An Epidemic of Rumors: How Stories Shape Our Perceptions of Disease by Jon D. Lee (review)

Going back at least two millennia, cultures around the world have developed narratives to help them make sense of the arrival and consequences of pandemic diseases, and modern populations are no exception. In this book, Jon D. Lee brings both folkloric and medical perspectives to bear in order to better understand the stories that we tell about devastating outbreaks. Focusing on the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic as his primary example, he analyzes a range of material to show how the public and official responses to SARS were similar to, or divergent from, reactions to previous diseases as they surfaced in the public consciousness.

As Lee notes, the rumors that are generated during outbreaks can have massive medical, financial, and personal implications, so it behooves all of us to have a better sense of how these stories evolve and operate and what they really mean once one gets below the surface of jokes, warnings, and conspiracy theories. To address all of this, he has put together a book with an easy-to-follow structure, moving from the initial introductory notes to a rather detailed timeline of key events in the SARS outbreak that provides more than ample background for the analysis that follows. All of that, though, is just the setup for the subsequent discussion, and the analytical chapters are the most interesting. These sections focus on the nature of the narratives resulting from the SARS epidemic (and others); investigating what they can tell us about perspectives on causality; dangerous locations (in a section on gathering-place stories); xenophobia; stigmatization; and folk medicine. Finally, there is a comparison of the SARS stories to those surrounding the H1N1 influenza outbreak in 2009, as well as a concluding chapter that considers how public health agencies might address future narratives based on the trends uncovered in this study.

An Epidemic of Rumors is an interesting book, and folklorists, epidemiolo-gists, and public health scholars, particularly, will find the contents and the analyses to be very useful. From an oral historical perspective, however, it is less satisfying. I hoped that the “stories” portion of the title suggested that there might be more in the way of new, primary, oral source material, and while Lee did conduct some interviews as part of his research, they often fade into the background. Material gleaned from the Internet, e-mails, and published news sources, as well as comparative research done by other folklore and medical scholars, seem to feature more heavily than the oral sources in much of the work. There are short excerpts from eight of the twelve interviews scattered throughout that are well integrated into the analysis, but readers with more of an interest in oral sources should not expect the interviews to be the main focus of the book.

Because this is a folkloric work and not an oral historical one, it would be unfair to expect the author to broach issues normally addressed in the latter methodology, such as the provenance and archival status of interviews or adherence to a particular set of best-practices guidelines. From a more general scholarly standpoint, though, some additional information on the recordings and their narrators would have been useful. What stands out the most is the lack of any information on sampling procedure. Most qualitative researchers, regardless of discipline, want to know how a set of interviewees was identified and selected and if it was a random process or if the author meant to cover a more representative sample of affected individuals. While the information that prefaces some of the interview excerpts provides some contextual details, there is still no sense of the overall plan with the interviews as a source, and that makes it more difficult to interpret how to understand them and privilege them (or not) relative to other sources.

Overall, An Epidemic of Rumors is a thoughtful analysis of the reactions of laypeople, medical...