Contents:
Introduction
Contagion, Modernity and Postmodernity, Alison Bashford and Claire Hooker
Contagion and Cultural Histories of the Modern World
1. The Meaning of Contagion: Reproduction, Medicine and Metaphore, Margaret Pelling
2. Foreign Bodies: Vaccination, Contagion and Colonialism in the Nineteenth Century, Alison Bashford
3. Moral Contagion and the Will: The Crisis of Masculinity in Fin-de-Siécle France, Christopher Forth
4. Excremental Colonialism: Public Health and the Poetics of Pollution, Warwick Anderson
5. Leprosy and the Management of Race, Sexuality and Nation in Tropical Australia, Alison Bashford and Maria Nugent
6. Sanitary Failure and Risk: Pasteurisation, Immunisation and the Logics of Prevention, Claire Hooker
Contaminating Capacities in Postmodernity
7. Vulnerable Bodies and Ontological Contamination, Margrit Shildrick
8. A Pig's Tale: Porcine Viruses and Species Boundaries, Marsha Rosengarten
9. Taking the HIV Test: Self-Surveillance and the Making of Heterosexuality, Lisa Adkins
10. The Promiscuous Placenta: Crossing Over, Jane-Maree Maher
11. Carrier - Becoming Symborg, Melinda Rackham

In the age of HIV, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the Ebola Virus and BSE, metaphors and experience of contagion are a central concern of government, biomedicine and popular culture.
Contagion explores cultural responses of infectious diseases and their biomedical management over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It also investigates the use of 'contagion' as a concept in postmodern reconceptualisations of embodied subjectivity.
The essays are written from within the fields of cultural studies, biomedical history and critical sociology. The contributors examine the geographies, policies and identities which have been produced in the massive social effort to contain diseases. They explore both social responses to infectious diseases in the past, and contemporary theoretical and biomedical sites for the study of contagion.

This open access book is a biography of Joseph L. Pawsey. It examines not only his life but the birth and growth of the field of radio astronomy and the state of science itself in twentieth century Australia. The book explains how an isolated continent with limited resources grew to be one of the leaders in the study of radio astronomy and the design of instruments to do so. Pawsey made a name for himself in the international astronomy community within a decade after WWII and coined the term radio astronomy. His most valuable talent was his ability to recruit and support bright young scientists who became the technical and methodological innovators of the era, building new telescopes from the Mills Cross and Chris (Christiansen) Cross to the Parkes radio telescope. The development of aperture synthesis and the controversy surrounding the cosmological interpretation of the first major survey which resulted in the Sydney research group's disagreements with Nobel laureate Martin Ryle play major roles in this story. This book also shows the connections among prominent astronomers like Oort, Minkowski, Baade, Struve, famous scientists in the UK such as J.A. Ratcliffe, Edward Appleton and Henry Tizard, and the engineers and physicists in Australia who helped develop the field of radio astronomy. Pawsey was appointed the second Director of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (Green Bank, West Virginia) in October 1961; he died in Sydney at the age of 54 in late November 1962. Upper level students, scientists and historians will find the information, much of it from primary sources, relevant to any study of Joseph L. Pawsey or radio astronomy. This is an open access book.