Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association © The Author 2009; all rights reserved.
Commentary: Ackerknecht and ‘Anticontagionism’: a tale of two dichotomies
University of Notre Dame, Department of History, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA. E-mail: chamlin@nd.edu
Accepted 16 September 2008
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Bearing the simple title ‘Anticontagionism between 1821–67’, Erwin Ackerknecht's 1948 Fielding Garrison lecture to the American Association for the History of Medicine1 is one of the best known articles in the modern history of medicine. It not only opened the door to studies relating medical theory to the politics of epidemic response, but helped us appreciate that medicine could be ideological.
Ackerknecht's best known claim in the paper is in fact three: an empirical claim, an historical interpretation, and an evaluation. The empirical claim was that in the period covered by the paper (the chronology was looser than the title suggests; Ackerknecht took examples from the 1790s), the view that ambiguous epidemic diseases—i.e. plague, yellow fever, and cholera—were transmitted by contagion was dominant in the anti-liberal states of central and eastern Europe, while the anticontagionist view (or better, views), that these diseases derived from some transitory complex of environmental and