Epidemic threats and racist legacies

By the time of Murchison’s study, Western physicians were using the term ‘endemic’ to describe diseases that regularly occurred in specific locations. Derived from the Greek words for ‘in’ and ‘people’, endemic was tied to location in the ‘Airs, Waters, Places’ doctrine of classical Western medicine. This doctrine held that the physical and mental health of an individual was intimately tied to place, including climate, weather, food, water and season.

From endemic to epidemic and back again

The term endemic was yoked to another, more familiar term, epidemic, which in the 19th century referred to an imported and often contagious disease. But endemic and epidemic were relational terms: some endemic disease might become epidemic, and some epidemic diseases might revert back to being endemic.

The classic disease used for thinking about the fluctuations of endemic and epidemic was malaria. Henry Stephens, member of the Royal College of Surgeons, in 1849 went as far as to use ‘malarious’ as a synonym for endemic diseases, noting that they are “ordinarily the disease of a district, having a local origin and local habitation”. “Yet occasionally,” Stephens said, “they will assume the march and character of an epidemic.”

The study of the relationship between endemic and epidemic, and the complex reasons why some endemic diseases erupted as epidemics, was at the centre of the rise of the modern field of epidemiology and global thinking about disease. As John Macpherson, Inspector-General of Hospitals in Bengal in colonial India, noted in his book 'The early seats of cholera in India', “No question in medicine is more interesting than that of an endemic disease taking on the character of an epidemic, and of the behaviour of an endemic, when its own epidemic form reaches it.”

Epidemiology and Western imperialism

Entangled with the rise of modern epidemiology was the global march of Western imperialism and colonisation, which reframed epidemics as not just contagious and non-localised but foreign and aggressive. Diseases framed as endemic to Europe, like typhoid, were easier to explain through the ‘Airs, Waters, Places’ doctrine. But diseases such as cholera and plague, understood to be endemic to the Middle East and Asia, apparently required a different kind of logic.

Framing cholera’s origin as endemic to India, for example, was part of an imperialist doctrine of blame at the heart of global health, with racist presumptions, one with legacies that continue today. British doctors like Ernst Hart, long-time editor of the British Medical Journal, declared that cholera was “a filth disease” of India, “carried by dirty people to dirty places, and there spread by dirt and the use of dirty water”.

Endemicity in the colonies was used by Western doctors as a value judgement in diseases, like cholera, “of the inferior social and hygienic”, “moral influences, and irregularities of life” among “the natives of India”, John Sullivan of the Royal College of Physicians opined in 1877.

Epidemics of cholera or plague that struck Europe might be, as Henry Stephens noted in 1849, an “invading army”, that brought with them not just pestilential terror, but the threat of moral decay, which is why pandemics and xenophobia are almost inextricably bound together.

Mapping disease on the “highways of man”

When a disease like cholera erupted into an epidemic, it followed, Sullivan noted in 1877, “the direction of the highways of man”. From the second half of the 19th century, doctors attempted to map and visualise the global patterns of endemicity and epidemicity. The Scottish geographer Alexander Keith Johnston, a corresponding member of the Epidemiological Society of London, produced in 1856 ‘The Geographical Distribution of Health & Disease’, a colour-coded map that attempted to situate the origins of diseases and their spread as epidemics.

Johnston’s map connected yellow-fever epidemics from Philadelphia to Haiti to Cartagena. Leprosy, in this visualisation, was endemic to South America, parts of Africa, and India. Cholera was endemic to India, and typhus to Europe. And the moral and racial influence of epidemiological thinking was at the core of Johnston’s map. Colonised Southern Africa and Australia, for example, were explained as “very healthy”, and “diseases same as in England except cholera”.

Interestingly, Johnston’s map also attempted to visualise the geographical pathways whereby endemic diseases spread in epidemic patterns. He used red lines, for instance, to show the march of cholera in 1832 and 1848, and arrows to show where cholera came from and how it reached the West.

Global health in a post-colonial age

The fluidity between the endemic and epidemic began to change from the late 19th century, both with more reductionist, biomedical understandings of disease, and with major shifts in the global distribution of infectious disease. Endemic continued to mean diseases of specific locations and to many in the Global North endemicity also came to mean remote diseases that were a low-level threat, easily contained.

Thus malaria, classed as endemic in much of the Global South, continued to kill millions but, because it was not an epidemic threat and could be contained, did not warrant significant medical and research resources on a global scale. Increasingly, experts in the Global North came to disregard many previous disease threats like cholera, typhoid and plague, which seemingly ‘disappeared’ in the Global North but remained ‘endemic’ in the Global South. In other words, the politics of the post-colonial world masked the way in which endemicity had been tied to colonialism.

Signalling the end of the Covid-19 pandemic

The legacy of the endemic and epidemic diseases remains with us. In early 2022, as the mass vaccination programme across the Global North began to take effect and mortality rates fell, there was a push in western Europe and North America to recategorise Covid-19 as endemic, signalling a subtle shift in how it should be perceived.

The disease was no longer a significant global threat, but something generally mild and inevitable. It may still be spreading in epidemic proportions in other parts of the world with lower vaccination levels, but for the Global North the change in perception signalled that the pandemic was coming to an end.

As 19th-century epidemiologist Gavin Milroy quipped in 1870, “The general subject of epidemiology is indubitably mysterious and complex,” but it is not without politics.

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