The Manchurian Plague and COVID-19: China, the United States, and the "Sick Man," Then and Now.

In this article, I explore the historical resonances between China's 1911 pneumonic plague and our current situation with COVID-19. At the turn of the 20th century, China was labeled "the Sick Man of the Far East": a once-powerful country that had become burdened by opium addiction, infectious disease, and an ineffective government. In 1911, this weakened China faced an outbreak of pneumonic plague in Manchuria that killed more than 60 000 people. After the 1911 plague, a revolutionized China radically restructured its approach to public health to eliminate the stigma of being "the Sick Man." Ironically, given the US mishandling of the COVID pandemic, observers in today's China are now calling the United States "the Sick Man of the West": a country burdened by opioid addiction, infectious disease, and an ineffective government. The historical significance of the phrase "Sick Man"-and its potential to now be associated with the United States-highlights the continued links between epidemic control and international status in a changing world. This historical comparison also reveals that plagues bring not only tragedy but also the opportunity for change.

Hong Kong Junk: Plague and the Economy of Chinese Things.

Histories of the Third Plague Pandemic, which diffused globally from China in the 1890s, have tended to focus on colonial efforts to regulate the movement of infected populations, on the state's draconian public health measures, and on the development of novel bacteriological theories of disease causation. In contrast, this article focuses on the plague epidemic in Hong Kong and examines colonial preoccupations with Chinese "things" as sources of likely contagion. In the 1890s, laboratory science invested plague with a new identity as an object to be collected, cultivated, and depicted in journals. At the same time, in the increasingly vociferous anti-opium discourse, opium was conceived as a contagious Chinese commodity: a plague. The article argues that rethinking responses to the plague through the history of material culture can further our understanding of the political consequences of disease's entanglement with economic and racial categories, while demonstrating the extent to which colonial agents "thought through things."

Plagued by kindness: contagious sympathy in Shakespearean drama.

This article considers Shakespeare's metaphors of transmission, contagion and infection in the light of period plague tracts, medical treatises and plague time literature. The author demonstrates how period conceptions of disease are predicated upon a notion of sympathetic transference and, consequently, how kindness, likeness and communication between characters in Shakespearean drama are complicated and fraught with period specific anxiety. This article situates Shakespearean literary texts within a precise historical and medical moment, considering how scientific conceptions contaminate dramatic text.

Perceptions and reactions with regard to pneumonic plague.

We assessed perceptions and likely reactions of 1,005 UK adults to a hypothetical terrorist attack involving pneumonic plague. Likely compliance with official recommendations ranged from good (98% would take antimicrobial drugs) to poor (76% would visit a treatment center). Perceptions about plague were associated with these intentions.

Thinking extreme social violence: the model of the literary plague.

The author uses literary plagues as a model for thinking psychoanalytically about the basic anxieties activated among perpetrators of sanctioned massacres. The model of the plague allows abstracting an underlying primitive psychological organization characterized by syncretism and a powerful anxiety of de-differentiation and confusion, leading characteristically to imitative behavior within the in-group as well as to the disavowal of the out-group members similarities to oneself, i.e. the disavowal of the other's humanity. Recognizing the historical and social foundations of discrimination and genocide, the author analyzes the interaction between group and individual processes that allow ordinary people to join daily acts of immoral violence. She dramatizes the model of the plague through a psychoanalytic reading of three literary plagues: Thebes' plague according to Sophocles, Camus's chronicle of the plague in Oran, and Saramago's meditation on the plague of white blindness.

[The plague: A disease that is still haunting our collective memory]. / La peste, une maladie qui hante encore notre mémoire collective.

Although the plague has practically disappeared from Europe since the beginning of the 20th century, it is still present in everyone's memory. Owing to three pandemics, it has left an indelible mark on mankind and has given rise to many popular phrases, paintings, books or more recently movies and video games. After a brief description of the plague as a disease, we will try to trace the history of the plague through some of the works of art it inspired and then to show how the plague is still haunting our collective memory.

Psychosocial effects of the 1994 plague outbreak in Surat, India.

The plague outbreak in Surat, India in September 1994 stirred a nationwide panic and a near international isolation of India. These are aspects that need serious attention. A large amount of damage to India's image and an immense economic loss occurred. Some advice for the future is suggested.

Bacteria and vampirism in cinema.

A vampire is a non-dead and non-alive chimerical creature, which, according to various folklores and popular superstitions, feeds on blood of the living to draw vital force. Vampires do not reproduce by copulation, but by bite. Vampirism is thus similar to a contagious disease contracted by intravascular inoculation with a suspected microbial origin. In several vampire films, two real bacteria were staged, better integrated than others in popular imagination: Yersinia pestis and Treponema pallidum. Bacillus vampiris was created for science-fiction. These films are attempts to better define humans through one of their greatest fears: infectious disease.

Stigma in the time of influenza: social and institutional responses to pandemic emergencies.

This article examines the role of stigma in social and institutional responses to infectious disease emergencies, to better understand and minimize these dynamics in the event of a pandemic of virulent influenza. In addition to their impact on human suffering, fear and stigma can seriously delay detection and treatment efforts, cooperation with contact tracing and isolation measures, and the effective distribution of resources for the prevention and control of infectious diseases. These dynamics are illustrated by the Indian plague epidemic of 1994, which occurred in a region where H5N1 influenza has been detected recently. Public fear and stigma also played a significant role in the social and institutional responses to the 1918 influenza pandemic. These historical models provide important lessons for pandemic preparedness and global health policy.

[The origins of the Pavilion Lazaretto: quarantine architecture between the 18th and 19th centuries]. / Los orígenes del Lazareto Pabellonario: la arquitectura cuarentenaria en el cambio del setecientos al ochocientos.

The model of pavilion lazaretto was built above the scientific basis established during the hospital reform process held in France on the lasts decades of the eighteenth century. The morphological solutions adopted for the new quarantine taxonomy has not been given by the example borrowed by the new typology of hospital as resulted in this discussion, but by existing quarantine and detention facilities in general. In this paper we will analyse all factors that have influenced in the configuration of this model of lazarettos.

[Lucretius and the meaning of the disease in "De Rerum natura"]. / Lucrezio e il senso della malattia nel de rerum natura.

In De Rerum natura disease is represented as a real event (the well known Athenian plague during the Peloponnesian war, already in Thucydides); Lucretius describes it with great clinical precision, using both Thucydidean text and quotations from C.H. Lucretius underscores the subjective aspects of disease and suffering, emphasizing them in the description of the falling ill's anxiety for the forthcoming death. Disease is also examined in a metaphorical dimension, at the light of Epicurean thought- according to Lucretius the only doctrine which is able, teaching a correct concept of time, to reduce suffering.

The origins of the health defence system against contagious illness: the strategies of isolation and quarantine in Mediterranean cities from the XIV-XIX centuries.

From the onset of the Black Death in 1347-48, Italian cities which faced the Mediterranean, an epidemic sea, constructed a complex and articulated health defence system which was an example to all other western countries. The cornerstones of this health defence system lay in quarantine, sanitary cordons, lazarets, disinfection, and in the social regulation of the population at risk. Medicine played no part. Its impotence in dealing with epidemic diseases left health defence to the initiative of the civil authorities who rigorously fought the repeated incursions of plague, which from the end of Middle Ages severely tried and tested social organisation, economic life and public order, all of which were threatened by reactions of fear and aggression. From the fifteenth century onwards the public authorities instituted health magistracies which perfected policing and hygiene strategies based on isolation, separation and social control. This progressively extended to individuals in the community through 'health certificates'. This paper follows the evolution and crises of the conceptual, cultural adn institutional response to epidemics through the centuries up to the appearance of the plague of cholera and its disappearance.

Lessons from Legionnaires' disease.

In July 1976 a pneumonialike epidemic from a previously unrecognized microorganism erupted among Legionnaires who had attended a meeting in Philadelphia. There were an estimated 182 cases, in which 29 patients died. Among other things the episodes shows that even in a medically sophisticated industrialized nation, a bacterical pathogen can produce a small epidemic and defy identification for almost 6 months. One historical implication of the event is the need to consider the possibility of a return of large-scale epidemic disease rivaling the sweeps of bubonic plague in fourteenth-century Europe. Such epidemics could occur through any of a variety of microorganismic mechanisms recognized as operating at the present time. It is suggested that humans would react to such a disaster much as their progenitors did centuries ago.