title: [The lower Neretva basin as a pathological topos: press reports and politicization of the memories of the age of cholera in 1886].
abstract: The lower Neretva basin as a space that has undergone historical transformation into a myth of a pathological topos has been analyzed. Starting from the fact that temporality is essential for understanding of the elements that partake in conceptualization of a myth, we have analyzed the state of this area as it was during its exposure to an epidemic of cholera in 1886. There is evidence that at this time exactly a step forward was made in comprehension of the etiology of the disease, which resulted in the change of centuries-long concepts of the Neretva basin as an unhealthy area. In this paper the Neretva basin was understood and presented as a field of unfolding of all kinds of transformations, a habitat exposed to manifold social arrangements, lushly documented in newspapers and other printed material. The arguments about the natural disaster in these texts are ethically and politically coloured, which to a large extent corresponds to the vocabulary of current print media on similar occasions. Thus, the area of the Neretva basin imposes itself as a multilayered anthropological concept, a multi-semantic ecologically and socially constituted reality, within which history functions as a valuable source of knowledge pliable to contemporary usage.
authors.affiliation: Odsjek za povijest medicinskih znanosti, HAZU, Zagreb. stella@hazu.hr
authors.forename: Stella
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Fatović-Ferencić
authors.forename: Mario
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Wokaunn
mesh_terms: D002771:Cholera / Q000266:history*; D017523:Croatia; D058872:Epidemics / Q000266:history*; D049672:History, 19th Century; D006801:Humans