Dread

The average individual is far more likely to die in a car accident than from a communicable disease ... yet we are still much more fearful of the epidemic. Even... » 

The average individual is far more likely to die in a car accident than from a communicable disease ... yet we are still much more fearful of the epidemic. Even at our most level-headed, the thought of an epidemic can inspire terror. As Philip Alcabes persuasively argues in Dread, our anxieties about epidemics are created not so much by the germ or microbe in question - or the actual risks of contagion - but by the unknown, the undesirable, and the misunderstood.

Alcabes examines epidemics through history to show how they reflect the particular social and cultural anxieties of their times. From Typhoid Mary to bioterrorism, as new outbreaks are unleashed or imagined, new fears surface, new enemies are born, and new behaviors emerge. Dread dissects the fascinating story of the imagined epidemic: the one that we think is happening, or might happen; the one that disguises moral judgments and political agendas, the one that ultimately expresses our deepest fears.

Over de auteur
Philip Alcabes is an Associate Professor of Urban Public Health at Hunter College of the City University of New York and Visiting Clinical Associate Professor at the Yale School of Nursing. He has written op-eds for the Washington Post and contributed essays to The American Scholar, Chronicle of Higher Education, and Virginia Quarterly Review. He lives in the Bronx, New York. «