Field Notes #3: It Passes Between Us

Issue #3

It Passes Between Us

On transmission, transformation, and the language before pathogens

Welcome to Field Notes. Each week, I take one idea from the episode and follow it where it leads. For Outbreak After Dark, that idea isn’t just biological—it’s how we make sense of what we don’t fully understand.

If you want the full story, you can read or listen to the episode here.

In the Margins

There’s a line in the episode about garlic—how it shows up both in early infection treatments and in vampire mythology. 

That overlap isn’t new. The connection between vampirism and disease has been written about for a long time. Usually as metaphor, sometimes as coincidence, sometimes as a reflection of outbreaks people didn’t yet understand. And it makes sense.

Imagine a house where people have started wasting away: pale, thin, exhausted, coughing at night. The stories don’t say "infection", let alone tuberculosis. They say something is feeding on them while they sleep.

But what’s more interesting isn’t that comparison itself. It’s why it holds.

People were noticing the patterns long before pathogens were identified: Something passed between individuals and once it took hold, it changed the person. Often irreversibly.

Vampires follow that same structure. Transmission through blood. A transformation that persists. A version of the person that continues—but altered, and capable of passing it on.

Not an explanation but a recognition. Recognition that informs our narratives. The story comes first. The mechanism comes later.

Underlined

Once you start looking for it, this shows up in more places than you’d expect. Not as a deliberate metaphor, but as a pattern.

Here are a few ways to recognize it:

• A condition that passes between people, even if the mechanism isn’t clear

  → The story may be modeling transmission before it can explain it.

• A delay between exposure and visible change

  → What looks like transformation may actually be describing incubation.

• A version of the person that continues, but altered

  → The focus isn’t the event, it’s what persists afterward.

• Containment becomes part of the plot (isolation, quarantine, exile)

  → The story is trying to manage spread, even without naming it.

• The threat isn’t just what happens to you, but what you might pass on

  → Risk shifts from individual to collective.

Most of these aren’t framed as disease.But the structure is the same.

What It Points To

We were recognizing the behavior of infection long before we had the language to describe it.

Postscript

Thank you for subscribing. 🫶

This week I’ve been rolling speakeasies around in my head.

I love the idea of speakeasies—hidden rooms, coded entry, clandestine gathering around something forbidden. And I keep wondering if there’s a way to build an Outbreak After Dark episode around that concept. Also...are vaccine speakeasies the answer we need right now?  

In the meantime, May’s Outbreak After Dark will be heading into the true crime space. It centers on a real case that hinged on forensic virology, and it’s one of those stories where science shines.

I have lots of ideas that don't necessarily fit together, but they often seem to circle the same thing: what we can see, what we can’t, and how we make sense of the space in between.

— Heather