Podd on Lynteris and Evans, 'Histories of Post-Mortem Contagion: Infectious Corpses and Contested Burials' [review]

Amy M Hay Discussion

[x-posted from H-Sci-Med-Tech by Amy Hay]

Christos Lynteris, Nicholas H. A. Evans, eds. Histories of Post-Mortem Contagion: Infectious Corpses and Contested Burials. Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern History Series. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 230 pp. $99.99 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-319-62928-5.

Reviewed by Rachel Podd (Fordham University)
Published on H-Sci-Med-Tech (April, 2018)
Commissioned by Lucy C. Barnhouse (College of Wooster)

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=51410

This wide-ranging and important volume illuminates how the epidemic corpse—that is, a human cadaver resulting from or capable of transmitting epidemic disease—is not only the physical remnant of an individual but also a place where society negotiates ideas of race, culture, and power. In an introduction, seven essays, and a short postscript, the authors explore the multivalent nature of the epidemic corpse. As coeditors Christos Lynteris and Nicholas H. A. Evans note in their historiographical “Introduction: The Challenge of the Epidemic Corpse,” the cadaver resulting from epidemic disease functions not only as a sign of societal collapse and human powerlessness against contagion but also as a space where society and humanity can be contested and (re)defined. More than that, in an anthropologically informed reading of the body and contagion, the theories used to “read” a corpse are themselves culturally and temporally constructed. Each essay asks how the epidemic corpse may be defined and what roles it plays, from the bodies of the European plague dead of the fourteenth century to the twenty-first-century burials of Ebola victims in West Africa.

The first two essays explore that pathogen par excellence, the plague. Gabriele de’ Musi’s story of the Tartars flinging the bodies of their plague dead over the city of Caffa’s walls looms large in the historiography of the plague itself and in understandings of the epidemic corpse as a vector of transmission. In the first chapter, “Failed Ritual? Medieval Papal Funerals and the Death of Clement VI (1352),” Joëlle Rollo-Koster analyzes liturgical ceremony books known as ordines; these operated as rubrics for liturgical services, outlining the procedure for papal burial, including how the body ought to be embalmed, dressed, and displayed. By comparing these prescriptive texts to records recording the funeral of “the pope of the plague,” Rollo-Koster determines that the disruption of burial ceremony noted by contemporary writers reached even the highest echelons of society, as practical concerns regarding the infective potential of the corpse overrode the liturgical rites (p. 30). When possible, aspects of the traditional rites were maintained or altered to maintain the ritual’s integrity, but the link between the epidemic and the dead body remained strong, even if that body was the pope’s. Turning from the Second Pandemic to the Third (ca. 1855), Samuel Cohn Jr. asks how social responses differed depending on an epidemic's causative pathogen, problematizing the idea that all epidemics fomented social breakdown and violence. In “Fear and the Corpse: Cholera and Plague Riots Compared,” he traces how popular response varied based on the pathogen. The essay is geographically broad, incorporating evidence from the British Isles and continental Europe, as well as Turkey, China, and Egypt. Cohn concludes that especially lethal diseases, like cholera, plague, and Ebola, were more likely to create fractures between the populace and medical and government authorities, as the poor and marginal reacted with violence to what they perceived as unnecessary or harmful alterations to funerary practice, including the cessation of vigils and the use of mass graves.  

The next two essays explore the ways in which ethnicity, culture, and power could be mapped onto the epidemic corpse. In “Bloeming-Typhoidtein: Epidemic Jingoism and the Typhoid Corpse in South Africa,” Jacob Steere-Williams focuses on how the typhoid epidemic during the South African War (1899-1902) not only changed medical and popular understandings of the epidemic corpse but also fomented critical thinking regarding the British Empire. Through following three threads—popular texts, bacteriological research, and military medicine—Steere-Williams analyzes how the typhoid dead “operated as a contagious metaphor for degeneration and disillusionment” (p. 88). In the works of popular contemporary authors, including Arthur Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling, the South African typhoid epidemic posed a threat to the British masculine body and imperial ambitions. In Europe, bacteriologists asserted that dangerous microbes could remain active in the soil or the corpse, expanding ideas of disease causation. Steere-Williams then turns to British experiences of the typhoid epidemic. These three threads find expression in the town of Bloemfontein; as the onetime capital of the Orange Free State and subjected to British occupation followed by a typhoid epidemic, Bloemfontein was not only a contested site but also a transitional space in which ideas could be renegotiated. As the typhoid cadaver became liminal—dead, but still able to spread disease, strong and masculine, but made abject by illness—so, too, did the British Empire. Lynteris’s “Suspicious Corpses: Body Dumping and Plague in Colonial Hong Kong” moves the geographic focus toward the East and forward in time. Tracing the responses of the colonial British authorities to the improper disposal of the plague dead, Lynteris demonstrates how the corpse was entangled in the politics of colonizer-colonized and functioned as a site of creation, fueling debate on the British government’s role in its colonies. British officials, confronted with body dumping, blamed it on “Chinese character”: the Chinese either concealed the body to prevent a ritually improper burial or dumped it to escape government scrutiny. A shift in this discourse, “the naturalist turn,” occurred around 1907, due in part to the work of Chinese elites like Lau Chu-Pak. These writers characterized body dumps as profoundly un-Chinese in character, requiring a rejection of Confucian filial piety; body dumps were the last resort of people profoundly afraid of the Sanitary Authorities’ harsh treatment, who cleaned both people and their belongings without compassion. Ideas of disease transmission also changed: the colonial government’s bacteriologist, William Hunter, concluded that corpses were not a major vector for the spread of the plague; and thereafter, the authorities managed body dumps through incentives rather than punishment. The bodies of the plague dead were biopolitical, forcing a reconsideration of governmental responsibility, the “Chinese character,” and disease etiology.

Moving to the twentieth century, the next two essays focus on the meaning of the corpse in wartime. In “Composing and Decomposing Bodies: Visualizing Death and Disease in an Era of Global War, Pestilence, and Famine, 1913-1923,” Michael Anton Budd analyzes how images, including postcards, personal photographs, and photojournalism, contributed to a shifting conceptualization of the epidemic corpse in the decade after 1913. Budd asserts that the photographs of World War I soldiers complicated the dichotomy of controlled and sanitized images produced by the government and the gritty, honest images of the soldier on the ground. Concluding with two case studies, an analysis of the work of Dan H. Jones and Colonel Sir Mark Sykes, Budd explores how images of the soldier’s corpse and advancements in technology like photography created a global reality of war that was shared by the core and the periphery. The First World War forced people to grapple with unprecedented destructive power, and images of the injured or flu-ridden corpse forced people of all backgrounds to contextualize these new abilities within a world of unprecedented pandemics. Budd concludes that understanding how the corpse was represented and characterized is essential for understanding contemporary practices of body disposal and remembrance. Lizzie Oliver’s “Shrouded Corpses, Walking Cadavers: The Shifting of ‘the Choleras’ in Depictions of Southeastern Captivity” looks at the experiences of prisoners of war (POWs) who were forced to build “the Death Railway” from Bangkok to Thaneyuzayat in Burma. The construction of the railroad, perhaps best known to a Western audience through the 1975 film Bridge over the River Kwai, involved a labor force of 180,000 civilians and 64,000 Allied POWs. Conditions in the labor camps were poor, and a variety of physical ailments, including dysentery, malaria, and typhoid, figured heavily in the POW imagination. It was cholera, however, that they feared most. Using the journal of Edward Dunlop, a medical officer, coupled with contemporary photographs and fiction, Oliver shows how cholera was represented as divisive, resulting in the segregation of cholera patients from the main camp, as well as cohesive, creating “communities of care” made up of medics, support staff, and their patients. The artwork created by these communities made the experience of cholera accessible to younger generations, ensuring that the memory of cholera remained emotionally resonant.

The final two essays, “The Burial Pit as Bio-historical Archive” and the postscript, “Epidemic History and Ebola Present,” outline the contested meaning of the corpse in medical history. Lukas Engelmann’s “The Burial Pit as Bio-historical Archive” explores the occasionally fractious relationship between biohistory and traditional history; the former approach seeks to place historical developments within evolutionary and environmental laws, while the latter asserts that biological determinism creeps ever closer. Using plague pits as a case study, Engelmann analyzes how the analytical approach employed alters the meaning of burial pits; in all approaches, however, the plague pit may be imagined as an archive. In contrast to the more traditional disciplines of history, archaeology, and microbiology, Engelmann notes, new approaches can lack historical contextualization. Engelmann’s goal is to demonstrate the necessity of interdisciplinarity in the analysis of the cadaver. James Fairhead’s postscript further develops Engelmann’s claims and synthesizes the previous chapters, contextualizing them within his experiences with the West African Ebola epidemic. Fairhead notes that we seem to learn the same lessons with every epidemic, from the burials of the plague dead analyzed by Rollo-Koster to Oliver’s exploration of the cholera corpse in World War II: with every epidemic, the authorities learn that they have not been sufficiently sensitive to the culture of the individuals suffering the pandemic. Fairhead calls for a more systematic comparative framework; as the previous essays in the volume handily demonstrate, the experiences of British troops in the Boer Wars have something to tell us about the management of Ebola in twenty-first-century West Africa, and vice versa. It is only through breaking down temporal and disciplinary boundaries that we can most fully appreciate the complicated figure of the diseased body.

This volume is not intended for general readers, but it is suitable for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students. The wide temporal and geographical scope of the essays, moving from the fourteenth to the twenty-first century and from cholera riots in Manchester to the port of Hong Kong, means that Histories of Post-Mortem Contagion will be a valuable volume for any medical historian’s library. As a medievalist, I found Oliver’s chapter on twentieth-century Thailand as riveting as Rollo-Koster’s essay focused on late medieval papal burials; I can think of no better testament to this volume’s quality than that.

Citation: Rachel Podd. Review of Lynteris, Christos; Evans, Nicholas H. A., eds., Histories of Post-Mortem Contagion: Infectious Corpses and Contested Burials. H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews. April, 2018.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=51410

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