Contagious

Book cover of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative

Book description

How should we understand the fear and fascination elicited by the accounts of communicable disease outbreaks that proliferated, following the emergence of HIV, in scientific publications and the mainstream media? The repetition of particular characters, images, and story lines-of Patients Zero and superspreaders, hot zones and tenacious microbes-produced a formulaic…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Contagious as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Andrea Kitta

Author

This is an amazing book if you want to understand that disease isn’t just medical, it’s also cultural.

Contagious really describes how culture influences how we understand illness and how that affects treatment and care of individuals, including who we blame and how we understand risk.

People like to think of medicine and science as being detached and objective, but this book shows that simply isn’t true.

From Andrea's list on reads before the next pandemic.