Three pandemics : the composition of worlds

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Alexandre Yersin's discovery of the plague bacillus in Hong Kong in 1894 is inextricably linked with an epidemiological orientalism that carries the imaginary pestis of the ancients into the plague of modern times. Yet it also represents a break with the past, analyzed here as a "style" that crosses disciplines to produce a narrative of a new composition of plague worlds, but also of a new chronology in which what happens in the distance documents an invisible past.

In Marcel Proust's bedroom, "an imaginary world where the characters evolve in the closed vase of a book protected from mortal affections" (Gérard Macé, Le Navire Arthur, 2020)
Adrien Proust and epidemiological orientalism (Nükhet Varlik, ""Oriental Plague" or Epidemiological Orientalism? Revisiting the Plague episteme in early Modern Europe", in Plague and Contagion in the Islamic Mediterranean, 2019)
La question sanitaire, l'internationalisme et l'externalisation des quarantaines (Sylvia Chiffoleau, Genèse de la santé publique internationale. De la peste d'Orient à l'OMS, 2012)
From the pestis of the ancients to the plague of the moderns: the dangers of a pernicious Orient
Didier Fassin on the inequality of lives: "The Canton plague of 1894 went almost unnoticed. True, it only affected Chinese. Nevertheless, it caused the death of 100,000 people" (Adrien Proust, La Défense de l'Europe contre la peste, 1897)
When Doctor Proust smells a rat: the Ark of the Covenant and the "golden tumors" of the Philistine plague (Book of Samuel, V, 1-5)
Nicolas Poussin, La Peste d'Asdod, 1630: actuality of pestilences (Sheila Barker, "Poussin, Plague and Early Modern Medicine", The Art Bulletin, 2004)
Pathetic theater and pictorial stereotypes (Dominique Chevé-Aicardi; Le Corps de la Contagion. Étudeanthropologique des représentations iconographiques de la peste (^XVIe-XXe siècle) en Europe, 2003)
The time that remains: three shots and two details
From^{twelfth-century}lawsuits against rats to Der Rattenfänger von Hameln : a bad reputation
Hong Kong, 1894: Alexandre Yersin and colonial medicine (Henri Mollaret and Jacqueline Brossolet, Alexandre Yersin. Un pasteurien en Indochine, 1985, republished 1993)
La paillote, le laboratoire et les "technologies de l'espoir" (Ilana Löwy, in Dominique Pestre dir., Histoire des sciences et des savoirs, 2015)
"La peste bubonique à Hong Kong", Annales de l'Institut Pasteur, 1894: les étapes d'une démarche scientifique (Alice Lebreton-Mansuy, "La mise en évidence du bacille de la peste, Hong Kong 1894", Bibnum, 2009)
Crossing disciplines to render an indisputable truth: the "Pasteurian style" (Bruno Latour, Les Microbes. Guerre et Paix, 1984)
"En deux mois à Hong Kong, c'était plié la grande histoire de la peste" (Patrick Deville, Plague & Cholera, 2012)
Not quite: serotherapy and the politics of the proper name (Gabriel Galvez-Behar, Possessing science. Scientific property in the age of industrial capitalism, 2020)
Paul-Louis Simond and the rat flea: "On that day, June 2, 1898, I felt an inexpressible emotion at the thought that I had just violated a secret that had distressed mankind since the appearance of the plague in the world" (Annales d'hygiène et de médecine, 1898)
Rats hide to die: Avicenna, European physicians and the mystery of the hidden epizootic (Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau, Les Chemins de la peste. Le rat, la puce et l'homme, 2003)
Le " commensal obligé de l'homme ", histoire écologique (Michael Mc Cormick, " Rats, Communications and Plague: Toward an Ecological History ", Journal of Interdiscriplary History, 2003
The colonization of Europe by rattus rattus : from archaeozoology to genetics
Hong Kong, 1994: sentinel posts for global health (Frédéric Keck, Les Sentinelles des pandémies. Chasseurs de virus et observateurs d'oiseaux aux frontières de la Chine, 2020)
Yersinia pestis Antiqua, Yersinia pestis Medievalis, Yersinia pestis Orientalis : three biotypes, three pandemics, a history to be decolonized
Expanding and complicating the composition of worlds