“Dragons and Lice” Lecture with Łukasz Mieszkowski

An epidemic is an empirical phenomenon, confirmed from the medical point of view and subject to historical description and biopolitical interpretation. By contrast, plague, according to its anthropological definition, constitutes a part of a mythological landscape—a permanent element defining the crisis, the transitional moment, the end of the old world and the beginning of a new one. This talk covers the two biggest epidemics of infectious diseases, typhus and influenza, plaguing Poland’s population of that time and places them in a broader context of sanitary and social conditions in the early Second Polish Republic.

This event will be held in-person in Lubar Hall S185.