explanations exist for "catching" a disease from another person, such as a common environmental source. After all, the miasmatist sanitarians were a prominent feature of the nineteenth-century public health movement. Moreover, there have always been epidemiologic puzzles such as why outbreaks occurred in some places and not others, and why some people succumbed and others did not.

Jarcho's citations to the secondary literature are sparse. Although he references penetrating scholarship by Vivian Nutton, he makes no mention of a fine review by Margaret Pelling. ¹ I suggest that Pelling's chapter is essential background reading in order to appreciate fully Jarcho's work and his concluding remark: "in the part of our investigation that has to do with religion and many other realms of human thought and action, we have observed a rarity--a historical process which, despite vicissitudes, comes close to being a constant" (p. 64).

Perhaps Saul Jarcho wisely felt that entering into detailed discussions on various interpretations was a quagmire from which extrication would take years. He died at age ninety-four, a few months after the book appeared. His catholic contributions to medicine and its history have been acknowledged elsewhere. This last volume illustrates, above all, what D. M. Fox has called Jarcho's "romance with enquiry"--a model for us all. ²

John D. Crellin
Memorial University of Newfoundland

 

Notes

1. Margaret Pelling, "Contagion/Germ Theory/Specificity," in Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine, ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993), 1: 309-34).

2. Daniel M. Fox, "Saul Jarcho's Contribution to the History of Medicine," J. Urban Health: Bull. New York Acad. Med., 1998, 75: 87-88.

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