Lucinda Cole, The Fifth Plague: Cattle, Contagion, and the Medical Posthumanities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) xii, 260 pp. £87.50 ebook £109.99 Hb. ISBN: 978-3031927928
Lucinda Cole’s The Fifth Plague: Cattle, Contagion, and the Medical Posthumanities, published as part of the series, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, takes up the vexing and urgent question of how we narratively make sense of widescale livestock contagion. This may seem like a relatively focused topic, but it is not: indeed, The Fifth Plague vividly narrates not only the significance of livestock illness and management, and consumption and circulation, but also the utterly central stories these events reveal in the making of Western institutions, including governance and health. To this end, The Fifth Plague offers a powerful and unique contribution to the scholarly canon: bringing together what we now understand as ‘medical humanities’ with ‘animal studies’, Cole trains her learned eye on the ways that diseases of cattle traveled medically and literarily. In our current moment, nearly two-thirds of all vertebrate biomass is livestock, and half of that, cattle. The history of grain farming has created a crash of environmental, medical, economic, political, and ethical problems. Cole’s The Fifth Plague, with a historical focus of c. 1500-1900, brings into view not only the material conditions that have generated this now, but also the powerful stories about plague and livestock that shape what and how these conditions mean. Cattle, in Cole’s monograph, are not merely agents in zoonotic pandemics—though they certainly are that—but also figures for cultural representations that work out aesthetic, ethical, and ideological priorities in a specific historical moment. Reading The Fifth Plague in the wake of the recent global COVID-19 pandemic, this reader sees in Cole’s archive, analysis, and arguments powerful and long-standing answers to how stories about disease and contagion fundamentally shape one’s experience of them, whether that be on an individual or structural level.
A few words about the significance of Cole’s concept of ‘medical posthumanities’, for it illuminates the theoretical innovations at the heart of The Fifth Plague. Medical humanities, as imagined by Patricia Wald and others, takes up the problems of disease and its transmission, looking to a wide network of players—including individuals, epidemiologists, medical researchers, governments, and doctors—in what we now understand as public health. However, as Cole wryly notes, the diseased subjects under the care of veterinarians ‘don’t talk’, and are instead primarily imagined through their status as property of human agents (owners, rescuers, and so forth) and as commodities to be consumed (as food). What the medical humanities, in this way, cannot accommodate is, therefore, what Cole unearths—the webs of networks and relations, the fundamental interdependence between animal and human that such disease transmission reveals. And these networks and relations rely upon the binding and explanatory effects of storytelling.
The title of the monograph signals Cole’s focus on story: the fifth plague, of course, is a story from Exodus, one of the ten plagues of Egypt. The biblical allusion centers the book both in Europe and in the Judeo-Christian theological traditions, writ large. Imagined as instances of divine displeasure, plagues throughout this period—even up through the nineteenth century, the focus of the monograph’s final chapter—are occasions for telling stories about mutual affliction. This mutuality is key, for with this historical arc, Cole teaches us that widescale disease transmission and illness in the early modern period was always understood through its effects on human and animal alike. In this earlier archive, we see inklings of today’s scientific and political work that takes this mutuality as its starting point, pushing policy and story alike to embrace rather than refuse the interconnectedness of the living world, always in operation but particularly heightened with zoonotic diseases.
The story Cole tells is one, therefore, of story and stories, with particular focus on what she calls disease ecologies. Cattle are central to these stories. Consider, for instance, the ideological weight of beef eating in eighteenth-century Britain, a marker of ‘Englishness’ over and against European (specifically French) gastronomies. Diseased cattle, therefore, connoted much more than a problem of agricultural or husbandry; they took on the status of a nation—its power, its autonomy—at risk. Sick cattle were likewise compared to smallpox (in the eighteenth century) and cholera (in the nineteenth), contagious diseases that not only infected individuals, but also challenged social and moral boundaries and the fitness of the body politic. European imperial ambition intensified demands for meat, producing meat markets and transportation networks, ultimately transforming the myriad problems of European cattle disease into a global phenomenon.
In the two chapters devoted to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Cole takes us into the logics and pervasiveness of a cattle consciousness, which is to say that she presents a rich archive of texts preoccupied by cattle plague. A 1612 version of a classical poem, Carmen Bucoliucum De Mortibus Boum, or ‘The Bucolic Song On the Deaths of Cattle’, signals, for Cole, interlinked concerns about effective husbandry, positing the question, how can a herder protect cattle from infection and disease? Given the causes of plague within Christian ecologies, the answer is moral and ethical, dividing the world into Christian and Pagan sectors. The chapter on The Merchant of Venice is stunning, not only for its nuanced and sophisticated arguments about the role of cattle in the Venetian economy, but also for how Cole’s ‘zoonotic’ reading of Shakespeare (primarily The Merchant of Venice, but with shorter comments on a variety of plays) teaches us profoundly new and profoundly important things about this vexing and infamous play. Shakespeare, Cole reminds us, was the son of a tanner, raised in proximity to livestock and animal skins. The tanner’s adjacency to the livestock trade filters through the playwright’s attention to sheep and their ailments throughout Merchant. The meat market of Venice—a phrase rich with uneasy connotations even today—is presented in contrast to a Foucauldian notion of ‘pastoral power’, primarily represented through the practices of husbandry in a harmoniously-imagined rank-based society. In conflict, then, are the vectors of commodification and tradition, the former deeply imbricated not only in illness and the proliferation of disease, but also in greed, selfishness, and destruction. Shylock’s villainization in the play relies upon this division, marking him as a livestock trader who has already converted his animals into coin. Pastoral care, in contrast, imagines an ethos of shared vulnerability.
When we reach Daniel Defoe in the first of two chapters devoted to the eighteenth century, we are well-prepared to expect that Cole will teach us something new about this most famous of writers about plagues—and she does. Defoe’s texts give voice to a host of intersecting concerns about religion, medicine, and society through the singular problem of rotten meat. Situating Defoe within a host of contemporaries, including Hodges, Quincy, and Blackmore, Cole unravels the period’s debates about direct transmission across species as well as concerns about transmission from animal skins and meat. These constitute the ‘steppe diseases’ associated with the cattle trade in Eurasia, figurative rivals to the plagues of Egypt, and become a representational nexus for concerns about Christian-Islamic trade more generally. Attending to the three major cattle plagues of the 18th century, Cole turns, in chapter five, to the variety of texts generated to explain, mourn, adjudicate, and theorize their effects. Recovering a robust sub-genre of the georgic, which Coles calls the ‘Bovine Elegy’, The Fifth Plague gives voice to an agricultural poetics long associated with Virgil, on the one hand, and newly urgent in the hands of all those who lived in relation to—in conjunction with—livestock, caring for them, working with them, and living with them. These poems, to the modern ear, might seem perversely idiosyncratic and obscure, but Cole powerfully identifies a significant poetic tradition in which communities also register the loss of livestock in an affective register, resisting the administrative calls for slaughter mandated by government. From this rural context to the seat of power, Cole turns to national concerns about cattle health and plague mitigation as a sign of the nascent ideology of biosecurity (which, likewise, is also an indicator of bio-insecurity), evident, for instance, in George II’s 1745 Act restoring quarantine and cull policies. In this, Cole asks us to reimagine what the cultural project of late eighteenth-century ‘sensibility’ might be, given its demands for sympathy in a moment where the go-to response was herd culling.
In a final chapter, Cole studies the final major outbreak of cattle disease in England, which took place 1865-1866. This chapter, therefore, takes us into a vastly different historical moment, with different theories of disease, illness, and sanitation, all of which Cole treats with her characteristic dexterity and learning. The Victorian rinderpest was linked to cholera. Even with the contemporary understanding of these diseases’ differences, this analogy persists across a variety of genres and in texts by myriad writers to represent the overwhelming concerns about the movement and transmission of disease. The cholera epidemics of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1860s readied a public to experience and understand rinderpest and cholera as fundamentally, if not epidemiologically, linked. Particularly in the first waves of the outbreak, the cholera figure substantiated calls for various measures, including slaughter, pesticides, hot-air baths, healthy diets, and (a most paradoxical suggestion) disinfected manure. Drawing upon an 1869 treatise, On the Cattle Plague, Cole identifies a counterproposal that explicitly draws upon the pastoral power model from the eighteenth century, concluding with a reading of the highly original 1872 novel, The Days of the Cattle Plague.
The Fifth Plague is a bravura piece of scholarship. The historical scope, the archival spine, and the theoretical focus mark this as a major book. Cole’s thinking is highly original and highly urgent: these are not the dusty concerns in an archival mausoleum, a quirk of history. Cattle and contagion are at the heart of today’s biopolitics—this is about the stories we tell ourselves concerning animals and people, food and climate, commerce and society, ethics and capital. These are, likewise, core stories about who matters and what matters. I cannot think of a more urgent remit in our current intellectual and political climate.
Tita Chico, University of Maryland
