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One year to the month before Antonin Artaud was born in Marseilles on 4 September 1896, Louis Pasteur died near Paris. While there may seem little to connect the future actor, avant-gardist, and writer with the man whose face and name had become synonymous with the advances of nineteenth-century medical science, the two men are linked in unexpected ways. Both displayed a flair for the theatrical, which in the case of Pasteur manifested itself in elaborately staged experiments and coup-de-théâtre demonstrations. In a highly publicized event arranged in the village of Pouilly-le-Fort in 1881, Pasteur confirmed the success of his anthrax vaccine by striding past the dead bodies of unvaccinated sheep, cows, and oxen while those that had received his vaccine were alive and standing. "Here it is! O ye of little faith!" he shouted to a cheering crowd, which included journalists from home and abroad.1 Hailed as "a new Apollo," Pasteur exerted God-like command over his own theatre of cruelty.2 There are broader and more political connections as well; when Artaud attended the Paris Colonial Exposition in 1931 and encountered the Balinese dancers, he participated in the cultural arm of a colonial venture for which the Institut Pasteur and the emerging discipline of tropical medicine had become institutional pillars.3
More centrally, for the purpose of this article, the lives of Louis Pasteur and Antonin Artaud mark a heroic period in modern epidemiology, during which the development of germ theory and its application to a range of institutions and social discourses fueled a preoccupation with issues of contagion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By 1900 the new science of microbiology had identified the microbial agents responsible for typhoid fever, diphtheria, and other major diseases, and while the limitations of its reach were also evident, the impact of germ theory on social and political theories of contagion was substantial. Its influence in the cultural sphere was also pronounced, especially in the theatre, where tropes of contagion, pathology, inoculation, and immunity received new currency. Even those playwrights, like Artaud, who rejected the scientism of germ theory employed a poetics of contagion in dialogue with the microbiological model of disease transmission. To juxtapose the dead sheep of Pouilly-le-Fort with the pestilential scenes of Artaud's 1934...