During her junior year in college, Catherine Kudlick sat in a Parisian classroom, rapt with attention, listening to a historian lecture on cholera, which had claimed nearly 38,000 lives in Paris during the 19th century. Kudlick, now an associate professor in UC Davis' history department, has since investigated the epidemic in depth and has learned much that can be applied today about society's reaction to disease.
Her new book, Cholera in Post-Revolutionary Paris, delves into the social environment that existed after the upheavals of the French Revolution, a time when bourgeois Parisians sought to distance themselves from an ever-growing population of poor immigrants who lived in squalor. In this tense environment cholera descended in 1832 and 1849 with profound repercussions.
In the beginning of the plague, bourgeois Parisians were convinced the lower classes--hit hard by the disease--were simply predisposed to contracting cholera. The poor, in turn, rioted violently through the streets, believing that doctors and the government had started cholera as a massive assassination plot.
According to Kudlick, the way Parisians reacted to cholera follows a distinct pattern of behavior that has occurred during disease outbreaks dating as far back as the Black Death. She has found that when epidemics strike, Western societies first deny the existence of the threat and then attempt to flee the infected areas. Next, they look for scapegoats to blame for the disease and even manufacture conspiracy theories.
This blueprint, Kudlick asserts, applies to modern epidemics as well, with AIDS being an exemplary model.
When AIDS first appeared in the early '80s, research labs were reluctant to see it as cause for alarm, Kudlick says. This dangerous denial period allowed the disease to spread further, before scientists finally learned it was not simply a "gay plague" but a blood-borne virus. In the tradition of flight from a disease site, AIDS may have been responsible for a major decline in tourism in San Francisco as the crisis worsened, Kudlick notes. But AIDS perhaps best illustrates the stage of scapegoating.
"Often disease hits groups that already have some stigma attached to them; so they're being blamed not only for the disease but also for all the other things that people have been afraid of from that group," said Kudlick.
"In Paris, it was the poor," Kudlick continued. "The fact that the bourgeois were closer to the poor (than the aristocracy) made them afraid of being poor themselves, of being dragged down. A comparable situation today is homophobia. People who are most afraid of gay people are probably subconsciously worried about being gay themselves."
Much as the poor of Paris believed themselves victims of a government-run plot, several conspiracy theories have been circulated as to the cause of AIDS. As Kudlick writes in a recent article for the medical journal Odyssey, "One rumor among gay men and I.V. drug users blames the disease on failed laboratory experiments of the CIA or KGB who were attempting to develop a new kind of germ warfare."
While society's reactions to disease seem to ring of fear and condemnation, Kudlick asserts that AIDS is significantly the first epidemic whose victims have taken a positive stance, defining themselves and mobilizing to find a cure.
Kudlick, who teaches an undergraduate seminar called "AIDS in Historical Context," says she hopes that, in looking at past epidemics, students will look at such diseases in a new light.
