Between 1832-66 Britain experienced a devastating series of cholera epidemics. Medical theory had earlier attributed sickness to miasma (Porter 1997 10) and this belief was compounded when Edwin Chadwick misdiagnosed it as the cause of cholera in his 1842 Sanitary Report. In Household Words (18 Nov 1854) Charles Dickens supported this view (321), while he identified ‘vitiated air’ as a cause of sickness in Dombey and Son (1848) (647). At the same time, the polluted air began to lose its reputation as the chief carrier of cholera. In 1849 Dr. John Snow published On the Mode of Communication of Cholera arguing that it was a water-borne disease. When cholera struck again in 1866 Snow’s idea was confirmed by William Farr (Bingham et al. 2004 387-93). Instead, Londoners began to fear exposure to untreated water from the Thames. Thomas Hardy described this concern in a passage from The Hand of Ethelberta (1876), where pedestrians ‘held handkerchiefs to their mouths to strain off the river mist from their lungs’ (139). This also reflects Hardy’s own experience, documented in The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy (1989); working next to the Thames in 1867, Hardy’s health suddenly deteriorated (54). Hardy’s later short story ‘A Changed Man’ (1913) also appeared to reference the influence of miasma theory; his depiction of a rural cholera outbreak described sanitation methods which included bonfires ‘purifying the air’ (543). This discussion compares descriptions of cholera in nineteenth-century medical texts with its representation in the literature of Dickens and Hardy.

The COVID-19 pandemic reignited debates over how the Greek Orthodox Church administers Holy Communion (the Eucharist) to its faithful. While public health officials emphasized the risks of viral transmission through shared religious rituals, the ecclesiastical hierarchy upheld its long-standing tradition of using a common chalice and shared spoon for the sacrament. Theologically, this ritual is viewed as sacred, as the transformative consumption of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ derived from bread and wine. Within Orthodox Christian doctrine, the sacrament holds profound theological significance, asserting that faith transcends concerns over viral transmission. This paper explores how medical and scientific perspectives, alongside theological views on Holy Communion, were represented in the media, particularly during the early days of the pandemic. It also examines the socio-cultural factors influencing public opinion on this tradition.
In negotiating this issue between science and faith, it is essential to consider the likelihood of future re-emergent novel viruses, which could potentially be even more virulent than SARS-CoV-2.

Comics and graphic novels have proved to be a very useful means for health communication in the form of what is known as Graphic Medicine, which combines the visual language of comics with health information content. For this reason, when the global pandemic of COVID-19 broke out in 2020, various graphic narratives appeared in newspapers and in the form of books to try to explain what was happening or to denounce some situations that were arising as a result of the pandemic. The aim of this work is to take a look at some of the most important works in the form of comics that served as a chronicle of a pandemic and that helped to improve the public's understanding of the moment they were living through and to increase their empathy in a situation that until then none of us had experienced. The aim is to show through the example of the representation of life under COVID-19 what graphic medicine has been demonstrating for many years: the capacity of graphic narrative to represent certain situations of anxiety related to health, together with the potential of comic journalism in its role as a chronicle of current affairs through the combination of image and text.

In 1892, the German physician and bacteriologist Richard Pfeiffer successfully isolated what he believed to be the causative agent of influenza. The microscopic offender, according to Pfeiffer, was a small rod-shaped bacterium, drawn from the upper respiratory tracts of his flu-inflected patients. Although Pfeiffer was mistaken – and decades later influenza was shown to be caused by a virus – ‘Pfeiffer’s bacillus’, or bacillus influenzae, was widely accepted by the medical and general press of the fin de siècle as the source of the so-called ‘Russian Flu’, an influenza epidemic which raged across the globe from 1889 to 1894.

This paper begins by tracing reports of Pfeiffer’s discovery across British periodicals during the outbreak of the Russian Flu, in order to demonstrate the ways in which the magnification of an otherwise invisible threat to public health also magnified public anxieties surrounding the pandemic. The concept of entire worlds in miniature, invisible to the naked eye but present to the microscopist, accentuated the innate vulnerability of the lay audience, while provoking frequent rhetorical demands on the part of that public for the containment, isolation, or otherwise imprisonment of the evasive bacillus. Taking up the work of H.G. Wells as my main case study, I explore the precarious position held by humanity within the continually fluctuating order of nature in his writings, to demonstrate the profound impact of the epidemic upon socio-cultural representations of health, disease, and the kinds of bacteriological threat to which the modern mind and body may be subject.