Philippa Nicole Barr, Uncertainty and Emotion in the 1900 Sydney Plague (Cambridge Elements: Histories of Emotions and the Senses: Cambridge University Press, 2024) 71 pp. £17.00 Pb. £49.99 Hb. ISBN: 9781108821063
In late 2019 Philippa Barr from the Australian National University signed the contract to write a book about how a pandemic affected the city of Sydney. The irony of this situation provides the opening to this intriguing slim volume (like all the Cambridge Elements, designed to be readable within a couple of sittings). Describing the events of the Third Plague Pandemic while the first (and one hopes, perhaps optimistically, last) coronavirus pandemic was in the full fury of its first wave, and when Barr herself was subsequently diagnosed with the rare plague-related infection Yersinosis, must have been, as she writes, quoting Thomas Fuchs, “a limit situation … a moment of existential vulnerability” (p.1). That sense of immediacy is present throughout the book in its descriptions of the arrival of plague in the port of Sydney and of the attempts to control it, not just by the technologies of late Victorian public health, but also through manipulation of public fears and emotions.
Most people who are not infectious disease specialists will automatically associate the plague with the Black Death of the Middle Ages or Samuel Pepys’ and Daniel Defoe’s vivid accounts of the events of 1665-1666 in London, a period also dramatised in William Harrison Ainsworth’s 1841 melodrama Old St. Paul’s, or Don Taylor’s 1970 play The Roses of Eyam. Most, however, are completely unaware of the slow-moving wave of plague – the Third Plague Pandemic – that began in the plague’s historical heartlands of Central Asia in the late 19th century and which still continues today, only leaving us reminders of its below-the-radar existence when sporadic more virulent local spikes appear, as they did in India in 1994 and Madagascar in 2017. Barr sets the scene for the earlier and more dramatic waves of that pandemic leading to its arrival in Australia in Chapter 1. Sydney in 1900 is a prosperous city in a continent that is about to transform from a patchwork of British colonies into a new independent Commonwealth of Australia. Meanwhile news is arriving of plague radiating out from Hong Kong to various other ports in the British Empire. Millions have already died in China and India. On the 19th January 1900 the inevitable happens and plague arrives in Sydney. Barr traces the events of the next few years through the official documents, newspaper articles and scientific papers of the day.
In Chapter 2, Barr outlines in detail the events of January 1900 following the appearance of signs of plague in dockworker Arthur Payne, the fear that gripped the population (plague killed about one-third of its victims in Sydney) and the urgency with which the city authorities launched into a campaign of civic hygiene. Barr’s analysis centres on the concept of disgust, taking issue with those evolutionary psychologists who have for the last quarter of a century or so analysed disgust as an evolved pathogen-avoidance mechanism, a powerful aversion reflex that preserves us from food poisoning, skin infections and sexually transmitted disease. Instead Barr draws on the social anthropology of Mary Douglas and Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic work on ‘abjection’ to highlight ways in which disgust may be both socially constructed and historically contingent. Also cited is Sara-Maria Schobel’s work on the deliberate disgust desensitization of medical students during their early undergraduate education. Through such works, Barr makes the case that sensations of disgust, whatever their underlying neurological mechanisms, cannot be entirely merely reflexive. I can vouch personally that biology undergrads in the 1980s (not so much today) went through a similar process to medical students. Acquisition of a strong stomach was a badge of professional membership.
Chapter 3 describes the wave of street-cleaning and indeed street-clearing instituted by the Sydney city authorities in response to the plague’s arrival, whole buildings even being demolished if their levels of cleanliness were deemed to be beyond recovery. Chapter 4 then explores the ways that the city was rebuilt, refashioned and restructured to create the kind of Sydney the new Australia wanted, justified as something its population needed – an exercise in Foucauldian BioPower. In Barr’s words it was an imposition of ‘pure order’ (p.34), pure from ‘filth’ (a common term in all late 19th century discourse on disease) but also portrayed as socially and morally purified, where realistically possible, from the retrogressive presences of the poor, the feckless, the shiftless and the alien. Barr quotes the self-satisfied assessment by Chief Medical Officer of the New South Wales Board of Health, Dr John Ashburton-Thompson, in 1907, after the war against the plague had apparently been won (almost – there were weaker waves of cases until 1910), that the new Sydney was: “not merely wholly white, of English extraction and speech, and fully civilised, but intelligent, instructed, and orderly, accustomed to direction and amenable to it” (p.40). Wrong in detail on every count, of course, but Barr’s juxtaposition of the relative ease with which Australia bent itself to the rigorous regime required by the public health authorities, in comparison to the violent resistance encountered in India, shows how Ashburton-Thompson could have convinced himself of his own achievements. Ashburton-Thompson was a master in the exercise of BioPower, avant la lettre. Soon he found himself headhunted to advise the Raj on how India could defuse the smouldering powder keg of revolt that the plague threatened to ignite.
Chapters 5 and 6 place this story of the plague and its suppression into the context of the changing medical landscape of the time, as the miasma theories of the mid-19th century, which saw infectious disease as travelling in clouds of foul smells, began to give way to the Pasteurian notion of infectious diseases spread by micro-organisms, both directly from person to person and via the environment. Fumigation in particular was used to give a tangible demonstration of how the disgusting biological smells of the slums could be masked with the clean chemical smells of the fumigant. The most common fumigant used in Sydney was formalin – not a pleasant smell at all (one of the things that modern biology students still have to learn to tolerate) – but it became associated with cleanliness and freedom from plague and therefore became socially conditioned as a reassuring odour. The scenes of the streets of Asian cities being indiscriminately sprayed with disinfectant during the early phases of the coronavirus pandemic spring to mind.
The final Chapter 7 returns to Barr’s theoretical framework, aligning it with the detail that emerges from her account of the plague in Sydney. For Barr ‘the crisis gave way to a contestation over power’ in which disgust and related emotions were ‘actively generated’ in order to ‘authorize’ the actions of the city authorities, which were often based at best on ‘hypothesis and conjecture’ (p.55) and at worst simply a means of suppressing ‘anomaly, disorder and therefore threat[s] to identity’ (p.57) in this case the white/English/civilised/intelligent/orderly/amenable identity envisaged for the new Sydney, indeed for all the new Australia by Dr Ashburton-Thompson and the other city fathers.
The best books are those that nudge the reader out of comfortable assumptions. As an evolutionary biologist specializing in infectious diseases, my professional training included the standard evolutionary explanation of disgust as an instinctive reaction serving a function in disease avoidance. The fact that I was also, during those years, undergoing the same desensitization described by Barr (citing Schobel), did not give me much pause for reflection. My own sense of disgust was changing – I recognised that and I also recognized, as we all do, that different people have different degrees of dirt tolerance, different aversion thresholds to all sorts of things and social practices. However, the Jesuitical rigour of my evolutionary education led me to see these things, as all evolutionary biologists do, as mere cultural foam on the rocks of innate genetically determined behavioural disposition. Barr’s little book is a dense read in places, the restrictions of the Cambridge Elements format requires that arguments are packed in as tightly as possible, but if, like me, you are inclined to evolutionary psychology’s explanations of our inner lives, then this is well worth the short time it will take to read it. I shall certainly spend much more time thinking about it.
Derek Gatherer, Lancaster University
