Infections spread, and stories are composed: The difference between the two forms of communicability ‒ transmission and representation ‒ opens a space for reflecting on what illness means. The contributors focus on the moral and social dimensions involved in narrating pandemics, analyzing how urban dwellers, vaccine sceptics, medical experts, factory workers, colonial administrators, colonial subjects, and fictional characters try to make sense of biological threats and their implications for social order, freedom, and solidarity. The figures who populate these factual and fictional stories agree on very little in terms of treatment and prevention, but they all have one thing in common: they deploy stories against the spread of disease.
