Introduction

Abstract

Plague is still with us. This is a medical fact: the disease which results from infection by the Yersinia pestis bacteria continues to sicken and to kill, especially in poor countries where medical supplies are sparse and antibiotics are unavailable or arrive too late.¹ Plague is endemic in the rat and rodent populations of certain regions; humans who come into contact with these animals remain at risk. Legacies of Plague, however, is not concerned with the medical reality of the disease but with its conceptual and symbolic continuation from the time of the final Western European outbreak in 1720 to the present day. The Marseilles outbreak of 1720 was widely feared and prompted Daniel Defoe to write A Journal of the Plague Year in 1722, even though it did not spread and, when it exhausted itself, plague epidemics disappeared for good. Although various medical and epidemiological theories have been advanced, there is still no conclusive explanation as to why plague never returned to Europe upon an epidemic scale after the French outbreak. This mysterious disappearance, plague’s huge numbers of victims, coupled with the vivid imagery of buboes, burial-pits, death carts and houses shut up or marked with the cross of infection, have been held responsible for the grim grip plague has had upon our cultural imagination and for its continual linguistic deployment to name new ‘scourges’, from AIDS to smoking and, more recently, Tslamofascism’.²