Hilary term 2023 lecture with Dr Nicholas E Bonneau
A Repression of Things Past: Reflections on the Memory of Pandemics in the Wake of Covid
Part of the Rewley House Lecture Series
We are now entering the fourth year of an ongoing pandemic and COVID-19 continues to dominate headlines alongside wars, elections, and sporting events. And perhaps it should. As of the beginning of 2023, we have witnessed the deaths of almost seven million individuals across the globe to this new disease and its complications.
In often vain attempts to put this extraordinary loss in perspective, many invoke the memory of similar epidemics from the past. This methodologically problematic search oftentimes turns up just enough evidence of confusion, pain, and grief in past societies so that we might recognize some of our own experiences. Rarely do they satisfy our expectation of proportionality. This inconsistency raises difficult questions for historians. Must we presume that events of high lethality do not always leave proportionately discernible and long-lasting impacts on the societies they afflicted? While stories of the Black Death, smallpox, and consumption still haunt our collective imagination, why do the memories of other equally terrifying afflictions seem so conspicuously absent? It appears that among most epidemics – even those associated with particularly high levels of mortality – the historical record lies empty of such evidence.
Dr Nicholas E. Bonneau will explore several past pandemics, from the Plague of Justinian to the Great Influenza of 1918, and the unexpected ‘forgetting’ which seems to have followed them. Exploring this strange reality may enable us to consider better what lies ahead for our own society and how (and whether) we might choose to record our own experiences of death and survival.
About the speaker
Nicholas Bonneau is a historian of science, medicine, environment, and death, interested particularly in the demographic, emotional, and cultural legacies of epidemics in the territory of the modern United States. He earned his PhD in History at the University of Notre Dame and has been a visiting lecturer at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County for the past two years. He is now a visiting scholar at Franklin and Marshall College, where he has taught courses in the history of public health and the history of science.
