The footprint: living with the plague

Today's pandemic is forcing us to take a fresh look at the ways in which the live  with the epidemic. When the plague becomes endemic, it leaves its mark on the bodies of those who survive it. We look at the consequences of its passage on the demographic regime, but also on the state of health of the surviving populations, ultimately examining, on the basis of a few urban sites, the trace it leaves, understood as wear and tear and as an event.

Contents

• "We are not the number we thought we were" (Bruno Latour, Les Microbes. War and Peace, 1984)
• Does nature take revenge? Sur quelques risques méthodologiques de la pensée du vivant (Simon Schaffer, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Bruno Latour", Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 1991)
• La Terre est une pelote d'embrouilles (Patrice Maniglier, Le philosophe, la Terre et le virus. Bruno Latour explained by current events, 2021)
• La pandémie comme fait social total (Frédéric Keck, "Pandémie", in Didier Fassin dir., La société qui vient, 2022)
• War of extermination or war of occupation ? The human species as an epidemiological dead end
• Investigating a number that drives you mad: Johannes Nohl's 42,836,486 deaths (Gautier Dietrich)
• Plague, cholera and hygienic investigation (Jean-Antoine-François Ozanam, Histoire médicale générale et particulière des maladies épidémiques contagieuses et épizootiques qui ont régné en Europe depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu'à nos jours, 1835 )
• One sum, many scales: "What is impossible is not the proximity of things, but the site itself where they could be in proximity" (Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les Choses, 1966)
• In search of the last three decimal places: from Justus Hecker (1833) to Henry Knighton (1396) via Cyriacus Spangenberg (1572), Joshua Barnes (1688) and Thomas Short (1749)
• "Doucement, messieurs les morts, procédons par ordre, s'il vous plaît" (Jules Michelet, Histoire de France, t. 2, 1833): making history of those who remain
• Former plague sufferers: recovery, after-effects, immunity
• Selection pressure, blood groups and the immune response to emerging diseases
• The impact of the plague's passage on the phenotypic evolution of the human genome (Maria Emilia Carloni, Javier Pizzaro-Cerda and Christian Demeure, "Sélection génétique par les épidémies de peste" [Institut Pasteur, 2021: https: //planet-vie.ens.fr/thematiques/sante/pathologies/selection-genetique-par-les-pandemies-de-peste])
• The health status of surviving populations: a new field of archaeodemography (Sharon DeWitte, "Stress, sex, and plague: Patterns of developmental stress and survival in pre- and post-Black Death London". American Journal of Human Biology, 2018)
• Establishing the sex ratio and age pyramid of plague victims (Sacha Kacki, "Recherches bio-archéologiques sur la peste noire: avancées récentes et perspectives", colloquium October 6, 2021)
• The death of children in contemporary accounts (Samuel Cohn, The Black Death Transformed, 2002)
• The statistical bias of excess mortality analyses (Guido Alfani and Marco Bonetti, "A Survival Analysis of the Last Great European Plagues: The Case of Nonantola (Northern Italy) in 1630", Population Studies, 73, 2019)
• Plague as a constant in a new demographic regime? Hollow classes and an aging society (Boris Bove, Le Temps de la guerre de Cent Ans, 2009)
• Des familles prolifiques, mais pas des familles nombreuses: quand la mort passe parmi les siens (Jean-Louis Biget and Jean Tricard, "Livres de raison et démographie familiale en Limousin au XVe^siècle ", Annales de démographie historique, 1981)
• In the 1430s, "Hiroshima in Normandy" (Guy Bois, Crise du féodalisme. Économie rurale et démographie en Normandie orientale du début du XIVe^siècle au milieu du XVIe^siècle , Paris, 1976)
• Jeux d'échelles et temporalités: les paysages urbains de la peste à Dijon au XVe^siècle (Pierre Galanaud, Anne Galanaud and Patrick Giraudoux, "Historical Epidemics Cartography Generated by Spatial Analysis: Mapping the Heterogeneity of Three Medieval "Plagues" in Dijon". PLoS ONE, 2015)
• Al Maqrizi, surveyor of Cairo's ruins: ruin as wear and tear and event (Julien Loiseau, Reconstructing the Sultan's House. Ruin and the Recomposition of Urban Order in Cairo (1350-1450), 2011)
• "In Egypt, ruin is the historian's greatest enemy. It covers up and empties of meaning the shipwrecked debris of the past, at the very time when everything makes us believe that it has left them in place and preserved them" (Julien Loiseau, "L'histoire désurbanisée. À propos de Qûs et des travaux de Jean-Claude Garcin", Afrique & histoire, 2006)
• Footprints, no footprints: when the historian finds the footprints