Social history of medicine : the journal of the Society for the Social History of Medicine
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Historical Article
Of war and epidemics: unnatural couplings, problematic conceptions.
The relationship between war and epidemics is usually cast pathogenically. This article pursues a different perspective: that of the history of the idea of relating wars to epidemics. lt considers how this notion was formulated, deployed, and transformed overtime. The first section reviews prevailing approaches to the war and epidemics dyad, and outlines the reasons for its "denaturalization" within contemporary historical demography. ⋯ It enables us to concentrate on the different socio-political and professionalizing contexts within which the "ideal partnership" between war and disease was fashioned, and eventually deposed, in epidemiology. By thus historicizing the relationship, the article contributes to a view of epidemiology and historical epidemiology as socially-constructed discourses. As such, it cautions against borrowing uncritically from the writings of the original framers of the retrospectively fashioned war-and-epidemics couplet - borrowings, arguably, that have served to constrain the imaginative capacities of historians ever since.