The only other humans in the city, standing watchfully in the lower center, are two plague doctors, readily identifiable by the long-beaked masks (in which were placed anti-miasmic herbs and spices), which had become a prominent symbol of their office in the preceding decades.
A few soldiers move purposefully about in the military quarter of the town. But the city is not quite empty of human beings. A nearly-empty walled city is drawn immediately under the imposing (Stuart king-like) Leviathan – the humans of all sorts, the body politic which had hitherto been the multitude, are drawn within the torso and arms of the sovereign. In this little note, though, I write just about asking what is said (and not said) on medics in epidemic disease times within the traditional (male) power-focused Euro-Classical political theory canon – Thucydides, Hobbes, Foucault and the rest.Ī place to start is the well-known frontispiece etched for Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan of 1651. Much of the deep thought about this outside Euro-Atlantic political theory has barely been absorbed inside it.
Considerable notice and thought has long been given to this work by the people doing it, of course, and in academic terms it is also prominent in feminist and sts traditions, as well as in rich historico-cultural studies of many kinds, including specific histories of professions. In nearly every society, the existential importance of the visible and non-visible work of medical professionals as well as many other workers and caregivers on the front line in infectious disease epidemics was at the forefront in coping with covid-19. My own work recently has been on physical and digital infrastructures and the workers within and around them, and on the legal and infrastructural governance of data-information-knowledge-wisdom-justice.
THE PLAGUE DOCTOR HOW TO
More abstractly, many of the initial questions for me were located in the large puzzle of how to place life-essential medical-scientific knowledge and associated technologies into these politico-social spaces and their governance. For myself – and I suspect for numerous academics – the starkest questions usually came prefaced in my mind with ‘why had I not done enough to have thought more about this before?’ Power and law in these kinds of troubled times were infused with, and bound into, the great issues of virus justice and vaccine justice with which the world and every kind of society is required daily to grapple. Many scholars of political power and public law contributing to this volume, alike with much of the world’s population, have been driven in the 2020s epidemics to turn our minds to medicine, government and justice in ways we have not turned them previously. (Walk backwards into the future with eyes on our past)
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