IsisCB Explore

Thesis ID: CBB284511283

'Kept From All Contagion': Germ Theory, Disease, and the Dilemma of Human Contact in Late Nineteenth-Century Literature (2015)

Megan Kari Nixon (Author)
Ross C. Murfin (Advisor)

Southern Methodist University
Ross C. Murfin
Publication date: 2015
Language: English

URI: http://search.proquest.com/docview/1705859638?accountid=12964

Outside Links

Microbiology Germ theory of disease Science and literature Biology Bacteriology 19th century England

“‘Kept From All Contagion’: Germ Theory, Disease, and the Dilemma of Human Contact in Late Nineteenth-Century Literature,” argues that the notion of the necessity of human connection and community is a crucial but long-overlooked imperative of fin-de-siècle literature, following upon the solidification of germ theory in the 1860s and 1870s and the subsequent development of bacteriology in the 1880s. Germ theory linked each illness to a specific microbe harbored in the human body and its waste, soundly rejecting the older miasma theory’s focus on unwholesome environments. Thus, germ theory moved the crosshairs of disease prevention from cleansing diseased spaces to cleansing or avoiding diseased people. Building on recent historical analyses delineating contemporary resistance to germ theory’s conquest over miasma theory, my project fleshes out the cultural ramifications of such reactions, and uncovers the hidden narratives of disease in fin-de-siècle literature, revealing authors’ concern with the social impact of germ theory. My project argues that a great many late-century authors (often seemingly unrelated one such as Hardy, Ibsen, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon) used their fiction to depict the stifling world that a culture of “sanitary” isolation based on germ theory seemed to encourage. Rejecting germ theory’s phenomenological implication that absolute purity is possible or desirable, Henry James, Ellen Wood, and others portray intimate relationships as fruitful and meaningful in spite of (and often because of) contaminating disease instead of portraying disease as evidence of failed sanitary preemptives. Human interaction may be messy, dirty, and even deadly, these authors suggest, but even potentially fatal interaction with the human community offers a more salvific life than germless isolation.

...More

Citation URI

data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB284511283

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Richardson, Ruth; (2013)
Inflammation, Suppuration, Putrefaction, Fermentation: Joseph Lister's Microbiology (/p/isis/citation/CBB001320254/)

Article Flavio D'Abramo; Sybille Neumeyer; (2020)
A Historical and Political Epistemology of Microbes (/p/isis/citation/CBB158989443/)

Book Laura Newman; (2021)
Germs in the English Workplace, c.1880–1945 (/p/isis/citation/CBB438055420/)

Thesis Kym Weed; (2018)
Our Microbes: Imagining Human Interdependence with Bacteria in American Literature, Science, and Culture, 1880-1920 (/p/isis/citation/CBB507631304/)

Article Nederbragt, Hubertus; (2003)
Strategies to Improve the Reliability of a Theory: The Experiment of Bacterial Invasion into Cultured Epithelial Cells (/p/isis/citation/CBB000340827/)

Article Kyu-hwan Sihn; (2017)
Reorganizing Hospital Space: The 1894 Plague Epidemic in Hong Kong and the Germ Theory (/p/isis/citation/CBB906774070/)

Book Pratik Chakrabarti; (2017)
Bacteriology in British India: Laboratory Medicine and the Tropics (/p/isis/citation/CBB209564091/)

Article García, Mónica; (2014)
Typhoid Fever in Nineteenth-Century Colombia: Between Medical Geography and Bacteriology (/p/isis/citation/CBB001320606/)

Article Amir Teicher; (2020)
Medical Bacteriology and Medical Genetics, 1880–1940: A Call for Synthesis (/p/isis/citation/CBB796702758/)

Book Chakrabarti, Pratik; (2012)
Bacteriology in British India: Laboratory Medicine and the Tropics (/p/isis/citation/CBB001252484/)

Article Barry, Stéphane; (2008)
La peste: de la 3e pandémie à sa réémergence actuelle (/p/isis/citation/CBB000932488/)

Thesis Weiss, Kim Morrison; (2013)
Louis Pasteur's Butterflies: The Role of the “Sericicultrices” in the Metamorphosis of a Nineteenth-Century Germ Theory (/p/isis/citation/CBB001560890/)

Article Lozano, Sonia; (2008)
Importation et destin de la première théorie des germes au Mexique: développement des premières recherches sur la fièvre jaune dans les années 1880 (/p/isis/citation/CBB000932882/)

Article Jones, Susan D.; Teigen, Philip M.; (2008)
Anthrax in Transit: Practical Experience and Intellectual Exchange (/p/isis/citation/CBB000850412/)

Book Hänseler, Marianne; (2009)
Metaphern unter dem Mikroskop: Die epidemische Rolle von Metaphorik in den Wissenschaften und in Robert Kochs Bakteriologie (/p/isis/citation/CBB001220064/)

Book Lax, Alistair J.; (2005)
Toxin: The Cunning of Bacterial Poisons (/p/isis/citation/CBB000774255/)

Article Kreuder-Sonnen, Katharina; (2012)
Wie die Mikroben nach Warschau kamen (/p/isis/citation/CBB001420904/)

Article Marcella Tamburello; Giovanni Villone; (2017)
Vincenzo Tiberio: la prima antibiotico-terapia sperimentale in vivo (/p/isis/citation/CBB360249828/)

Article Saldaña, Juan José; Priego, Natalia; (2000)
Entrenando a los cazadores de microbios de la república: la domesticación de la microbiología en México (/p/isis/citation/CBB000102469/)

Article Löwy, Ilana; (2010)
Cultures de bactériologie en France, 1880--1900: la paillasse et la politique (/p/isis/citation/CBB001220549/)