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

From the first sentence to the last, the clarity of the author’s prose aids the reader in grasping what might otherwise be a relatively technical topic. This clarity helps one locate the thesis, though it cannot be distilled into a single sentence. In brief, Jon D. Lee argues that any disease has two dimensions. The physical manifestation of a disease, if severe, arrests the human attention, leading to the second dimension, which is that the disease cannot receive adequate treatment as a purely physical phenomenon but must be understood from the vantage point of perception. Perception is the sometimes elusive psychological dimension that makes diseases terrifying. In other words, perception triggers fear born of many deaths, some of them hideous. This is the kind of fear that grips the reader of Edgar Allen Poe’s tales. One need think only of Roderick and Madeline Ussher. One can see it in European art of the 14^th century, when the black death caused severe dislocations in society. Lee is right to argue that disease grips the body and the psyche. Note that this is not the fear that President Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted to mock early in the Great Depression. This is the fear of death. Perception and fear inspire a torrent of questions. When and where did a pathogen originate? How does it spread? Does a cure exist? It is obvious that any disease that does not have a cure has an analogue in the diseases that plagued humans in the era before modern medicine.

This book’s place in the literature would be more secure had it sent roots into the past to compare with the great killers of prehistory, antiquity, the Middle Ages, and even modernity. The near extirpation of the Native Americans was after all a modern event. The author’s focus on viral diseases should form a natural bridge to the past when other viral infections, like influenza and smallpox, were horrid killers. Indeed, influenza remains lethal even if it does not kill in numbers sufficient to warrant media attention. Such comparisons might have enriched this book. Nonetheless, this book is a significant contribution to scholarship, primarily because it has the feel of a journalistic attempt to grapple with recent disease outbreaks rather than the historian’s attempt to build context over time. Students of history might wish for more context, but this is not always easy to do when recent events impinge so strongly on the story.

An Epidemic of Rumors is organized by the viral diseases under investigation: SARS and AIDS in Chapter 2, SARS in Chapters 3–6, and H1N1 in Chapter 7. It is difficult to know whether the text should have been more balanced by giving other viral diseases a chapter each or whether the author should have confined his investigation to SARS, which is already so prominent in the text. After all SARS, AIDS, and H1N1 are not the only viral diseases of consequence, but it is possible that the author might respond that historians have neglected these three. In the case of AIDS, this would not be a sound defence. Matters of coverage are important because the author is not a physician, scientist (virologist especially), or historian of medicine. As an assistant professor of English, Lee might have coupled this study with the perception of diseases in literature. We have seen that Poe would lend himself to such treatment. The same is true of Albert Camus and perhaps to the characters in Malraux’s The Royal Way. These texts would satisfy the desire for a more or less recent examination of diseases.

Obviously, perception runs much deeper than media coverage. It is intertwined with the way humans construct literature, art, and music. It is this larger sense of perception that seems to be out of Lee’s grasp. One does not wish to be too critical. Lee is...