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Cholera And The Plague Epidemic Analysis

Decent Essays

Modern usage of ‘epidemic’ to politicise or instil with “urgency” an agenda has made the term too broad to define, but this quasi-metaphorical use of the word represents a new diversity in its definition. Epidemics create a window from which the social historian has access to both the “complexities of human nature” and the “political arenas that control and disseminate information”: an insight to political, cultural, religious and social life that in other circumstances may elude the chroniclers of the past. There is no categorical, empirical or quantifiable rule in defining epidemics; instead they are subject to a series of accepted truisms - that they have both a start and an end, that they elicit large social response, that they fragment …show more content…

There has been a tendency to study epidemics with harsher symptoms and higher chances of death under the assumption that these fragment society and culture more than “mild” epidemics like influenza. The main example of this would be the countless studies of Cholera and the Plague, the former of which took the lives of fifty per-cent of its victims with intense rapidity (in nineteenth-century Britain: “healthy in the morning, dead in the evening”), the latter imposing a mortality rate as high as forty seven per-cent (in the case of Newcastle 1636). However, the modern usages of the word do not always fit into this model. The epidemic of obesity for example is a medical topic, which has been termed an epidemic by using current social dissatisfaction as much as effect on mortality. Rosenberg deconstructs ‘disease’ stating that it is a “specific repertoire of verbal constructs reflecting medicine’s intellectual and institutional history”, which would accept that obesity is a disease. His statement that an epidemic is an event, not a trend, in need of a common dramaturgy, a beginning and an end, and a “mobilisation of community to reaffirm social values”, does not allow for the classification of obesity as an epidemic. Here, it seems that epidemic has been motivated by society rather than by a medical profession, making a definition yet more abstract; both Hansen on homosexuality and MacDonald on suicide show that the “political, religious, social and cultural” setting can cause a medicalisation of a behavioural issue. This in turn can expand the ways in which we use the term epidemic: the medicalisation of homosexuality and suicide share themes common in definitions of epidemics: both elicit a social response, both are used to advance a political agenda, “reveal areas of the social fabric which do not appear clearly in everyday life”, and both have

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