{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02229188436084988, 'fraction_numerical': 0.007662835249042145, 'mean_word_length': 5.203023758099352, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Epidemic Years: A Third Look

Rereading an iconic book on concepts, politics, and practices of epidemic management in the middle of a pandemic is an exciting and strange experience, bordering on the harrowing. Charles Rosenberg’s The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866, first published in 1962, shows the multiple ways in which moral, medical, social, and political sensemaking shaped the American experience of a recurring pandemic. With its detailed analysis of parallel and ever-changing approaches in the midst of scientific uncertainty, its description of a society in crisis in which vast social and racial inequalities are laid bare, Rosenberg’s seminal work offers entry points into understanding the experiences and challenges of our current epidemic. Thus, the book transports us into a past that is perhaps not such a foreign country, after all. What is astounding about The Cholera Years is its continuous relevance and importance over fifty years after its first publication. The key to its significance lies in the multiplicity of analyses it delivers: it is an early demonstration of Rosenberg’s transformative research and methodology in the history of epidemics (and of medicinemore broadly) and at once a continued critical engagement with his own research and its place in historiography. This essay is, in fact, a “third look” at Rosenberg’s seminal book, as the author himself delivered a second look at his own work in the afterword of the book when it was republished in 1987 in the middle of another epidemic crisis: HIV/AIDS. This reflection is as important as the original book itself, as it lays out a genealogy of the history of medicine, provides readers with historiographical context and theoretical background, and anchors The Cholera Years at once in Rosenberg’s formidable scholarship and in the shifting methodologies and concepts of history of medicine more broadly. I first read the book as a graduate student at Rutgers University in a directed reading group led by Keith Wailoo, who himself had been Rosenberg’s student. The discussions in the reading group were, in a way, a continuation of genealogies and historiographical processes that Rosenberg provided a snapshot of twenty years before.Wailoo, whose own impressive body of scholarship focuses on the politics of race in public health and medicine, has taken Rosenberg’s scholarship forward (with subtle critique) and brings tensions of race and class in laboratory practice and clinical encounter into focus, highlighting how inequalities and suffering are formed through them. After a decade of research into the Cold War politics of global health, medical research, and epidemic management, and now trying to make sense of COVID-19, I find myself conscious of the historiographical lineage spanning decades. The Cholera Years, and Rosenberg’s work in