Contagion: Perspectives from Pre-Modern Societies (review)

Lawrence I. Conrad and Dominik Wujastyk, eds. Contagion: Perspectives from Pre-Modern Societies. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate 2000. xviii + 224 pp. $79.75 (0-7546-0258-3).

During the last twenty-five years or so, there has been an increasing interest among historians of medicine for East-West comparative approaches—the twenty-two symposia held in Japan between 1976 and 1997 under the sponsorship of the Taniguchi Foundation having been among the most outstanding sustained initiatives in this line. The growing assumption has been that by showing the affinities and differences between diverse medical systems, comparative analysis will throw light on their specific origins and development as well as on the cultural links that they have established with each other throughout history.

Contagion: Perspectives from Pre-Modern Societies contains nine papers originally presented at a conference held at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in 1993. In one way or another, all of them explore the notion of contagion by means of different case studies in a number of Eastern and Western premodern societies—namely, three in China (by Shigehisa Kuriyama, Chia-Feng Chang, and Christopher Cullen), two in India (by Rahul Peter Das and Kenneth G. Zysk), and four more in Old-Testament Israel (Elinor Lieber), ancient Greece (Vivian Nutton), early Islam (Lawrence I. Conrad), and Latin medieval Europe (François-Olivier Touati). They focus on periods in the history of these cultures ranging from the preclassical to early modern times, and deal with complaints like smallpox, leprosy, pestilences, skin diseases, and the kewu—a Chinese sort of child's possession by an alien agency—by resorting to both medical and nonmedical (religious, legal, philosophical, literary, and so on) historical sources.

In modern terms, the concept of contagion applies to those infectious diseases that are transmissible from an ill individual to a healthy one. But the transmissibility of certain complaints is a sort of universal experience that most premodern societies have explained in some way. As all the authors agree in pointing out, this notion appears not to be sharply defined or widely used in any society under scrutiny, nor does it exclusively apply to those diseases we currently characterize as infectious ones. They show, on the contrary, that it is usually instrumental in explaining a great number of physical and mental complaints and moral evils, due to natural or supernatural agencies and transmissible through such distinct ways as contact, heredity, magic, wichtcraft, and so on. Therefore, claiming to isolate the complaints currently counting as medical from the moral and religious ones appears to be an entirely artificial and senseless exercise.

A general emphasis has been put on the risks of any kind of "presentism": we are warned to beware the words that act as false friends; to avoid easy generalizations in approaching millenary cultures as if they had not changed throughout the times, and to always contextualize as much as possible the texts under scrutiny; and to be prudent in evaluating the always fragmentary evidence from most of these premodern cultures. Except for the paper "Old Testament 'Leprosy,' Contagion and Sin" by Elinor Lieber, who insists on basing her main claims on the practice of retrospective diagnosis, all the case studies collected in this volume cannot but reinforce the argument for incommensurability between premodern and modern conceptions of disease.

On the whole, this volume presents an attractive insight into the complexities of a key issue in any medical system and invites scholars to develop further research by suggesting a number of exciting questions. Last but not least, the book has been carefully produced and includes a comprehensive index that is a model of its kind.