ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the epidemic, the epidemic of fear, but keeping in mind the problems of both morality and action, as all three domains are profoundly intertwined. Influenza and viral illnesses were the absolute protagonists in the twentieth- and early twenty-first-centuries' epidemics and pandemics. As Walter Pasini writes in his presentation of a recent Symposium on "old and new epidemics": Plague, smallpox, syphilis, cholera, tuberculosis, influenza have changed mankind's history for their impact on men's life and health, and their demographic, financial and social effects. The fear of contagion and infectious epidemics has some very specific characteristics. The idea of epidemic as an exotic production and of strangers as typical "untori", vehicles of contagion, wards off the troubling evidence that the danger is with us, inside our family or in human nature. The "miasmatic theory" of contagion remained pivotal to Western medicine until the nineteenth century and the discovery of bacteria as infectious agents.
