Pandemic Patterns: How Artistic Depictions of Past Epidemics Illuminate Thematic and Structural Responses to COVID-19 Today.

From the beginning of recorded history, human beings have encountered epidemics. They have also memorialized these events, which can be deeply traumatic and scarring, in visual art and literature. In this article, we look at a selection of artistic depictions of past epidemics in Western culture in light of what they can teach us about COVID-19 today. Our analysis reveals that while responses to epidemics are culturally bound to specific times and places, they also share common features. What surfaces again and again are pandemic patterns: persistent themes, such as divine revelation, "othering," freedom, and exile, girded by a four-part dramaturgical structure as originally articulated by medical historian Charles Rosenberg. We argue that our response to COVID-19 is neither uniformly progressive nor linear, but rather circular or overlapping in time and space. COVID-19 may feel new to us, but in important ways, it is quite old. It has awoken an ancient and durable human script, laid out and reenacted over thousands of years. Understanding these pandemic patterns may help clinicians and health policy makers alike better craft a response to COVID-19 today and to the future epidemics that undoubtedly will come.

Visualizing the Geography of the Diseases of China: Western Disease Maps from Analytical Tools to Tools of Empire, Sovereignty, and Public Health Propaganda, 1878-1929.

Argument This article analyzes for the first time the earliest western maps of diseases in China spanning fifty years from the late 1870s to the end of the 1920s. The 24 featured disease maps present a visual history of the major transformations in modern medicine from medical geography to laboratory medicine wrought on Chinese soil. These medical transformations occurred within new political formations from the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) to colonialism in East Asia (Hong Kong, Taiwan, Manchuria, Korea) and hypercolonialism within China (Tianjin, Shanghai, Amoy) as well as the new Republican Chinese nation state (1912-49). As a subgenre of persuasive graphics, physicians marshaled disease maps for various rhetorical functions within these different political contexts. Disease maps in China changed from being mostly analytical tools to functioning as tools of empire, national sovereignty, and public health propaganda legitimating new medical concepts, public health interventions, and political structures governing over human and non-human populations.

Medicinal Formulas and Experiential Knowledge in the Seventeenth-Century Epistemic Exchange between China and Europe.

This essay deals with the medical recipe as an epistemic genre that played an important role in the cross-cultural transmission of knowledge. The article first compares the development of the recipe as a textual form in Chinese and European premodern medical cultures. It then focuses on the use of recipes in the transmission of Chinese pharmacology to Europe in the second half of the seventeenth century. The main sources examined are the Chinese medicinal formulas translated­presumably­by the Jesuit Michael Boym and published in Specimen Medicinae Sinicae (1682), a text that introduced Chinese pulse medicine to Europe. The article examines how the translator rendered the Chinese formulas into Latin for a European audience. Arguably, the translation was facilitated by the fact that the recipe as a distinct epistemic genre had developed, with strong parallels, in both Europe and China. Building on these parallels, the translator used the recipe as a shared textual format that would allow the transfer of knowledge between the two medical cultures.

The Golden Mirror in the imperial court of the Qianlong emperor, 1739-1742.

In the last month of 1739, the third f the Manchu rulers, the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736-1795), ordered the compilation of a treatise on medicine "to rectify medical knowledge" throughout the empire. By the end of 1742, eighty participants chosen from several offices within the palace bureaucracy based in Beijing completed the Golden Mirror of the Orthodox Lineage of Medicine, the only imperially commissioned medical text the Qing government's Imperial Printing Office published. The Golden Mirror represents both the limitations in the power of the Qianlong emperor and the dominance in the Manchu court of Chinese scholarship from the Jiangnan region during the first decade of his reign. Chinese scholars participating in the compilation of the Golden Mirror fashioned a medical orthodoxy for the empire in the mid-eighteenth century from regional trends since the sixteenth century. The Golden Mirror is an illuminating example of how medical scholars participated in the formation of evidential scholarship in early-modern China and why Manchu patronage, southern Chinese scholarship, and medical orthodoxy, coalesced in the imperial court of the Qianlong emperor.