Wars and sweets: microbes, medicines and other moderns in and beyond the(ir) antibiotic era

Abstract

Once upon a time, many of us moderns dreamt that our future was bright, squeaky clean, germ-free. Now, we increasingly fear that bacterial resistance movements and hordes of viruses are cancelling our medicated performances, and threatening life as many of us have come to know it. In order for our modern antibiotic theatre of war to go on, we pray for salvation through our intensive surveillance of microbes, crusades for more rational antibiotic wars, increased recruitment of resistance fighters and development of antibiotic armaments through greater investment in our medical-industrial-war complex. But not all of us are in favour of the promise of perpetual antimicrobial wars, no matter how careful or rational their proponents aspire to be. An increasing vocal and diverse opposition has amassed in academic journals, newspapers and other fields of practice denouncing medicalisation and pharamceuticalisation of our daily lives, as well as our modern medicine as overly militaristic. In this paper, rather than simply rehearsing many of these well-made and meaning debates to convert you to yet another cause, I enrol them in redescriptions of our modern medical performances in the hope of awakening you from your aseptic dream. What follows is my invitation for you to re-enact our mythic antibiotic era in all its martial g(l)ory. I promise that it will bring you no physically harm, yet I can't promise it will leave your beliefs unscathed, as you follow its playful redescription of how our objective scientific descriptions, clinical prescriptions, economic strategies, political mandates and military orders, not to mention our warspeak, have always been deeply entangled with triumphs and devastations of The(ir) Great anti-Microbial Wars (aka our antibiotic era).

Keywords: COVID-19; history; infectious diseases; metaphor; public health.

Figure 1

Advertisement for penicillin production from Life Magazine. Science Museum, London. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).