26. Contagion without Infection: Histories of the epidemiology of psychiatric and non-communicable diseases
Lukas Engelmann, University of Edinburgh; Gladys Kostyrka, University of Edinburgh; John Nott, Maastricht University; Harry Yi-Jui Wu
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês, Spanish/Español/Espanhol
The history of epidemiological reasoning is too often identified with the legacy of infectious diseases. Most modern instruments of epidemiological research and surveillance are often associated with histories of cholera, plague, smallpox, influenza, polio, and so on. Yet, during the latter part of the twentieth century, psychiatric and non-communicable diseases spread faster and further than many of the infectious diseases on which epidemiology is built.
To move beyond the limitations of infection, the panel’s rationale starts with a series of open questions. First, when why and how did psychiatric and non-communicable diseases become targets of epidemiological thinking? Second, how have psychiatric conditions and their historical and local framings impacted on the development of epidemiological thinking? And, finally, how has the history of non-communicable conditions shaped the development of discrete epidemiological methods and theories?
Beyond this inventory of a non-infectious epidemiology, the panel seeks to focus the transfer of ways of thinking and models of reasoning between infectious diseases on the one hand and psychiatric and chronic conditions on the other hand. To focus on the phenomena of ‘contagion without infection’ we ask how ideas of spread, concepts of distribution, and images of contagion have been folded onto diseases and conditions in psychiatry, oncology, gynaecology, endocrinology, metabolic disease, and so on. We ask, in other words, how the introduction of epidemiological reasoning has disrupted, reshaped, and redirected the production of knowledge about psychiatric and chronic conditions and how we can account for the traces and ruins of epidemiological reasoning in these fields.
