Catching colds with Canguilhem: culturing relations with Common Cold viruses

This paper draws on the thought of the historian of science, Georges Canguilhem, to explore how the practice of making medical knowledge brings into question accepted understandings of (ill)health and contagious disease. Drawing out how the lively materialities of both humans and viruses shape human experience of viral infection, the analysis focuses on written and oral histories of the UK’s Common Cold research Unit (CCU), associated scientific papers and correspondence between 1961 and 1965, and press cuttings and visitors’ books from the CCU archives, in order to offer multiple readings of the relationship between humans and cold viruses at this site. These alternative post-natural histories challenge our preconceptions about the costs and benefits of living-with-viruses and the role of infection and associated symptoms in drawing lines between the normal and the pathological. The archives of the CCU offer new ways of encountering viruses and their histories, and evidence that that infection can be, as Canguilhem suggests, a “positive, innovative experience”, while at the same time questioning the novelty of recent posthumanist accounts of human-virus relations