ACADEMIA Letters The State of Panic and Pandemics in History Santosh Kumar Rai As we are in an unprecedented lockdown to deal with this mutant virus that is killing people and making our world tragic and horrendous, one requires to explore nature of panics in relation to epidemics of plague and influenza among others and the ways in which they have been historically produced, defined, and managed in different settings. The relationship between disease and historical change has been quite rapid across different, imperial, and post-imperial settings—from early fourteenth century Europe, late nineteenth century East Asia to twentyfirst-century world. Panics of epidemics in relation to political anxieties, rumors, resistance, and crises have been a provocation for the government agencies, policymakers, planners, and other authorities to understand, deal with, and neutralize the fear. Here one has to situate each epidemic episode into two distinct cultural settings: European and non-Western- as the peoples of different cultures viewed and attempted to control or cure the illnesses that newly afflicted them in their own ways. There have been the differing conceptions of plague and controls to check its spread in Western Europe and the Middle East, from 1347 to 1844; the case of leprosy and lepers in modern Europe and the tropics colonized by Europeans; and the course of smallpox in the Americas from its supposed introduction in 1518 to eradication in the 1970s.There have been the varied experiences of the impact of syphilis in Western Europe and East Asia from 1492 to 1965; then histories of cholera in Great Britain and India from 1817 to 1920; and yellow fever and malaria, have been major historical forces shaping Atlantic Africa and America in the period 1647–1928. The, impact of plague of medieval Europe on the peoples of the continent was so immediate and dramatic that it is critical to our understanding of the changing cultural and religious, as well as the social and economic dynamics of the beginning of modernity. In Western Europe plague mortality generally decreased after 1450, but in Egypt it continued high until the middle of the nineteenth century simply because the Mamluks tended to stay put as the plague Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Santosh Kumar Rai, skr1000@gmail.com Citation: Rai, S.K. (2021). The State of Panic and Pandemics in History. Academia Letters, Article 1805. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1805. 1 appeared, as did the Christian Copts and the Jews. Religious concepts played a predetermined role of making people fatalist. The real shift in mortality began under Mohammed Ali, after 1805. By mid-nineteenth century quarantine, separation of victims, the burning of infected clothing, and frequent bathing helped reduce the number of plague patients, and hence the number of deaths. In 1894, in far-east, when the colonial authorities sought to deal with an outbreak of bubonic plague with draconian sanitary interventions, including house-to-house visitations, anti government notices began appearing in Hong Kong and subsequently in the streets of Canton (Guangzhou). Rumors circulated amongst the Chinese “that the Government had resolved, in order to stop the plague, to select a few children from each School to excise their livers in order to provide the only remedy which would cure plague patients.” As a consequence, a panic spread, like wild fire among the local population.s In the history of pandemics, “public” or popular responses have always been entangled with “elite” responses. In his discussion of outbreaks of bubonic plague and influenza in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century India, renowned scholar on history of epidemics, David Arnold illustrates the extent to which panics are compounded reactions: that is to say, multiple panics are intertwined, each coproducing the other. In 1896–97, India was struck by the same bubonic plague, that earlier began in southern China and Hong Kong in 1894. Over the following 50 years an estimated 10 to 15 million deaths occurred worldwide, 12 million of them in India alone due to this bubonic plague. There was a another more destructive disease which simultaneously cached India. The influenza outbreak of 1918–19 has been described as the greatest pandemic in world history, leaving in its wake an estimated 30 million dead. As per the conservative official data, influenza resulted in 12.5 million deaths in India. Here plague provoked a major “panic” that affected the colonial regime and the Indian population, sparking rumor, riots, repression, and mass migration from urban centers, the greater and more abrupt mortality of the influenza episode passed without any apparent crisis. The influenza epidemic did not provoke panic in India, despite the high mortality figures, because agents of the colonial state did not panic in their response. Conversely, in the case of the plague, the institutional panic triggered by agents of the colonial state resulted in draconian public health interventions that sparked another species of panic amongst native communities. Clearly, the scale of mortality alone does not explain the onset of a deep sense of crisis in 1896–97 and its relative absence in 1918–19. The rise of National Socialism in twentieth-century Germany underscored the lethal consequences of conflating disease with crime and implementing state policy around an absolute imperative to ‘cure.’ During the Third Reich, politics was progressively biologized, producAcademia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Santosh Kumar Rai, skr1000@gmail.com Citation: Rai, S.K. (2021). The State of Panic and Pandemics in History. Academia Letters, Article 1805. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1805. 2 ing a ‘new’ politics of health. While social problems were deemed to have a biological etiology, such problems could be treated with specific therapies. Adolf Hitler imagined himself to be the political incarnation of Robert Koch, the German bacteriologist celebrated for isolating the anthrax, tuberculosis, and cholera bacilli, as well as developing a set of scientific procedures—known as Koch’s postulates—for confirming the causal relationship between specific microbes and diseases. Hitler, conceived of himself as a political physician. He insisted that every distress “has some cause or another.” His mission as a politician was to “penetrate to the cause” of Germany’s disease, and to effect a cure. Rest is history. Here we require looking at the contrasting epidemiology of the diseases and their cultural construction, the very different governmental and public health responses to them, the timing of the epidemics in relation to internal political and economic developments, and the international situation surrounding them. The severity of a crisis and the magnitude of the panicked reactions it triggers are not always commensurate. It might be further argued that today globalized pandemic panics, along with the panics induced by global networks of terrorism, continue to feed on fears that reverberate from the past about the dangers and capriciousness of other races and cultures. Panic, is always produced from a repertoire of former fears: about oceans that might cause tsunamis, diseases that might one day become pandemics, and wars that could escalate into holocausts. Panicked conditions may serve as a justification for ratifying sweeping political reforms and acceding to radical state interventions. As recent events have also shown, panic and anxiety can serve to highlight the need for longer-term social action and act as catalysts for new modes of enquiry into emerging diseases or banking practices. In this sense, panic may have its uses beyond the controlling calculations of the state. Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Santosh Kumar Rai, skr1000@gmail.com Citation: Rai, S.K. (2021). The State of Panic and Pandemics in History. Academia Letters, Article 1805. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1805. 3