The fourth lecture of the "Overseas History of Chinese Medicine" lecture series organized by Professor Gao Xi of Fudan University was held on December 11, 2021, and the keynote speaker was Diego Armus, Professor of the Department of History at Swarthmore College and Ph.D. of the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Amus focuses on latin american history and medical history, and has recently edited the book The Gray Zones of Medicine: Healers and History in Latin America, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021, and has published monographs such as The City of Knots: 1870— The Ailing City: Health, Tuberculosis, and Culture in Buenos Aires (1870-1950, Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.), is expected to be published in 2022, Híbridos Argentinos: Pasado y presente en las artes de curar), who also wrote about the history of smoking habits in Buenos Aires in the 20th century. In this lecture, Professor Daniel Zhang'an, Dean of the School of Liberal Arts of Shanghai University and Director of the Masto Anti-Drug Policy Research Center, served as the interlocutors. Professor Daniel Zhang'an is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of The Social History of Medical Science, the latest of which will focus on the history of medicine in Latin America in collaboration with Professor Amos.
Through the comparison of previous experience and current experience, the lecture shows that on the one hand, the epidemiological history is not to provide a detailed response roadmap for the present, but to help us realize how to face uncertainty and realize that the understanding of the disease is process-oriented, on the other hand, comparing the complexity of the current epidemic record with the previous historical legacy, showing that there are many "holes" in the epidemiological history, and as a historian, we should be humble about the conclusions based on this. The translator here uses the title of Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben (The Use and Abuse of History) in the hope that the study of the history of disease recognizes an allegorical return in the tension between monumental, nostalgic, critical and some kind of "medicine".
The amus lecture translates as follows:
I will talk about epidemics and their responses from a historical point of view, but the first thing to say is that this is mainly based on the performance of biomedicine, or more generally, on the performance of so-called Western medicine, an elusive label that has been used and abused in historiography. The focus of this lecture is not on illustrating that there are other traditions of medicine besides biomedicine— some are much older than biomedicine. It is even more important to emphasize that I believe that there is and is still a dialogue between these systems of practice and knowledge (of course, the intensity of this dialogue varies) and is constantly changing, and this hybrid combination is more interesting and valuable during the NEW Crown, because it is a situation that reflects a lot of uncertainty. Based on the above points of commentary, I will share some of my views on the epidemic from a historical perspective.
I. Epidemiological history and the current COVID-19
Whether you're in Buenos Aires, New York, or Wuhan, it's much easier to write about and think about epidemics than it is to live with them. It is an unconventional public event, with extraordinary intensity and drama, revealing the distance between individual and social experience and its narrative possibilities. At the end of the 2020s, the global epidemic of COVID-19 was written, read and listened to in real time. Fear and urgency, the real-time dynamics of print and digital media, draw us to narrate it.
The epidemiological situation is undoubtedly obscure. The uncertainty allows those who think they have something to say to make all sorts of predictions. From this, a large number of narratives are generated. Most of the time, they are sincere and reasonable, but there will inevitably be ad hoc patchwork. They try to provide the best way to respond to the crises and challenges of the post-pandemic era.
Some epidemics in the past have left us with stories, or so-called impressions, through the narrative of personal experiences. Uncertainty dominates these narratives. This appears in the famous Decameron and Daniel Defoe's The Age of the Plague. Closer together, like Katherine Porter's "Grey Horse, Grey Rider" about the 1918 flu, and of course the story of the second half of the 20th century about polio and the AIDS epidemic.
Even as COVID-19 continues, there have been many personal narratives and forum sites that showcase their inner lives in times of collective unrest and confusion, without dogmatic claims or ambitions. Some are very cautious. Some are conspiracy theories, irresponsible comments, and some inflammatory reflections. Forward-looking diagnoses of all aspects and everyday life of post-PANDEMIC societies, as well as capitalism/post-capitalism, abound. But these narratives seem to have long since been replaced by others and lack personality. The certainty shown in this appears premature.
The urgency of the pandemic has attracted the attention of philosophers, essayists, social scientists, economists, cultural critics, and even psychoanalysts. In a variety of tones—dystopias and utopias, doomsday and a better future, or patchwork or preparation—they tend to emphasize that the future is very different from the past as we know it. They discuss, celebrate, or refine these dangerous claims in futurology or hasty assertions. These are all examples of fast-food culture — which is inevitable in journalism — in times when this culture moves in tandem with digital media, while reflection and commentary in other areas tend to spread more slowly.
All of these voices were bold in their comments. In many cases, even irresponsibly, public health incompetence or inefficiency is emphasized from statements such as "only a little grasp".
Themes recur in these narratives: how much control is needed to respond to crises; the role of the state and the private sector in preventing and managing public health; the limitations of national responses to global health problems; social inequalities brought about or exacerbated by epidemics; daily habits in the public and private spheres; and how much freedom can be brought in the post-pandemic era.
It seems to me that almost all of these narratives have in common the inability to cope with uncertainty in the context of an epidemic, which, as I have pointed out, is exacerbated by the fact that this is a new epidemic associated with an unknown virus.
Unlike these narratives, personal stories give these epidemic-related uncertainties a proper place. The experiences of patients or ordinary people who are worried about getting sick are full of uncertainties. A similar situation has occurred among epidemiologists, virologists and health practitioners, but for different reasons. Because these scholars understand that epidemics, especially new ones, are characterized by biomedical and public health uncertainties. For them, epidemics are everywhere, but not to see through what is about to happen at a glance, but to identify and use in the fog a scarce (coping) repository that has not yet proven effectiveness. There are arguments between experts, there is communication, and they know that everything they do will eventually be incorporated into the realm of political decision-making. But their focus is clear: to understand the virus and try to present the most effective public health interventions as soon as possible.
When one does not look at the past in an anachronistic way—that is, avoids reconstructing and interpreting the events of an era from the perspective and sensibility of another—one finds uncertainty everywhere and narratives abound. Some people talk about the plurality of epidemics, talk about epidemics by plural standards, consider the specific time and place when and where epidemics occur, and avoid positioning epidemics from perspectives that transcend the times, and historians are not necessarily better than they are. The plurality here is that infectious diseases are about cholera, influenza, AIDS, dengue fever, measles, COVID-19. I am convinced that each epidemic is special, not a general generalization. Each epidemic is unique, caused by specific microbes, and how society should face, react to, and interpret it.
Diseases and epidemics are part of the human experience. Some are indeed avoidable, and it is particularly irritating not to do what should be done to avoid them. But it is also true that the relationship between human society and the environment has not always been stable. Many epidemics arise as a result of non-human factors (such as genetic mutations), human interventions (such as environmental changes), and non-equilibrium states intertwined with specific social contexts. Periods marked by large-scale human migration have exacerbated outbreaks of epidemics that are often repetitive, continuous, and associated with a variety of microbes. For decades, world globalization has accelerated. In the Americas, this phenomenon has been common since the time of European conquest, and is particularly pronounced in the 16th and 17th centuries, the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and today.
Throughout this long history, as a social phenomenon, epidemics have unfolded as a drama that seems to be repeating itself. The association between microbes and other species is a prelude to a sense that is strictly biological and not obvious to humans. Then the first act was staged, when the microbe was transferred from animals to humans, triggering an outbreak of epidemics in a specific environment. The next step is to try to ignore or hide this new situation, but this has proved unsuccessful, especially when the epidemic outbreak has been acknowledged and accepted, it has left individuals and collectives with various implications and tensions. Finally, after wreaking havoc and death, epidemics lose strength and gradually recede (in most cases, but not always, because the collective immunization process cannot be artificially interfered with). The final act of the play is the epidemic entering the complex realm of individual and collective memory, where people choose to remember or choose to forget.
In the dramatization of the epidemic, a series of topics have recurred. A natural topic of conversation is how contemporaries tried to understand how contagion from one person to another happened, and where it originated — often in a dirty place. But there are many more, for example, individual and collective reactions to the infection, including those who can flee the infected area or who struggle to isolate themselves from the outside world. In addition, attempts to understand the explanations and defenses of this catastrophe, resorting to identifying those responsible, stigmatizing so-called carriers of infectious diseases, usually "others" marked by their social conditions, race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, gender, age or anything else. And, of course, rituals and religions aimed at driving out this invisible enemy, not only to provide some calm for believers to deal with fear and the unknown, but also to moralize the catastrophe.
But while the themes that emerge in the play have emerged – and will obviously continue to do so – also seem to inspire narratives that are nearly universal and timeless, in fact they also carry the specificities of each epidemic. Therefore, there is a need to identify the specific pathogen that triggers the epidemic; how it circulates; the novelty or familiarity, duration and recurrence of the epidemic event; the more or less territorial nature; and the environment and climate that facilitate its spread. And, of course, the socially differentiated effects it has had since the epidemic, which, even if anyone is a potential victim, is far from democratic, and it always affects more of the most vulnerable groups in society. An epidemic is a tsunami that affects everyone, but not everyone has the same resources to deal with it.
Of course, epidemics are not the only aspect of the human disease experience. There are many different types of diseases: acute and chronic, traumatic and non-traumatic, epidemic and occasional. Each represents a unique phenomenon that both laymen and doctors can understand.
To cope with the fear and anxiety of the epidemic, there is an urgent need for some understanding and certainty. Each generation finds materials around it in its specific cultural context to shape its perception of epidemics: climate, sin, dirty air or water, bacteria, viruses. The effort to explain reflects the assumption that each generation has established a culture or cognition based on the cognition and scientific tools of the time.
On the one hand, the origins of sporadic, endemic, and chronic diseases echo a number of general idioms that correspond to personal life experiences. Epidemiological explanations, on the other hand, are collective, located at specific times and places. Epidemics must be identified in a timely manner and the causes sought out, as this affects many people.
Medical explanations of epidemics tend to be holistic until doctors understand a particular source of infection: epidemics are the result of a unique environmental configuration, a disturbance to the "normal" arrangements of climate, environment, and community life. Epidemics mean disorder in a more general sense.
In most historical examples, in order to establish an appropriate culturally interpretive framework for epidemics, three main elements were considered — specific circumstances, contagiousness, and susceptibility.
Astrological, climatic, and geographical factors were widely used to explain the Black Death. For example, the 14th-century theory of the Black Death illustrates the enduring utility of these concepts. At the same time, the fear of carriers of infectious diseases is also strong. Hypothetical susceptibility helps explain the invasiveness of plagues.
Yellow fever has sparked a heated debate about the transmissibility of disease carrying. Doctors who are concerned about the origin of yellow fever tend to believe that the disease is caused by pathogenic environmental conditions, which are usually poor sanitary conditions, which lead to the accumulation of decaying substances, which produce miasmas that cause disease in the process of their decomposition. Sure, this miasma may be considered a pollutant, but it's those disorderly environmental conditions that cause it. Physicians who advocate the theory of contagion emphasize the various specificities of the symptoms of the disease and the ability of a particular person or inanimate object to appear to have a larger environment of "inoculate." In support of this position, they point to the "carrier-borne" nature of yellow fever, as it appears that yellow fever always erupts suddenly after the arrival of ships in port. Whether from a configuration or contamination perspective, susceptibility explains the phenomenon that people like the poor, "immoral" and the weak die more.
The apparent portability of yellow fever remains the most powerful empirical basis for infectious agents. However, those who emphasize the local environment can easily refute this argument – even acknowledging that some external "influence" is needed to trigger an outbreak of yellow fever. So the key issues are in other ways. That is, they will emphasize that no matter what mysterious effects the yellow fever-infected ship is affected, it will not infect the communities that keep municipals clean: the "causative substance" will remain harmless without appropriately weakening local conditions.
Similarly, in the debate about cholera, many doctors avoid the "simple" version of the contagionist or anti-contagionist position. They selectively construct their causes, emphasizing specific "vaccinations/infections" and environments that allow them to reproduce themselves. In the case of typhus, the German pathologist Rudolf Virchow proposed an eclectic, critical, and holistic explanation in 1848. He accused the Prussian government of being able to tolerate oppressive living conditions in the working population that were prone to disease. For him, "medicine is a social science," and health and disease can be thought of as indicators that reflect the moral and material characteristics of the society in which he lives.
But this sociological epidemiology soon faced the emergence of new data and new ways of thinking. In both its modern and laboratory-oriented form, bacterial theory shifted the medical perspective to the theory of contagion, but it did not dispel the urge to focus on the environment. The continued interest in social medicine and interest in the environmental determinants of health and disease remains in dialogue with new theories of bacterial etiology.
Even after Robert Koch discovered cholera organisms in 1883, his colleague Pettenkofer insisted that Vibrio was a necessary but not sufficient cause of the disease. Microorganisms must "mature" in subsoil water for an appropriate period of time before they become toxic. His theory embodies a stubborn desire to preserve an ancient, holistic, environment-oriented framework of interpretation while incorporating the roles of specific microbes. So, despite the powerful influence of bacterial theory, doctors instinctively try to place these new roles in traditional narratives, viewing epidemics as the result of the interaction of various factors.
Perhaps it is inappropriate to discuss TB as an epidemic, as we now see it as a chronic endemic disease. However, for doctors and public health authorities at the end of the 19th century, it was an epidemic, and it was a unique and ubiquitous epidemic. The prevalence of TB organisms seems to prove that it relies on interactions with various precipitating factors.
To explain the case development of this disease, there is no doubt that more needs to be said outside of random exposure to Kochella. Tuberculosis – like infant mortality – has been an important source of data for policy debates in the 20th century. Both are used as indicators of social health, and both are used to demonstrate holism and multi-factor public health approaches.
Since observers first noticed the decline in TB mortality in the late 19th century, until the latest historical compilation, this decline in mortality – in the absence of effective treatments – has been used to justify the more environmental or holistic modern version of the twentieth century, but this is increasingly dominated by narrow biopathological interpretations.
The emphasis on physical medicine/constitutional medicine, psychosomatic medicine, and related (psychological) stress can all be seen as efforts to counteract the weight of biopathological interpretation. In many cases, they bring class, gender, and ethnic dimensions to the shaping of disease incidence. These anti-reductionist positions constituted minority voices outside the dominance of biomedicine throughout the 20th century.
These different perspectives also illustrate how to fight epidemics. The battle was concrete, and the military reaction to the invisible enemy happened repeatedly. But the situation will vary, depending on whether you are dealing with a known enemy who can take action faster and more effectively, or a new enemy that is currently unknown and unexpected. In some cases, this requires nearly a century and a half of responses from biomedical and hygienic engineering design. In other cases, it requires short- or long-term changes in people's daily behavior. Of course, both often go hand in hand. For example, in the face of common diseases such as gastrointestinal diseases, the military response to this seems to have disappeared. These are usually avoidable diseases that can become endemic or chronic. In many people's lives, usually the poorest, have somehow successfully naturalized or naturalized the disease.
The term epidemic is often used in relatively acute, contagious and fatal events. For some time, people have been talking about obesity, lung cancer caused by smoking habits, deaths from car accidents, and the prevalence of domestic violence. But between the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century — about 80 years or so — people talked about the tuberculosis epidemic. AIDS has also been discussed for almost four decades.
I have tried to emphasize that the "world" of epidemics is and will remain diverse and complex. Limiting certain diseases to epidemics, rather than others, ultimately seems to be a political decision .[
Epidemics and uncertainties
So far, I have tried to emphasize the importance of talking about a particular epidemic rather than simply summarizing the general statement. Biological and socio-cultural particularities are once again at stake in the question of uncertainty.
Some of these uncertainties are biomedical. With the Pasteur Revolution, in the last three decades of the 19th century, the superstitions and beliefs that pervaded the lives of elites and ordinary people lost their relevance to the epidemic. First, this is because different countries are beginning to respond to the crisis in the name of emerging "health sciences", with a combination of new technologies, new social biases and new medical monitoring devices. Then, it's because of the knowledge of emerging experts like doctors and health engineers—the consolidation of powers—and the legitimization of public health actions—especially in cities—in all aspects of public and private life.
Biomedicine sets out to identify invisible, specific microbes that have long led us to interpret disease in a single causal way: equating germs, viruses, or bacteria with diseases. In fact, this is a less complete victory, because identifying a particular microorganism is only the first step and does not necessarily mean also understanding how and how quickly it spreads, susceptible people, duration, fatality rate, and etiology.
Therefore, it is not enough to merely biomedically explain events during a particular epidemic and does not meet the needs of infected people. These interpretations navigate a sea of faith of all kinds—traditional, religious, scientific—and they compete with each other, influencing political power to respond to crises with uneven weight.
In this case, as mentioned above, there is rhetoric of war (paramilitary) against invisible invaders such as microbes. In front of it, biomedicine deploys a "magic bullet", a timely and effective plan to end the epidemic. Vaccines have always been associated with the "magic bullet". In fact, there are very few real cases of "magic bullets" in the history of the disease. Smallpox is one of them, although it also took decades to eradicate the disease with a vaccine. Comparing the slowness of vaccine invention with the urgency of the current challenge shows that most cases actually fail. Over the years, the effectiveness of seasonal influenza vaccines has been mixed. It is particularly noteworthy that there are still some diseases that are not targeted vaccines, such as vaccines against AIDS and vaccines against the recent SARS.
The uncertainty of biomedicine goes far beyond the search for "magic bullets". There is a range of possible arsenals of interventional weapons– whether specific or unspecified – designed to deal with a disease, including therapies and drugs, and of course it is inevitable that it will be slower to reach an effective scientific agreement. This is still a controversial issue in the history of the disease, as convincing answers are not always available when assessing the effectiveness of medical interventions and their role in the development of herd immunity. Other factors, such as the material conditions for survival, also count towards these immune gains. For this reason, the mono-causality of the pasteur revolution in explaining disease is still worthy of critical discussion, without forgetting its limitations.
In addition to the biomedical uncertainties of the epidemic period, there is also the uncertainty of public health. I am not referring to social policies that deal with issues that have been problem-solved, that deal with the problems typical of non-pandemic periods — such as poverty, access to health care services, unhealthy living conditions in communities that cause people to get sick.
Rather, I am referring to social policies in response to the crisis caused by epidemics, to measures taken in response to emergencies, which are, of course, specific and concrete. Instead of using past examples to illustrate other epidemics, it is better to follow the news every day and discover strategies and initiatives to deal with COVID-19: when to define the epidemic as a priority and add it to the existing epidemic system; when and where to restrict the entry of foreigners; what control measures to implement at ports and airports; when to wear masks and gloves; how much to coordinate with the international community; to what extent public health policies obscure the trivialities and cracks in everyday politics in the face of epidemics; in prevention and control, in seeking treatment, Between reaching the necessary levels of herd immunity at a high cost, what is the first choice; how much, how long and how strict social distancing should be imposed; how to deal with public health and economic factors, i.e. at the levels of the public sector, the private sector, the formal and informal labour markets; and the extent to which governments need to concentrate in the face of a crisis.
There is no need to continue to state the scale, importance and complexity involved in trying to respond to an epidemic crisis. This constraint is imposed by the limited resources available, as there are uncertainties about the best methods and strategies to ensure the best outcomes.
For this reason, and taking the current new crown as an example, countries such as China, New Zealand, Sweden, South Korea, Italy, Japan, Germany, Argentina and other countries have deployed a variety of national strategies. As in the United States, the federal government's crisis response will be questioned by some state governments. If the pandemic situation effectively restores the central and decisive role of the central government in responding to the crisis, this will occur first at the health level, but also at the economic, social and cultural levels. Depending on the country, this multifaceted crisis exacerbated or re-validated the exercise of legitimate authority mechanisms. In the face of such a health crisis, the relevant styles of government intervention may have successes or failures.
Public health in times of the pandemic also has little intermediary for mediation, directly exposing the otherwise blurred lines between the private world and the public sphere, such as the individual and the family. Then, different cultures, more or less individualistic, more or less with ideas about individual freedom, may be accompanied by varying degrees of conflict, with public health requiring societal changes in daily behaviour to mitigate contagion and control epidemics. Accepting social distancing and wearing masks are just two examples, but there are many more.
An atmosphere of uncertainty in biomedicine and public health has contributed to the proliferation of conspiracy theories of all kinds. Some are naïve and absurd, while others are expressed in the language of biomedicine and public health, but do not provide a minimum of reliable facts and data support. There are also these conspiracy theories in history. They have also been spreading during the current pandemic. They will continue to spread in the future, because they remain uncertain in the daily lives of people trying to survive infectious diseases, diseases and deaths.
Some societies and cultures have weathered times with patience and resilience during epidemic periods of lack of certainty. Some societies and cultures do not do so, either because they have less trust in science, medicine, or government, or because they have not managed to take advantage of previous epidemiological experiences and to understand that these extraordinary events are largely inevitable (of course, they always have beginnings and ends).
The legacy of the epidemic
Not all epidemics have a similar amnesia.
In the second half of the 19th century, life in the big cities was interrupted by epidemics, so it is really difficult to ignore or forget them. But when control of certain infectious diseases progressed steadily in the early 20th century, these cycles began to lose their power and did not repeat themselves. This new environment makes forgetting easier. In the West, there is no minimum memory of the 1918 pandemic until there is a discussion about COVID-19 in the last century and for generations today – regardless of their level of education or social status. The polio epidemic of the 1950s was a similar forgetting situation.
Here are some things you know about the 1918/1919 pandemic. The uncertainty of its development, the uncertainty of its response, and the way in which it is socially, culturally and economically owned, make us pay more attention to the reality and common sense of the post-COVID-19 era.
During this period and in subsequent years, it is not difficult to understand some of the reasons that explain the outbreak, symptoms, speed of transmission, and fatality rate. In the United States and Europe, it is devastating. It also raged in India, Indonesia, Iran, South Africa, Ghana, the Soviet Union and Japan. Of course, it has also affected China. In contrast, it is not as serious in Latin America. About 40-100 million people, most of them young people, died from the pandemic. There have been attempts to make a vaccine, but without success.
For a time, the pathogen of the flu was a question mark. It wasn't until 1933 that the virus was first isolated, thus abandoning the assumption that it was a bacterium. Ten years later, the first vaccines came out. But there are still many unanswered questions: What contributed to its demise? How can I reduce the infectivity of the virus? What are the relevance of some specific medical interventions? How can its unequal impact in different parts of the planet be explained? Why would it kill specific individuals and not others who even belong to the same age, race or class group?
In addition to these biomedical uncertainties, others must be added, such as public health. For decades, people have been trying to understand whether specific non-pharmacological interventions can affect the management of influenza transmission. In recent years, two studies of U.S. cases have concluded that infection appears to have decreased in a small number of places where social distancing, quarantine measures are in place, schools are closed, frequent handwashing and masks are worn. One of the studies also concluded that if quarantine is not long enough to avoid a subsequent spike in mortality, it will bring about a more brutal situation than the first.
The pandemic of 1918/19 was quickly forgotten, even after a few less fatal episodes in 1957/58, 1968 and 2009. The passage of decades may explain why it was ignored before the arrival of covid-19, but surprisingly, no one remembered it in just a few years after the 1918 pandemic. The death toll from the pandemic far exceeded that of the First World War, but the death toll from the war masked in newspaper headlines, obituary pages and collective memory. Deaths from the pandemic are temporary, brutal but short-lived, and as the flu subsides, so do the memories. On the other hand, the memory of death from the war managed to linger longer in American public life and managed to avoid being forgotten. The workings of memory are difficult to explain. Perhaps the war was considered a human-inflicted tragedy, or perhaps the pandemic had been labeled as a cruel, unexpected, and unexplained phenomenon, and it was better not to let it take its place in memory.
Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, and Ernest Hemingway, the great American storytellers of the 1920s, barely mentioned their accounts. Even American history textbooks used in the 20th century ignored it, reinforcing the collective oblivion of generations. The pandemic exacerbated the economic hardships of the war, but the dynamic and scalable 1920s accelerated its neglect. Everything seems to suggest that the U.S. and some Western European governments pushed for the more inclusive health care policies of the 1930s and 1940s in response to the economic crisis of 1929, not the 1918/19 pandemic.
In the United States (and I suspect this is true in many parts of the West as well), the legacy of the pandemic — except death — seems mild. There's no "everything is going to be different" – as many commentators in the face of the current coronavirus have emphasized. There is no "before-after" difference caused by the pandemic. Conversely, in the Far East, at least on some issues, the legacy and memory of the pandemic is not so hard to find.
The widespread use of masks illustrates this. Throughout the 20th century, they have been reducing infections. Masks appeared in 1910, when an epidemic of pneumonia (pneumonic plague) hit northeast China. Before the advent of modern bacteriology, the concept of miasma in Chinese medicine helped the widespread spread and acceptance of masks. As a result, they were used during the 1918/19 pandemic. They were also used during the Mao zedong era. Environmental pollution over the past few decades and the situation in 2002, 2006 and 2009 have once again confirmed the evidence of masks as objects of personal health and health modernity. In addition to its effectiveness, masks become a gesture of hygiene and civility against contagion. Japan is similar, especially after the 1934 epidemic. The same is true for South Korea. It is worth noting that the political systems of the three are different.
During the 1918/19 pandemic, there was no shortage of masks in the West. But soon, the mask was gone. Albert Camus mentions them in his famous book The Plague, but this is nothing more than a snapshot in universal oblivion. This time the new crown has brought masks back. In the summer in New York or winter in Buenos Aires, masks are part of the urban scene. They appeared in stores and people made them. Some people use them in a disciplined way. Some people have glorified them in terms of design, color, and material. Some politicize them and resist their use.
In this return of masks, some commentators predicted the arrival of a culture that restricts kissing. This commentator should note that people don't stop kissing; they wear masks when they feel unwell or know they're living in epidemic times. Therefore, there is no sudden change in culture and daily life. Instead, reasonable individual and collective adjustments to changing circumstances are taken. A strong example of a civilized posture/citizenship of collective hygiene.
As a historian, how do you live in the current pandemic?
Let me conclude this report with a personal comment. I am a historian, but I believe that history cannot define a detailed roadmap to avoid mistakes, it can only provide general guidelines and outline the complexities experienced by individuals and societies in the past. So let me outline some of the lessons that this pandemic has taught me.
The first: It is much easier to write about and think about epidemics than to live with them.
Pandemics have been and will continue to be a marathon of uncertainty, and imagining history helping us navigate the fog of the moment seems to me nonsense. In other words, we as historians naturally understand that our work is fraught with uncertainty.
Second: It is equally risky to look back at the past with the tools and questions that the epidemic has taught us.
COVID-19 provides a wealth of evidence – an important resource for future historians studying it. There is no doubt that these material resources are much richer than what we had when we studied epidemics in the late 19th or most of the 20th century.
In an interview a few years ago, cultural historian Peter Burke recalled the motto of art historian Ernst Gombrich: "History is like Swiss cheese, full of pores." "In the face of these pores, as a historian rather than a novelist, what I want to emphasize is that the lack of evidence creates historical pores, but the historical pores themselves are part of the whole historical cheese. I think it is appropriate and necessary to include those "pores" in the past that we are trying to explain.
As I said above, past epidemics have not left such a rich and various forms of information and records as this new crown. But as historians, we've become accustomed to this scarcity. We are often confronted with these pores that allow us to speculate on an elusive and uncertain past. Re-reading previous articles on epidemics, including my own writings, I feel that perhaps it is better to recognize what we are unable to discuss, explain, or speculate on due to the lack of evidence. I mean, the density of events during COVID-19 makes us humble about studying history (and the next argument) itself. Perhaps we can make it clear that we have found answers to some of the questions. But for a lot, we're left with only problems. Sometimes, asking these questions in themselves is more relevant, effective, and accurate than repetitive generalizations.
Third: While not the first pandemic to accelerate the flow of people, products, information, and ideas, COVID-19 seems to have brought about a global multifaceted crisis that is considered unique, unprecedented, and unparalleled in the West. I wonder if this is the most striking historical perspective: Does each generation experience some unusual event — for example, an epidemic — and see it as unique, thus dividing the ages?
As mentioned above, I do not believe that history provides lessons that guide the present and the future. History offers us many perspectives. That's why I want to conclude by pointing out that if the past does reveal something to us, it's that other epidemic periods are just as tragic as we are going through right now. Of course, this should not be a comfort to us, but it can help us see what we are experiencing in the present moment with some perspective (or insight).
After Professor Amos's speech, Professor Daniel Zhang Asked questions about how carriers affect personal expression and memory shaping, and the audience inquired about how militarized metaphors are taken in the face of diseases, in addition to the trust of scientific "traceability". Professor Amus argues that the former gives us a "bottom-up" perspective to some extent, while the latter gains some certainty through dualization to find support in crises. However, if we dig deeper, the above dimensions, such as the three kinds of retention of memory (Stiegler) and the application and limit of rhetoric (Gorgias), are difficult to develop here. Perhaps this extensibility should be translated from Gombrich's words, "Swiss cheese is full of pores": on the one hand, Mr. Burke's (quantitative analysis) projectionism ideal is almost naïve, and the theoretical grasp is equally unsophisticated on the point of "all" in the slightest, and it is humility; on the other hand, "pores" provide a certain intuitive blank space, as Professor Amus mentioned in perspective/insight, and the "turbulence" of uncertainty is not absolutely aware of this flow [ Also in Chinese for an interview between Gombrich and Burke].