Negotiating Pandemic Risk: On the Scandalization and Transcultural Transformation of the Swine Flu Norbert W Paul and Mita Banerjee Negotiating Pandemic Risk 1 On some methodological venture points Epidemiology, it would seem, lends itself to an interdisciplinary dialogue between medicine and the humanities in particular ways More than any other medical discipline, perhaps, epidemiology has triggered responses by cultural theorists and cultural historians, and it has done so on two levels and on account of two, mutu- ally interrelated reasons First, epidemiology as a discourse and medical practice has been so seductive to cultural theorists because of the metaphorical potential inherent in what Priscilla Wald has termed the “outbreak narrative” As Wald writes, [Accounts of epidemics] put the vocabulary of disease outbreaks into circulation and introduced the concept of “emerging infections”    Collectively, they drew out what was implicit in all of these accounts: a fascination not just with the novelty and danger of the microbes but also with the changing social formations of a shrinking world    Disease emergence dramatizes the dilemma that inspires the most basic of human narratives: the necessity and danger of human contact 1 Epidemiology and pandemic risk is inseparable, Wald succinctly argues, from the human bodies targeted as the carriers and “spreaders” of the epidemic e drama of the epidemic play itself out through the “dramatis personae of an unfolding tragedy” 2 As Wald goes on to note about the coverage of the SARS epidemic in the New York Times, 1 Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Durham: Duke UP, 2008), 2 2 Ibid, 3 © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden 2016 J. Vögele et al. (Hrsg.), Epidemien und Pandemien in historischer Perspektive, Edition Centaurus – Neuere Medizin- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte, DOI 10.1007/978-3-658-13875-2_28