Migration in Times of Pandemic: Mark Twain’s “3,000 Years Among the Microbes” and the Prospect of Planetary Health

Abstract

Introduction: Migration in Times of a PandemicAs the COVID-19 crisis has shown, migration and epidemic or pandemic events can sometimes enter a fatal relationship. Migrants are often particularly exposed to the threats of infectious diseases. For many of them, the desolate health care systems of their home countries, due to war, famine, economic, or other crises, was often one of the reasons for leaving in the first place. However, both during transit and on arrival at their (temporary) destinations, they are exposed to situations that are no less precarious. 1 They may lack a social network or insurance coverage; some even are without a roof over their heads or are crowded together in cramped quarters and under disastrous hygienic conditions. Thus, even in the twenty-first century, migrant communities are still highly vulnerable to the general threat of diseases, particularly during pandemic times. However, they are often perceived as being a threat themselves. This notion is no novel phenomenon but rather a long-standing topos of migrant experience, especially during pandemics, as the recent example of COVID-19 has shown.In this essay, I want to take a look back and explore the complex entanglement between migration and pandemics, using the example of Mark Twain's employment of cholera--the great pandemic of the nineteenth century. Twain's experimental and darkly satirical novel fragment "3,000 Years Among the Microbes" constantly shifts perspective between the microbial and macrobial level, thus featuring two deeply interconnected immigrant figures: the microbial first-person narrator and protagonist Huck Bkshp, a cholera bacterium, and the Hungarian immigrant and "tramp"