Christopher Hutchinson

Medical Misinformation in Early Modern Germany

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

The "virality" of diseases--their tendency to circulate simultaneously as biological and media phenomenon--is very familiar to us today. We are all too aware, in our digital age, of how lies, rumors, and misinformation circulate alongside epidemic disease. Medical Misinformation in Early Modern Germany explores the genealogy of this phenomenon and locates the origin of virality--the notion that information and disease circulate analogously--at the turn of the sixteenth century. It investigates literary texts alongside popular vernacular medical pamphlets to reveal the emergence of the notion of the "contagious" in the context of both media and disease. The growth of print, alongside the development of new forms of media, new literary genres, and new forms of visual representation led writers and thinkers to reconsider the ways in which information could be communicated. These anxieties were often expressed through metaphors of disease, creating an emergent rhetoric of virality.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: University of Delaware Press
• Seitenzahl: 202
• Erscheinungstermin: 14. Juli 2026
• Englisch
• Gewicht: 454g
• ISBN-13: 9781644534298
• ISBN-10: 1644534290
• Artikelnr.: 75574078

Autorenporträt

CHRISTOPHER HUTCHINSON is an Assistant Professor of German in the Department of Modern Languages at The University of Mississippi. His research interests include book history, the history of disease, and the popularization of scientific discourses in literature. He has published articles in The German Quarterly and Seminar.