Identifying the Pathogen: An Inquiry
Hybrid
Tupelo Press, 2026
$19.95, 132 pages ISBN 9781961209442
Two years ago, my grandmother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer complicated by ascites. The prognosis sounded less like a sentence than a clock: weeks, perhaps, if the body obeyed the statistics. It did not. She endured chemotherapy, cared for my grandfather through his own sudden decline, survived his death, and only recently made what may have been the first purely self-protective decision of her long life: to sell the village house and return to the city. At almost exactly that moment, the cancer returned with full force. To read Jennifer Militello’s Identifying the Pathogen: An Inquiry under such circumstances is to feel the title not as abstraction but as a form of pressure. Illness makes us want a noun. A cause. A culprit. A name for the thing that has entered the body and changed the family.
Militello begins with the grammar of scientific inquiry, but the investigation quickly becomes metaphysical: what is the human need to identify the pathogen? The title, Identifying the Pathogen: An Inquiry, promises the grammar of diagnosis: isolate the cause, name the threat, understand the body. Yet the collection repeatedly troubles that promise. The pathogen is never allowed to remain only biological. It becomes bound up with mortality, care, memory, motherhood, marriage, art, and the fear that the body may never fully explain itself.
The title poem does not clarify the title so much as contaminate it. Its opening “It” is deliberately unstable: the pathogen, perhaps, but also fear, memory, rot, the body’s old theatricality, the dressed-up ruin of consciousness. This possible pathogen has a collar and cuffs, as though disease has entered wearing the costume of civilisation; it carries phobias, a past, a social body. Already, the biological has been crossed with the psychological and historical. When the poem turns toward method — one must “grow the organism,” “Produce the toxins” — identification is revealed as an implicated act rather than a neutral one. To know the pathogen, one must cultivate it; to name the danger, one must participate in its conditions. The inquiry is therefore not innocent. It does not stand outside the contamination it studies. The poem’s most devastating movement is from laboratory to household: the wife keeping the hospital from the house, the treated gauze, the minor wound, the attempted sanitation of the domestic sphere. Illness here is never contained inside one body. It enters marriage, care, labour, rooms, linen, the feminine work of prevention and vigilance. Even the distinction between anatomical and clinical knowledge begins to break down. The lab takes biopsy; the clinic takes blood; but blood work begins to “conduct biography.” This is the poem’s crucial turn: the body is made to narrate. It is no longer only sampled, but interpreted, translated into story, prognosis, dose. And then the poem interrupts itself with the blunt ontological fact that “What will someday be dead is always unsure.” No result can stabilise that uncertainty. The final image does not cure or explain; it preserves: “Jar the liver. Jar the heart.” The inquiry ends not in diagnosis but in specimen. What has been identified is not the pathogen as such, but the terrible human faith that the body, if cut, tested, washed, weighed, and stored, might finally tell us what it means.
In Illness as Metaphor, Sontag warns against the consolations and cruelties of metaphor: the way disease, especially cancer and tuberculosis, has been made to carry moral, aesthetic, or psychological meaning until the patient seems almost responsible for the body’s disaster. Militello’s collection might at first appear to violate this warning. Its illnesses do not remain literal; they bloom into wax, weather, marriage, instruments, organs, houses, churches, specimens. Yet the distinction is crucial. Militello does not suggest that illness reveals character, or that suffering possesses some hidden moral intelligence. She is interested in the opposite pressure: how the mind, confronted with the body’s terror, begins helplessly to make figures. Metaphor in Identifying the Pathogen is not an explanation of illness but a symptom of the need to explain. It is not the cure. It is one of the symptoms.
Anna Morandi Manzolini is not a historical ornament inserted into the collection, nor a convenient feminist emblem pinned to the book from outside. She is its ghost-mirror, its counter-body, its recurring scene of female knowledge. Militello first introduces her through an almost unbearable compression of intellect and cost: born in Bologna in 1714, anatomist and artist, mother of eight children, only two of whom survive; wife of a husband incapacitated by depression; maker of wax organs; teacher of human anatomy; widow paid so little after her husband’s death that she must surrender her oldest son to an orphanage. Immediately after this biography comes the inventory of instruments: saws, knives, scissors, probes, forceps, cowl, microscope. The effect is not decorative but brutal. The tools do not merely belong to the laboratory; they seem to belong to the life. Care, poverty, motherhood, grief, marriage, and anatomical precision are laid out together, as if each were part of the same procedure. Anna becomes the book’s original scene of female inquiry: the woman who reads bodies because bodies have already exacted everything from her.
Her later appearances sharpen this doubling. In the second section, Anna sculpts organs from beeswax, tallow, pitch, turpentine, honeycomb, flowers: the anatomical model is already an alchemy of animal, vegetal, domestic, and mortal substances. Her wax self-portrait is not a withdrawal from femininity into science, but a collision of both: she wears taffeta, lace, pearls, and gazes forward while cutting into the brain of a man. The image bends the usual direction of looking. Woman is not the specimen, not the muse, not the grieving support at the edge of male genius; she is the hand holding the blade. Militello’s inclusion of Anna’s own note on the hand as the “most capable and sincere judge” makes knowledge tactile, bodily, almost intimate. To know is not to hover above the body but to touch it, cut it, test its resistance. Even the husband becomes portrait and specimen: jaundiced, stubbled, his hand suspended over a dissected heart. Marriage, too, has entered the anatomical theatre.
By the time Anna returns near the end, her function is fully exposed. She is a discoverer and corrector, especially of vision, the faculty on which the whole book has nervously depended. Her notebook’s insistence — “This was discovered by me” — matters because the final biographical frame tries to discover her otherwise: beautiful, pious, devoted, domestic, “his woman.” History identifies the anatomist as wife. The woman who made bodies legible is herself made illegible by the sentimental grammar of usefulness. This is why Anna is central to the book’s inquiry into the pathogen. She shows that misidentification is not only medical but cultural. Militello’s collection keeps returning to her because Anna embodies the double violence at the heart of the book: the female body is asked to care, preserve, teach, and know, while the female mind is translated back into service. Anna identifies bodies; history identifies Anna incorrectly.
The “Autopsy Report” titles offer one of the book’s most intense formal reversals. They promise forensic distance, a clean procedure performed after the fact, but what they deliver is intimate memory under the pressure of belated understanding. In Militello’s hands, autopsy does not mean only the cutting open of a corpse. It becomes the cutting open of an event once the event has already survived itself inside the speaker. The reports move through a ruptured appendix, a wilderness revelation of no afterlife, a broken cello, and the mother’s near-fatal illness; together, they trace the way the body’s crises spread outward into belief, art, family, and identity. The appendix report is the most explicitly medical: intervention saves the child’s life, but the remedy also generates its own pain, so that survival and injury cannot be cleanly separated. The rock-climbing report autopsies not a body but a metaphysical certainty: the moment the speaker understands that there may be no heaven, domestic safety begins to look like a human architecture built against annihilation. The cello report turns damage into maternal guilt, an art object into a borrowed body. The mother-sepsis report is perhaps the most devastating because it shows diagnosis failing before it succeeds. The institution misreads the mother’s body, and the daughter must become witness, advocate, interpreter, almost a second immune system. Across these reports, the second person functions like a clinical glove: it permits touch while pretending to protect against contamination. But the glove fails. The memories remain alive, infectious, unfinished. Each “report” becomes less a conclusion than an aftershock, proof that to understand a wound after the fact is not necessarily to close it.
The wax portrait titles form another system of identification, one that seems at first to move away from diagnosis into art, but in fact deepens the book’s inquiry into what it means to preserve a body by making an object of it. “Wax Self-Portrait,” “Wax Portrait of a Husband,” “Wax Portrait of a Marriage,” “Wax Portrait of a Cadaver,” “Wax Portrait of a Husband as Male Anglerfish,” “Wax Portrait of a Son,” and finally the stripped, generic “Wax Portrait”: the sequence is not decorative but procedural. Wax is the perfect medium for Militello’s collection because it is neither fully flesh nor fully artifice. It imitates the body, teaches the body, preserves the body, and falsifies the body at once. It belongs equally to the museum, the anatomical theatre, the church reliquary, and the domestic candle. In wax, the loved body can be held still long enough to be studied, but that stillness is already a kind of death. The movement from self to husband to marriage to cadaver to son suggests an enlarging field of exposure. No relation remains safely private. The self becomes specimen; the husband becomes model; marriage becomes biological arrangement; the cadaver speaks from the other side of use; the son becomes, almost unbearably, a portrait before he has finished becoming himself. By the final “Wax Portrait,” the category has emptied of a specific object and become a warning about representation itself. To portrait is to preserve, but also to risk fixing the living inside a form that can no longer answer back.
The cello episode belongs to this logic of preservation, but shifts it into the domestic present. When the mother secretly learns on her son’s rented instrument and discovers the wood split open, her panic exceeds the practical damage. She has not merely broken an object; she feels she has exposed something intimate, borrowed, almost bodily. The cello is described through touch, breath, torso, shoulder, hip, hollow wood, resonance. It becomes child, body, church, art-object, and guilt-object at once. Its breakage repeats the book’s larger anxiety: to handle what one loves is already to risk injuring it. Like Anna’s wax models, the cello preserves life by translating it into form, but form has its own violence. Sound depends on pressure, strings, friction, hollowed space. The instrument must be opened to resonate. In this sense, art in the collection does not stand outside the body’s vulnerability; it repeats it by other means. Even the slashes after “Wax Portrait /” and “Autopsy Report /” perform this uncertainty. They look like cuts, unfinished classifications, wounds held open at the edge of a title. A report is never only a report; a portrait is never safely sealed. Each mark insists that whatever has been identified has not therefore been understood.
The movement of the book behaves like a pathology chart, a laboratory inventory, and a museum catalogue at once. It is not linear but spiral, diagnostic, recursive. The collection does not move from illness to cure; it moves from anatomy to diagnosis to archive. In the first section, the titles establish the apparatus of inquiry: Anna, tools, vision, lab, body parts, wifehood, blood. The body is broken into observable surfaces and systems, but repetition makes these categories anxious rather than stable. “The body” recurs because the body cannot be settled; “the lab” recurs because inquiry itself has become a mental condition. In the second section, the title poem arrives as the diagnostic centre, after which the body widens into structure, heredity, reproduction, ecology, scale, mortality. The pathogen is no longer a single object to be isolated; it has spread into method. By the third section, the titles become stranger and more metaphysical: skin, corollary, parasite, ferment, mind, son, specimen, brain, museum. The body is now not merely anatomical but relational, evolutionary, theological, and archival. The lab has become a museum. The plus signs that divide the book’s clusters sharpen this movement: addition, chemical reaction, positive test result, cross, junction, accumulation. They do not move the reader toward conclusion but toward further sampling. Another specimen, another angle, another wound. The titles mutate from clinical categories into relational and metaphysical ones because the pathogen cannot be isolated from the life it has entered.
As I write this, my grandmother is waiting in the hospital for her next round of chemotherapy. She will probably lose her thick salt-and-pepper hair again, one of the few visible signs by which illness announces itself before language has finished trying. I drove her there in full makeup and new clothes, clutching a rosary in her work-worn hand, dressed almost defiantly for the body that is failing her. Diagnosis, in such moments, performs its cleanest and cruellest work: it gives the disease a name, a schedule, a protocol, but not the form love should take around it. It does not explain how to sit beside someone whose body has become both familiar and newly unreadable. It does not tell one what to do with tenderness sharpened into vigilance, with fear that hardens into irritation, with anticipatory grief, or with the denial of my father, her only child. Militello’s book returns me to that difficulty. Identification matters. Treatment matters. The result matters. But none of it answers the human question left standing beside the hospital bed: how to love the mortal body without reducing the person to the body that is dying.
Identifying the Pathogen refuses to give that question a resolution. In its late movement toward “specimen slide,” “brain,” “vivisection,” “the lab,” and finally “the circle museum,” inquiry ends not in cure but in display: the results are there, arranged with terrible care, but they do not console. Militello does identify something, but not a pathogen in the simple biological sense. She identifies the reflex that rises around every threatened body: the need to name, classify, interpret, preserve, and thereby imagine ourselves less helpless before mortality. The book does not ask us to abandon diagnosis; diagnosis saves bodies. It asks us to abandon the belief that diagnosis can complete the human work of loving them. The pathogen is not death, but the faith that death, properly studied, might become legible. Mortality does not owe us an explanation. The living do not owe us legibility. What remains is the work of staying beside the body after the results have come back.