The Media and Epidemics Conference1 brought together scholars from the histories of medicine and technology, media studies, literature, and political science to explore the role of the media in the making and management of epidemics.

Discussions spanned a broad time period, covering epidemics and health crises from the late nineteenth-century to the present day, including the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. This temporal scope was matched by a global perspective, with case studies encompassing the United States to Europe, East and South-East Asia. The range of epidemic diseases discussed was equally extensive, including cholera, influenza, the bubonic plague, malaria, tuberculosis, venereal disease, and COVID-19.

Several key transhistorical and transdisciplinary themes emerged. The presence of gaps in epidemic-related archives was a frequent refrain, particularly concerning marginalized groups and individuals, while, at the same time, the conference highlighted the use of media as a powerful political tool during epidemics, with particular emphasis on the proliferation and power of visual media. Delegates encouraged researchers to navigate a societal urge to forget or repress the trauma of pandemics past to avoid distorting historical realities.

Many presenters underscored the methodological difficulties arising from their work. Challenges included the difficulties of researching and representing historical epidemics within archives that possess inherent biases, such as the marginalization of Black voices and stories during the 1918 influenza pandemic. Research efforts were further complicated by the loss or censorship of materials, as well as the hyper-modern concern of constructing archives from transient sources like email exchanges and breaking news. The legacies of political censorship and issues of archival access have accentuated these difficulties, particularly for those working within post-Communist research contexts or utilising ephemeral media sources.

The re-emergence of these themes over time, across different regions and disciplines, and in relation to various epidemics, underscores how issues considered to be postmodern – such as “fake news” or the rapid spread of information through technological networks – are actually deeply rooted in a much longer history.

AMELIA BONEA (Manchester) opened the conference by introducing the concept of media as a platform that not only illustrates social change, but is itself a product of contingent historical circumstances. Focusing on the import of the telephone in the history of medicine, Bonea demonstrated the ways in which new technologies have generated fear and excitement in almost equal measure, as modern telecommunications became indispensable to the proper functioning of the modern hospital, even as anxieties about infectious telephones ran rampant. Fear of contagion, it seems, has long been its own source of contagious panic.

HIRO FUJIMOTO (Heidelberg) examined the use of film as a mode of persuasion in 1920s and 1930s Japan. Fujimoto demonstrated how vibrant and often amusing, kyoiku eiga (educational films) made public health interesting and raised awareness of epidemic threats, including tuberculosis and typhoid. DALIA BATHORY (Bucharest) presented a detailed discourse analysis of Red Cross campaigns in socialist Romania to highlight messages which were typically highly gendered or targeted at children. Bathory revealed the significance of tailored imperative language which could be at times playful, pragmatic, and prescriptive, or, more concerningly, had connotations of violence. JANELLE WINTERS (Manchester) turned to the COVID-19 pandemic to discuss the ethical and logistical difficulties of curating a hyper-modern media archive of sometimes confidential “viral communications” relating to epidemic management. Each of these papers reinforced the influential yet sometimes overbearing nature of political messaging when navigating epidemics.

ŞTEFAN BOSOMITU (Bucharest) and BOGDAD IACOB (Bucharest) presented papers on the fraught role of public diplomacy and soft power when managing epidemics. Bosomitu analysed the relationship between prophylaxis and government propaganda in campaigns to tackle tuberculosis in communist Romania, while Iacob demonstrated the critical importance of campaigns to eradicate malaria in post-war Romania to its international counterparts and to global health. Both papers underlined tensions between bureaucratic, technological, and medical infrastructures exposed in times of public health crisis.

Furthering analysis of epidemics and political prevention, FLORIAN GRAFL (Ulm) offered a transnational perspective on government campaigns concerning venereal diseases in Europe following the Second World War. Grafl showcased vivid health posters through which diseases such as syphilis were treated as moral faults by demonising sex workers. GRAEME GOODAY (Leeds) and EMILY REES KOERNER (Leeds) stressed the significance of female scientific communities as a kind of “cure” during the Cold War, which worked to advance global knowledge exchange in times of nuclear threat. AYA HOMEI (Manchester) identified Japan’s similarly collaborative work with China in the 1980s, stressing that while co-operation ostensibly concerned family planning, it instead raised awareness for public health campaigns for clean water and parasite education. LUCIANA JINGA (Bucharest) traced the veracity of media narratives concerning paediatric AIDS in late twentieth-century Romania, bringing attention to issues of fake news and photographic consent during periods of political and personal trauma.

Concerning epidemiology, material epistemology and science media, LUKAS ENGELMANN (Edinburgh), JANA LOHROVA (Edinburgh), CHRISTOS LYNTERIS (St Andrews) and JOHN NOTT (Edinburgh) collaboratively demonstrated the many applications of tables in constructing a material epistemology of epidemiology in 1898–1899, indicating the benefits of summarising population data and the risks of creating social categories that may then be pathologised. CAROLINA MAYES (Edinburgh) and RHODRI LENG (Edinburgh) introduced new network analysis methods for tracing the development of the genetic epidemiology field, including the formation of subcommunities of researchers. SŁAWOMIR ŁOTYSZ (Warsaw) elucidated the changing narratives surrounding the HIV/AIDS crisis in socialist Poland and the ways in which these disadvantaged vulnerable groups. Finally, KATERINA VLANTONI (Athens) demonstrated the complex interactions between science and politics in the context of the Greek government’s COVID-19 response, identifying an inherent political component in knowledge production, and in the gap between politics and this knowledge production.

VANESSA NORTHINGTON GAMBLE (George Washington) examined major African-American newspapers to bring much-needed attention to the marginalization of Black voices and stories during the 1918 influenza pandemic. Gamble identified the first Black public health advice column written by physician A. Wilberforce Williams which urged readers not to panic, to obey doctors, and discouraged the ineffective folk medicine. DOMNICA GOROVEI (Bucharest) examined representations of African health crises in communist journal “Lumea” between 1960 and 1980, concluding that while African political arenas were continually present, there were significant voids concerning HIV/AIDS outbreaks. VICTORIA SCHMIDT (Graz) asked “when does the past start?” in relation to anti-pandemic campaigns and modernity. Each presenter called for the need to transcend the racialization and marginalization of ethnic minorities when recovering the epidemic past.

JAEHWAN HYUN (Pusan) gave a keynote address which explored the gendered nature of masking protocols following epidemics of pneumonic plague and influenza in colonial Korea. Hyun brought attention to unexpected social concerns which resurfaced during outbreaks of disease, particularly relating to the perceived compromising of female beauty standards and threats to masculinity caused by mask wearing. Hyun cited artists like Korean poet Kim Kirim who promoted discourse which suggested that men who wore masks to protect against influenza in the 1930s were deemed to be “cowardly”. Hyun stressed that literature which promoted both misogynist and misandrist messaging posed pervasive social threats to epidemic public health.

In a panel on epidemics in fiction and infectious metaphors, EMILY VINCENT (Birmingham) analysed Oscar Wilde’s use of figurative language relating to contagion, particularly his associations between physical sickness and social stigma as reflections of British cultural attitudes to the late nineteenth-century influenza pandemic. MELISSA DICKSON (Queensland) then examined Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel “Dracula” in the context of the 1890s influenza pandemic, arguing that the symptoms of that disease, as well as the accompanying sense of dread and the fear of vulnerability to external influences, all found their way into his famous novel. ELEN VAN LAER (Independent Researcher), using her own quantitative index of metaphorical strength or “power”, compared the metaphorical treatment of AIDS in Dutch and Flemish newspapers with the surprising finding that metaphorical power increased as the pandemic progressed. Like Dickson and Vincent, Van Laer highlighted the pervasiveness of metaphor in grappling with societal sources of fear.

Discussing language, narrative, and memories of epidemics, STEFAN STRUNZ (Dresden) examined the Dresden Hygiene Museum’s media on housing to demonstrate that the interior design principles of each era aligned with attitudes to hygiene. MAGDALENA ZDROWDOWSKA (Warsaw), looking closely at the Philadelphia Mütter Museum’s COVID-related Spit Spreads Death exhibit, characterised mourning as a process of collective affect-making that was disrupted by the rapidity of the pandemic’s acceleration alongside the collapse of health services in 2020–2021. IRINA NASTASĂ-MATEI (Bucharest) tracked Romania’s growing medical self-sufficiency under Ceaușescu’s communist regime, highlighting exceptionalist perceptions of the drug Polidin as indicative of nationalist ideologies. MAGDALENA DUNAJ (Warsaw), using Polish sign language media regarding HIV/AIDS, provided insights into effective health communication for the deaf community, stressing that socio-ideological dialects develop and can be harnessed for communication in sign language as in any other living language.

Considering how epidemics are managed in the aftermath of war, JOE MANOCK (Manchester), ISLAY SHELBOURNE (St Andrews), and ILONA DAUW (Louvain/Leipzig) traced rhetorical representations of the so-called “Spanish Flu” 1918 influenza epidemic across South-Asian, Californian, and Belgian and Polish contexts respectively. Positioning the influenza epidemic within a broader history of emotions, Manock demonstrated how catastrophe in South Asia was not only politicised but provided political opportunities for self-performance. Shelbourne examined the complex medical structures of early twentieth-century Southern California, while tracking moments of communication and miscommunication between medical professionals and the general press at the time of the influenza epidemic, which caused significant public challenges to medical expertise. Dauw then interrogated rhetorical strategies deployed across the Belgian and Polish press to represent the influenza, identifying how the censorship of German occupiers actively hampered communications. On the Eastern front, Dauw demonstrated, Poles were dying in similar numbers to those in the West, yet their suffering did not signify in the mainstream press. Finally, CARMELIA ZAVARACHE (Bucharest) turned to encephalitis epidemics between 1919 and 1925 in post-war Romania, demonstrating the unique challenges faced in addressing these outbreaks amidst political and social upheaval.

The conference closed by considering the ways in which the humanities, particularly the performing arts, might engage with issues of public health. SALLY SHUTTLEWORTH (Oxford) spoke about the Contagion Cabaret2, a series of events she instigated between 2017 to 2020, which brought together a cast of actors, scientists and literary researchers for an inventive illustration of infectious extracts from plays and music, past and present. Shuttleworth demonstrated that plagues and pandemics have fascinated writers, musicians and thinkers for centuries, for as diseases spread through a population, so have the mythologies and ideas attached to them travelled virally through film, literature, theatre and social media. Art provides opportunity to engage audiences with important issues and, importantly, to render those issues tragically, playfully, or satirically. IULIANA DUMITRU (Bucharest) shared some of the work undertaken by the Fragile Society3 with school groups in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Advocating for the power of story-telling as a tool for self-expression, identity formation, and the processing of experience, Dumitru delineated how the act of constructing narrative, where the elements a person chooses to include and the manner in which they tell their story, both reflects and shapes their sense of self. A life story, for Pop, doesn’t merely recount events; it explains why they were significant for the individual’s identity and future.

The Media and Epidemics conference underscored a complex interplay between scientific and medical knowledge, and public health in its broader socio-political contexts. Speakers consistently insisted upon the recognition that the production and communication of information does not occur in a vacuum. Rather, they are deeply influenced by prevailing ideologies and political forces, and the selective inclusion and exclusion of information can serve to maintain the dominance of certain groups while marginalizing others. Understanding the global intersection between epidemic diseases and their representations in media is crucial for addressing contemporary issues, including gender stereotyping, the erasure of marginalized individuals, and political disinformation – issues that have deep historical roots in public health discourses.

At the same time, the impulse collectively to forget the pandemics of the past, and the deeply felt public and private griefs associated with them, raises critical concerns about the stability and impact of the historical archive, and the challenges of developing effective public health strategies for future epidemics. Indeed, one of the most pressing questions addressed throughout the conference was how we can prepare for future pandemics if we do not first identify and analyse the lessons of pandemics past. Ultimately, the conference demonstrated the value of bringing together diverse researchers from across a range of periods, geographies, disciplines, and diseases, by highlighting the development and persistence of shared themes related to the making and management of epidemic diseases. Without knowledge of this history, we are confined to a perpetual and incomprehensible present.

Conference overview:

Keynote

Amelia Bonea (Manchester): Infectious technologies: Telegraphs and telephones in medical practice and epidemic management

Panel 1: Communicating health: Visuality, technology, epistemology

Hiro Fujimoto (Heidelberg): Utilizing film for health education in 1920s and 1930s Japan: The Ministry of Home, medical professions, and filmmakers

Dalia Bathory (Bucharest): Technologies of communication, education and health control targeting children: Red Cross campaigns in Socialist Romania

Janelle Winters (Manchester): Viral communications: Cinematic epistemology, norm cascades, and clinical trial evidence during the COVID-19 pandemic

Panel 2: Epidemic management as public diplomacy/ soft power)

Ştefan Bosomitu (Bucharest): Between prophylaxis and propaganda: The control of public health crises in communist Romania: A case-study of tuberculosis

Bogdan Iacob (Bucharest): The eradication of malaria in Romania: A global showcase

Panel 3: Preventing and managing epidemics: Media, gender and humanitarian aid

Florian Grafl (Ulm): Transnational Perspectives on Health Posters to Combat Venereal Diseases in the First Half of the 20th Century

Graeme Gooday (Leeds) / Emily Rees Koerner (Leeds): Technoscience for an era of global existential threat: Humanitarian projects in women’s Cold War conferences

Aya Homei (Manchester): Media technology and Japan’s cooperation in family planning with China in the 1980s

Luciana Jinga (Bucharest): Media, humanitarian aid and the outburst of paediatric AIDS in Romania (1990-2000)

Panel 4: Epidemiology, material epistemology and the media of science

Lukas Engelmann (Edinburgh) / Jana Lohrova (Edinburgh) / Christos Lynteris (St Andrews) / John Nott (Edinburgh): Tabulation and the material epistemology of epidemiology: The case of the Indian Plague Commission, 1898-9

Carolina Mayes (Edinburgh) / Rhodri Leng (Edinburgh): Containing complexity: The emergence of genetic epidemiology in and through science media, 1900-1990

Sławomir Łotysz (Warsaw): From denial to fear: Changing narratives of the AIDS/HIV crisis in late socialist Poland

Katerina Vlantoni (Athens) / Athanasios Barlagiannis (Athens): The public destiny of scientific research: The case of an observational study about in-hospital mortality of COVID-19 patients in Greece

Panel 5: Race, media and public health crises

Vanessa Northington Gamble (George Washington): Black dispatches from an epidemic: African American newspapers and the 1918 Influenza Epidemic

Domnica Gorovei (Bucharest): Representations of African health crises in the Romanian communist journal Lumea (1960s-1980s)

Victoria Shmidt (Graz): Anti-pandemic campaigns as a channel of racialization of ethnic minorities: A global pattern?

Keynote

Jaehwan Hyun (Pusan): Masks and gender in post-Great Influenza Epidemic media in colonial Korea

Panel 6: Epidemic fictions and infectious metaphors

Emily Vincent (Birmingham): ‘He was shivering with a sort of ague’: Influenza and Oscar Wilde in fin-de-siècle Britain

Melissa Dickson (Queensland): ‘The nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance’: Spreading vampirism and Russian influenza across Bram Stoker’s Britain

Elen van Laer (Independent researcher): Imagery about a virus: More contagious than the virus itself? Metaphors used in Flemish and Dutch written press in the coverage of HIV and AIDS since the invention of combination therapy (1996)

Panel 7: Languages, narratives and memories of epidemics

Stefan Strunz (Dresden): Preventing epidemics at home: The Dresden Hygiene Museum’s didactic media on housing, 1912-1933

Magdalena Zdrodowska (Warsaw): Museum as medium: Exhibitions on epidemics

Irina Nastasă-Matei (Bucharest): Transnational epidemics, national cure: the mass-media in communist Romania on the Polidin vaccine

Magdalena Dunaj (Warsaw): Whose is the epidemic? Double binding of sign language users

Panel 8: Epidemic management, emotions and war

Joe Manock (Manchester): ‘A woeful crescendo of death’: Emotions, state critique and volunteerism during the Influenza epidemic of 1918-1919

Islay Shelbourne (St Andrews): ‘Great is the modern press, and great the misjudgement by some of its members…’ Newspapers, doctors, and challenges to Southern Californian medical expertise during the 1918-19 Influenza Pandemic

Ilona Dauw (Louvain/Leipzig): Managing an epidemic during and after a war: The place of the ‘Spanish’ flu in the Belgian and Polish press (1918-1920)

Camelia Zavarache (Bucharest): The encephalitis epidemics in post-war Romania, 1919-1925

Panel 9: Performing epidemics

Sally Shuttleworth (Oxford): Contagion Cabaret in the Time of COVID

Iuliana Dumitru (Bucharest) / Rucsandra Pop (Bucharest): COVID 19 experiences alchemized through arts. A case study on script writing and film making with high school students

Notes:
1 Events page of: Media and Epidemics website, https://mediaepidemics.com/events/ (19.07.2024).
2 Events page of: Contagion Cabaret, Diseases of Modern Life, the University of Oxford, https://diseasesofmodernlife.web.ox.ac.uk/contagion-cabaret#:~:text=The%20Contagion%20Cabaret%20and%20Contagion,and%20music%2C%20past%20and%20present (19.07.2024).
3 Website of: Fragile Society, https://fragile-society.org/en/ (19.07.2024).