“With Charles VIII’s siege of Naples, not one scourge but two entered Italy. Before 1494, Syphilis probably did not exist in Europe; returnees from Columbus’ first voyage from America, who had contracted the disease in America, very likely introduced the disease to Spain. Spanish mercenaries at the siege of Naples (1494-5) suffered an epidemic that almost certainly syphilis, whence it spread throughout the continent. As the plague spread, the French called it ‘Neapolitan disease’, while Neapolitans preferred to call it ‘the French disease’.”
—Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States – AD 990-1992, 1992, p. 77
“A number of scholars have commented on how diseases ‘becomes adjectival’ since the late 1980s when Susan Sontag first highlighted how epidemics become a proxy for social disorder when metaphors are applied to them and ‘the horror of the disease is imposed on other things’. More recently, in a book that examined the legacies of plague in literature, theory and film, [Jennifer ] Cooke (2009) noted that: ‘Structurally, metaphor is a figure of speech that implies contagion: the two concepts metaphor brings together are no longer discrete but mutually infect one another’. In our current circumstances, we see that certain political leaders in various countries have begun to use the metaphor of war to legitimate action in response to COVID-19 and themselves as leaders who are able to fight an invisible enemy. Increasingly in America, Australia and elsewhere in the world, the rhetoric of ‘wartime footing’ is being used to describe needed and actual measures to combat, what some refer to as the ‘invisible enemy’ and others have depicted as the ‘Chinese virus’.”
‘Plagues, Pandemics and Playback Loops: War-time footing and urgent lessons from history
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