ABSTRACT
Contagion has long been used as a metaphor for emotion, but equally, disease is an emotional phenomenon. This chapter explores how pandemics in world history have been experienced in emotional terms, as well as how the emotional expectations of such crisis moments have impacts on the experience of contagious disease. It especially attends to fear and anxiety, isolation and loneliness, love and compassion, racial vilification and scapegoating, vaccination anxieties, anger at the breach of civil liberties and creative expression as an outlet for the pandemic feeling. This chapter highlights how histories of pandemics recursively shape the contemporary feeling of disease outbreaks.
