Global Risks, Divergent Pandemics: Contrasting Responses to Bubonic Plague and Smallpox in 1901 Cape Town

• In Event: 343 - Section on Medical Sociology Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 20. Health Risk

Abstract

What makes a pandemic and how do the presence of transnational epidemics engender social action in the sites of disease spread? This article explores why certain epidemic occurrences trigger sweeping and drastic medical and social interventions while others do not. Through an examination of the public health responses to Bubonic Plague in Cape Town in 1901, it becomes clear that the actions undertaken were both aggressive and significantly more totalizing than those employed against an epidemic of smallpox that was occurring a the same time. Fearing the spread of plague from within urban slums, all black Africans living within these poor neighborhoods were forcibly removed and transferred to a temporary quarantine site that was later made into a permanent township. This article contends that there is little empirical evidence to explain why the bubonic plague in particular, produced such racially motivated actions where other social forces and other epidemic diseases did not. Though deadly, plague was neither the most widespread nor the most deadly epidemic in Cape Town. The lack of empirical justification for these actions provokes a theoretical puzzle. Archival data suggests that not only was plague treated differently because of its pathology, it provoked such drastic and racist policies because it was the focus of a global medical structure. This article will explore why this global scrutiny was in large part responsible for the creation of the first township in the Cape and suggest why certain diseases become the focus of such global attention while others do not.

Author

• Alexandre White, Boston University