Carrier
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Carrier has its origins in carric_ā_re, the Latin word meaning “to cart.” In medical parlance, disease is “carted,” a freight transmitted by one individual, often unwittingly, to one or many others. Disease might be transmitted through viruses or bacteria shared between bodies or through a piece of genetic code passed on to an unborn child. In both cases, carriers of disease are socially maligned and stigmatized. Scholars in the health humanities have studied the causes and effects of such stigmatization, especially as race, class, gender, and disability often determine perceptions of and responses to disease carriers. The contemporary notion of the infectious disease carrier—a person who poses a health risk to others whether or not they show symptoms of disease—was first established by the bacteriologist Robert Koch in the early twentieth century (Mendelsohn 2002; Leavitt 1997; Wald 2008). Twenty years after his groundbreaking work on the infectious transmission of tuberculosis refocused scientific attention on the germ theory of transmission, Koch further established that typhoid could be spread by individuals who showed no symptoms, so-called healthy carriers (Akkermans 2014). Koch’s research established as scientific fact a concept freighted with a long history of fear and suspicion. Western contagionist thinking began as...
This essay may be found on page 25 of the printed volume.