Kept From All Contagion: Germ Theory, Disease, and the Dilemma of Human Contact in Late Nineteenth-Century Literature

Kari Nixon’s monograph has the distinction of being a book about reacting to pandemics written and published right before the worldwide outbreak of COVID-19, thus challenging so much of our knowledge about the public and disease. While a fascinating study in nineteenth-century attitudes toward germ theory and contagion, the book is also interesting from a predictive standpoint as it addresses many of the controversies about protection and personal risk that have come to dominate current public discourse. Nixon’s book highlights the ways in which nineteenth-century authors defy principles of isolation from contagion and how fiction “subverts germ theory specifically and unmitigated scientific authority more generally by defiantly and consistently illustrating intimate relationships as fruitful and meaningful in spite of—and sometimes because of—infectious contact” (5). The idea of sanitization becomes connected to the antibiotic, a process that renders matter lifeless, and thus circulation is both proper and necessary for healthy...