Peckham Robert
Bull Hist Med. 2020;94(4):658-669. doi: 10.1353/bhm.2020.0088.
Writing in the late 1980s in the midst of the AIDS crisis in the United States, historian Charles Rosenberg suggested that epidemics furnished "useful sampling devices" for examining "fundamental patterns of social value and institutional practice." This paper reconsiders Rosenberg's seminal essay and the central question it addresses-what is an epidemic?-from the vantage of a historian in Hong Kong working on colonial and postcolonial Asia in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper begins by setting Rosenberg's essay in its historical context and then considers whether explanatory models developed in a Northern American context may be applicable (or not) to other non-Western settings. The paper makes the case for a re-interrogation of the "epidemic" as an epidemiological and social category, and it concludes by suggesting that COVID-19 is challenging underlying assumptions about what a "crisis" is to the extent that the pandemic may be understood as a crisis of crisis itself.
20世纪80年代末，在美国艾滋病危机期间，历史学家查尔斯·罗森伯格提出，流行病为审视“社会价值和制度实践的基本模式”提供了“有用的抽样工具”。本文从一位在新冠疫情期间研究殖民和后殖民时期亚洲的香港历史学家的视角，重新审视了罗森伯格的开创性文章及其所探讨的核心问题——什么是流行病？本文首先将罗森伯格的文章置于其历史背景中，然后思考在北美背景下发展起来的解释模型是否适用于其他非西方背景。本文主张重新审视“流行病”这一流行病学和社会范畴，并在结论中指出，新冠疫情正在挑战关于“危机”的基本假设，以至于这场大流行可被理解为危机本身的危机。
