Volume 43, Issue 3, September 2012, Pages 710–719
Centre and Periphery in the Eighteenth-Century Habsburg 'Medical Empire'
The frightening borderlands of Enlightenment: The vampire problem
Abstract
Between
1724 and 1760, in the frontier area of the Habsburg empire waves of a
hitherto unknown epidemic disease emerged: vampirism. In remote villages
of southeastern Europe, cases of unusual deaths were reported. Corpses
did not decay and, according to the villagers, corporeal ghosts were
haunting their relatives and depriving them of their vital force. Death
occurred by no later than three to four days. The colonial
administration, alarmed by the threat of an epidemic illness, dispatched
military officers and physicians to examine the occurrences. Soon
several reports and newspaper articles circulated and made the untimely
resurrection of the dead known to the perplexed public, Europe-wide.
“Vampyrus Serviensis”, the Serbian vampire, became an intensively
discussed phenomenon within academe, and thereby gained factual
standing. My paper depicts the geopolitical context of the vampire’s
origin within the Habsburg states. Secondly, it outlines the
epistemological difficulties faced by observing physicians in the field.
Thirdly, it delineates the scholarly debate on the apparent oxymoron of
the living dead in the era of enlightened reason. Fourthly, the early
history of vampirism shows that ghosts and encounters with the undead
are not superstitious relics of a pre-modern past, or the
Enlightenment’s other, but intimate companions of Western modernity.
Keywords
- Enlightenment;
- Military medicine;
- Mind-body problem;
- Undead;
- Habsburg;
- Vampire
Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
