How should we understand the fear and fascination elicited by accounts of communicable disease outbreaks that proliferated, following the emergence of HIV, in scientific publications and the mainstream media? The repetition of particular characters, images, and story lines - of Patients Zero and superspreaders, hot zones and tenacious microbes - produced a formulaic narrative as they circulated through the media and were amplified in popular fiction and film. The 'outbreak narrative' begins with the identification of an emerging infection, follows it through the global networks of contact and contagion, and ends with the epidemiological work that contains it. Priscilla Wald argues that we need to understand the appeal and persistence of the outbreak narrative because the stories we tell about disease emergence have consequences. As they disseminate information, they affect survival rates and contagion routes. They upset economies. They promote or mitigate the stigmatizing of individuals, groups, locales, behaviors, and lifestyles. Wald traces how changing ideas about disease emergence and social interaction coalesced in the outbreak narrative. She returns to the early years of microbiology - to the identification of microbes and 'Typhoid Mary', the first known healthy human carrier of typhoid in the United States - to highlight the intertwined production of sociological theories of group formation ('social contagion') and medical theories of bacteriological infection at the turn of the twentieth century. Following the evolution of these ideas, Wald shows how they were affected by - or reflected in - the advent of virology, Cold War ideas about 'alien' infiltration, science-fiction stories of brainwashing and body snatchers, and the HIV/AIDS pandemic. "Contagious" is a cautionary tale about how the stories we tell circumscribe our thinking about global health and human interactions as the world imagines - or refuses to imagine - the next Great Plague.

什麼是知識？知識如何產生、發展、改變或消失？傅柯是當代歐洲文化、思想史最受矚目的學者之一，他拆解西方理性迷思，質疑歷史法則邏輯，重普知識衍生、傳佈的脈絡。
相對於傳統史學，其「考掘學」將歷史流程空間化、暴露知識體系的斷層，從而顯示意義、法理、道統的權宜性與擴散性；立論曲折，引人思辯，是觀察世紀末西方人文現象的重要入門。

本书是宣传概念的历史，也是宣传观念的历史。为了回答什么是宣传、它为什么会存在、大众为什么会容忍宣传等问题，本书追溯了第一次世界大战中宣传概念的产生、美国20世纪初宣传与民主的争论、俄国革命的宣传观念、第二次世界大战中的宣传观念、二十世纪后期的新宣传等宣传观念发展的重要环节，并以此为背景，重点研究了中国宣传观念的产生、国民党及共产党宣传观念的建立、知识分子与宣传、1949年之后中国宣传观念的变迁等问题。本书以理性中立的笔调，详细描述了二十世纪以来各种宣传观念和话语的交锋，展示了一幅国家与个人、控制与自由、思想与身体等观念相互冲突的全景图像。本书提出的问题值得每个深受宣传影响的中国人思考。