Cannibalism and Contagion: Framing Syphilis in Counter-Reformation Italy*

Eamon, William

doi:10.1163/157338298x00013

Cited by 15 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…In the short-run, these negative effects on life satisfaction raise the probability of scapegoating. The literature shows how some epidemics have resulted in the scapegoating of minorities ( Nelkin and Gilman, 1988 , Eamon, 1998 , Craddock, 2004 , Lin et al, 2015 ).…”

Section: Theoretical Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Epidemics, pandemics, and social conflict: Lessons from the past and possible scenarios for COVID-19

et al. 2021

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Section: Theoretical Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Epidemics, pandemics, and social conflict: Lessons from the past and possible scenarios for COVID-19

et al. 2021

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“…2 By the reckoning of Dorothy Nelkin and Sander Gilman: ‘Blaming has always been a means to make mysterious and devastating diseases comprehensible and therefore possibly controllable’. 3 Roy Porter concurred with Susan Sontag: ‘deadly diseases’ especially when ‘there is no cure to hand’ and the ‘aetiology … is obscure … spawn sinister connotations’. 4 And most recently, from earthquake wrecked, cholera–hit Haiti, Paul Farmer has proclaimed: ‘Blame was, after all, a calling card of all transnational epidemics’.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Pandemics: waves of disease, waves of hate from the Plague of Athens to A.I.D.S.*

Cohn

2012

Historical Research

106

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This article briefly surveys the history of pandemics in the West, contesting long-held assumptions that epidemics sparked hatred and blame of the 'Other', and that it was worse when diseases were mysterious as to their causes and cures. The article finds that blame and hate were rarely connected with pandemics in history. In antiquity, epidemics more often brought societies together rather than dividing them as continued to happen with some diseases such as influenza in modernity. On the other hand, some diseases such as cholera were more regularly blamed than others and triggered violence even after their agents and mechanisms of transmission had become well known.In 2009 the so-called Mexican swine flu fuelled widespread fear of contagion but, contrary to expectation, failed to spark hatred and violence. Given the climate of mounting Mexican drug wars and U.S. antipathies towards Mexicans crossing borders and competing for jobs in a recession, this absence may strike us as especially surprising. Perhaps had mortality rates soared, the spectre of racial, class and religious prejudice may have loomed large, as with certain pandemics in the past. Are a disease's mortality rates, its fatality rates and rapidity of dissemination, or fear of a new and mysterious disease or a strain of it the critical factors that determine whether an epidemic will trigger hate and violence? Or does the pandemichate nexus depend less on the character of the disease and more on underlying social and political conditions already in existence at a particular time and place? Or do any of these explanations work? To what extent were scapegoating, violence against victims and the innocent, or 'the hate of class in times of epidemics', to cite René Baehrel, universal or near universal aspects of big epidemics? 1 More recent historians of mentalities and medicine have thought much the same as Baehrel: hate has been the normal consequence of pandemics. According to Carlo Ginzburg, "the prodigious trauma of great pestilences intensified the search for a scapegoat on which fears, hatreds and tension of all kind could be discharged"? 2 By the reckoning of Dorothy Nelkin and Sander Gilman: 'Blaming has always been a means to make mysterious and devastating diseases comprehensible and therefore possibly controllable'. 3 Roy Porter concurred with Susan Sontag: 'deadly diseases' especially when 'there is no cure to hand' and the 'aetiology … is obscure … spawn sinister

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“…28 The alleged cannibalism exhibited by soldiers during these wars demonstrated a failure of human reason and a descent into the bestial. 29 In turn, soldiers could be regarded as the lowest of earthly creatures; at the siege of Metz in 1552 the Emperor Charles V compared them to 'caterpillars, insects and grubs which eat buds and other fruits of the earth.' 30 In Anton Francesco Doni's utopian I mondi [The Worlds] (1552-3) the bestial nature of men is further highlighted and the conventional hierarchy of rational human animal and irrational non-human animal reversed with reference to recovered classical ideas of the transmigration of souls.…”

Section: ****mentioning

confidence: 99%