Negotiating Pandemic Risk: On the Scandalization and Transcultural Transformation of the Swine Flu

Epidemiology, it would seem, lends itself to an interdisciplinary dialogue between medicine and the humanities in particular ways. More than any other medical discipline, perhaps, epidemiology has triggered responses by cultural theorists and cultural historians, and it has done so on two levels and on account of two, mutually interrelated reasons. First, epidemiology as a discourse and medical practice has been so seductive to cultural theorists because of the metaphorical potential inherent in what Priscilla Wald has termed the “outbreak narrative”.