The Coronavirus Crisis: a humanities perspective

The Coronavirus Crisis: A Humanities Perspective 

The Wuhan coronavirus crisis – or COVID-19, as the World Health Organisation encourages us to call it to avoid scapegoating a region or people – gives cause for reflection on the useful work humanities scholars have done on similar crises, and will in the future on this one. Can our work on past epidemics help medical workers, governments and society in general get to grips with what is happening at present?

As we analyse past epidemics using the methods of historiology or sociology, we bring a different sort of understanding of these diseases, compared to the work done by scientists or medical professionals. In my work on the social, medical, economic and political history of the 1918-19 or ‘Spanish’ (more scapegoating) influenza pandemic in Ireland, I became particularly engaged with Harvard historian of medicine Charles Rosenberg’s argument that the way societies develop an understanding of emerging large-scale epidemics of infectious disease has a consistent dramaturgy, a pattern which can be applied to just about all epidemic crises. He sees epidemic disease as having this social understanding, alongside its biological entity. As the Wuhan crisis continues to unfold, it plays almost uncannily into Rosenberg’s dramaturgy framework, and I thought it might be helpful to bring this work to a wider audience.

In Rosenberg’s dramaturgy, in Act I there comes the progressive revelation, with communities slowly acknowledging its presence. Only when the acknowledgement of disease becomes unavoidable is there public admission of its existence, with the public, physicians and authorities all reluctant to admit the presence of a potentially dangerous intruder. He argues that this reluctance comes from several factors: slowness to recognise the problem and assess its scale, a desire to prevent unnecessary panic, and because acknowledgement might damage economic or institutional interests.

In early summer of 1918, newspapers around the world were slowly beginning to reveal the existence of an alarming new disease, which turned the bodies of many victims purple. Many thought it associated with the Great War, but pondered on what it actually was. Perhaps plague? Doctors played it down, governments and their health authorities scarcely mentioned it in the first weeks, even though from the records it is quite clear they were aware of it, and the British War Office, for one, had long been monitoring for diseases coming back into the civilian population from the war, as usually happened with wars and returning soldiers. This mirrors the emergence of the Wuhan crisis: local doctors reported unusual disease patterns, but the Chinese authorities were clearly reluctant to publicly acknowledge the health threat. Outside critics, all too ready to remind us of controlling patterns of behaviour from the authoritarian Chinese government, have suggested this is because the Chinese government did not want to admit failure, but it may also have been out of an attempt to control unhelpful panic, and to protect the Chinese economy. Only when the presence of the epidemic became an inescapable truth was there public admission of its existence.