{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,5,12]],"date-time":"2026-05-12T10:16:50Z","timestamp":1778581010653,"version":"3.51.4"},"reference-count":37,"publisher":"BMJ","content-domain":{"domain":["bmj.com"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":["Med Humanities"],"accepted":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,12]]},"abstract":"<jats:p>\n                    Epidemics have historically been both biomedical disasters and cultural stories that societies interpret and recount. This study explores the epidemic imaginary, examining how literature and cinema symbolically depict contagion by analysing narratives of contagion produced during the Plague era in literature and modern pandemic representations in film. The research considers some plague-era literature, such as Albert Camus\u2019\n                    <jats:italic>The Plague<\/jats:italic>\n                    (1947) and Thomas Mann\u2019s\n                    <jats:italic>Death in Venice<\/jats:italic>\n                    (1912), alongside more recent pandemic literature like Dean Koontz\u2019s\n                    <jats:italic>The Eyes of Darkness<\/jats:italic>\n                    (1981), as well as two films:\n                    <jats:italic>Contagion<\/jats:italic>\n                    (2011), directed by Steven Soderbergh, and\n                    <jats:italic>Outbreak<\/jats:italic>\n                    (1995), directed by Wolfgang Petersen. Drawing from interdisciplinary fields including literary studies, film theory and medical humanities, the study highlights moments of systemic and existential responses to contagion. It explores recurring themes such as fear, denial, governance, death, mortality and resilience, demonstrating how epidemics serve as meaningful moments for both existential reflection and systemic analysis. I argue that epidemic stories function as cultural scripts, that literature subtly allegorises contagion through introspection, and that cinema vividly dramatises urgency by depicting collapsing systems. Overall, these works highlight how societies narrate and remember solidarity during crises, rearticulating collective resilience in the face of devastation.\n                  <\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1136\/medhum-2025-013615","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,5,12]],"date-time":"2026-05-12T09:50:51Z","timestamp":1778579451000},"page":"medhum-2025-013615","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1136\/crossmarkpolicy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Epidemic imaginaries in literature and film: a comparative study of narrative responses to plague and pandemic"],"prefix":"10.1136","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0001-0738-6597","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Bhumika Rohitkumar","family":"Bhatt","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Arts, Parul University, Vadodara, Gujarat, India"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Pawan","family":"Dwivedi","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Dy. Registrar, Parul University, Vadodara, GUJARAT, India"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"239","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,5,8]]},"reference":[{"key":"2026050810201710000_medhum-2025-013615v1.1","first-page":"1","article-title":"What is an epidemic? AIDS in historical perspective","volume":"118","author":"Rosenberg","year":"1989","journal-title":"Daedalus"},{"key":"2026050810201710000_medhum-2025-013615v1.2","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Snowden F . Epidemics and society: From the black death to the present. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.","DOI":"10.12987\/9780300249149"},{"key":"2026050810201710000_medhum-2025-013615v1.3","unstructured":"Sontag S . Illness as metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,"},{"key":"2026050810201710000_medhum-2025-013615v1.4","unstructured":"Sontag S . AIDS and Its Metaphors. 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