Infection, Pandemics and the Borders of Medicine

This talk investigates the ancient Egyptian belief which deems Sakhmet and decans as the cause of contagious diseases and epidemics. Sakhmet is a lioness goddess who is associated with plagues due to her epithet “Sakhmet in the year of pestilence” (Sḫm.t-m-rnp.t-iꜣd.t); while decans are the 36 stars or constellations which rise at one-hour interval throughout the course of one year. Since the reign of Amenhotep III (1400-1350 BCE), decans have frequently appeared together with Sakhmet, as the goddess’ disease-carrying emissaries.

Villainizing an unknown other as guilty of spreading or causing contagious disease has a long, odious history. In antiquity, it was often the marginalized who fell victim to the ritual dynamics of scapegoating. The poor, the enslaved, the disabled––those who lived at the margins of society suddenly became the focal point of cathartic expulsion in times of plague. Scholars have mainly focused on the purificatory aspects of the scapegoat ritual (Parker 1983, Burkert 1985, Vernant 1988) and its role in periodic festivals of renewal (Deubner 1932, Graf 2008).

This study will examine how early modern Ottoman medicine used fragrances to prevent the contagion of the epidemic. The main question of this study is why and how the Ottomans used fragrances in the treatment of the epidemic. For Classical Islamic scholars and the Ottomans, as their successors, one of the reasons for the spread of epidemics is the theory of miasma which signifies the negative effect of the presence of foul odors and spoiled air on the human body.

Lucan’s Pharsalia reads as an extended pathology of rabies civilis, or civil madness, in which individual disasters are symptomatic for the larger disaster that is civil war (Fratantuono 2012). For his only plague account, Lucan draws on Caesar’s Commentaries to stage the disasters of plague and famine at the siege of Dyrrachium in Book 6, thereby undercutting the lessons from its intertextual predecessors, especially Virgil’s Georgics, and crushing the hopeful prospect of regeneration and redemption.

The aim of this paper is to explore causality as a channel and as an environment (Meyrowitz 1999) within which information about the plague is produced, transmitted and (mis)recognized in Greek plague narratives.

Why do we think Hippokrates has anything to say about pandemics today? Despite an initial surge in public and academic interest in classical plagues, it has been argued that COVID-19 has presented “limit cases” to the relevance of Classics (Chaudhari & Dexter 2021). Nonetheless, the impulse to compare past and present has become a virus itself, “spreading rapidly along modern channels of communication, turning those infected into dribbling zombies writing op-eds about how current events demonstrate the eternal relevance of Thucydides” and the Athenian plague (Morley 2020).