Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences最新文献

This article explores framings of life, death, health, and invasion on an English chalk stream. It focuses on the ways in which these notions have been put to work in recent history, in relation to each other, and in relation to particular species and spaces. By 2019, narratives of a chalk stream in South-East England as a dead river expanded beyond retort to intermittent waterlessness. The river's death came to be framed as part of a wider ecology of chalk stream (ill)health, influenced by twenty-first century biodiversity conservation narratives and hauntological effects, which rendered deathly chalk stream futures present and requiring of human-action now. These narratives and effects conditioned a powerful sense of which non-human life belonged and counted, and which non-human life did not. Absent flagship chalk stream species, water voles, and efforts to resurrect them, were made synonymous with restoring the river itself to life and health. Contrarily, the ongoing presence of "invasive" American mink served as a continued reminder of the river's demise and death as a chalk stream. The resurrection of chalk streams to health relied on their being dispatched. Once considered to belong as extracted "lively capital" dominating the fur industry and later tolerated as feral escapees in the wild of the UK, American mink had been resituated and their history progressively obscured. Humans became manager-come-saviors of chalk streams, whose lost health was agreed and rendered visible through the ghostly image of the water vole that must be saved from the invasive foe, American mink.

Bringing together seven papers spanning Southern and Eastern Africa, North America, England, and India, this special issue explores the historically neglected connections between invasive species and health in the long twentieth century. Drawing upon perspectives from medical history, the history of science, environmental history, and environmental as well as medical anthropology, the papers analyze the entanglements of invasive species and zoonotic disease, food security, pesticide, crime, and ecosystem health. This introduction provides an overview of the historiography of invasive species and argues the importance of studying the historical connections between invasives and health. It also historicizes the relations between animal invasions, technoscience, power, and colonialism.

During the late 1930s, Great Lakes fishermen became concerned because of the new occurrence of the sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus). Originally an Atlantic coastal fish, it was allowed to migrate throughout the Great Lakes due to various canal extensions. By drawing from literature on the sociology of environmental problems and animal invasions, this article traces how the sea lamprey became problematized as a threatening invader between the late 1930s and early 1970s. Throughout this period, a broad coalition of fishery biologists, fishermen, politicians, and journalists were involved in framing the problem. Although sea lamprey research, localized control practices, and environmental discourses considerably changed, the sea lamprey continued to be regarded as an invasive fish that was not allowed to exist in the Great Lakes. The case shows how these shifting ways of understanding the problem in fact led to the continuation of past management directions.

Whether referring to oceanic travel on board of ships or to movement in terra firma, framings of the "migratory rat" formed a key epidemiological component of approaches to the Third Plague Pandemic (1894-1959) as the first pandemic to be understood as caused by a zoonotic disease. In this article, I examine the emergence and development of scientific framings of the migratory rat in the first, explosive years of the third plague pandemic in India (1896-1899). Examining publications and archival sources, I ask how this animal figure came to inform and transform epidemiological reasoning. Going beyond established approaches that have shown how the rat-plague relation was mobilised by colonial doctors to pathologise Indigenous lifeways, I argue that more complex and ambivalent processes were also set in motion by this figure. First, I show how the migratory rat became invested with attributes of invasiveness that assumed ontological qualities in colonial epidemiological reasoning. Second, comparing the migratory rat with the hitherto established "staggering rat," I argue that the former embodied new approaches to both space and time in epidemiology. Third, I show how Indigenous scientists came to mobilise this complex figure to contest colonial approaches to plague.

In the 1930s, a series of bubonic plague outbreaks among humans cropped up in several villages at the border of Angola and Namibia. These outbreaks provoked deep concern, laying bare social and political tensions amongst neighboring imperial powers and Indigenous people within the region. Despite the appearance of this disease in what was then considered a recondite place, its spread sparked debate in transnational forums, such as the League of Nations and the Office International d'Hygiène Publique. Drawing upon archival records in Namibia, South Africa, Portugal, the United States, and the United Kingdom, this article argues that concerns over the spread of plague across land borders led to the development of a nascent invasive species framework which indicted border-crossing "migrant" South African gerbils for the international spread of the disease. It follows the transnational political and scientific dynamics created by the plague "invasion" and discusses how these, like the gerbils, crossed numerous borders and scales. Ultimately, this article shows how localized inter-species and inter-imperial encounters can provide empirical insights into the feasibilities of a micro-global history of science in which more-than-human actors take on an important role.

The papers in this special issue explore the metaphorical realms that inform discourses on disruptive plants and animals. They explore how species movements in the twentieth century were framed and interpreted, and the medical, scientific, legal, and bureaucratic processes that turned a non-native or mobile species into a formally designated "invasive" one. In doing so, they allow insight into the mechanisms of disavowal, how some species were constructed as the cause of disease and ecological change, while others escaped censure.

Kudzu, a perennial climbing vine and invasive species to the American South, occupied a unique space in the city of Atlanta, Georgia as a danger to public health from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. This article examines why municipal authorities understood the vine as a threat to public health. Kudzu's ability to smother surfaces allowed it to conceal murdered people and serve as a habitat for rats, snakes, and mosquitos, making it a direct threat to public safety in the eyes of public health authorities. Kudzu also grew extensively in vacant lots where city officials were trying to promote the city as progressive and prosperous. The city council voted in support of an ordinance against extensive growths of the vine, but eradication produced its own challenges: kudzu removal was expensive, and permanent eradication required large investments in time. Unhoused people also relied on the vine for shelter, which meant that eradication directly affected their safety. Examining how municipal authorities framed kudzu as a threat to public health, this article demonstrates that the vine's status as a health risk lay in how it unintentionally clashed with the promoted image of Atlanta as a business-friendly city with harmonious relationships among its citizens.

This article tells the history of the management of invasive locust swarms in southern Africa in the 1970s and early 1980s. It examines the threats the pests posed to African livelihoods and the challenges in combating them. The article argues that in the 1970s, postcolonial southern African states' attempts to manage the environment with the help of international organizations were intimately tied to the region's experiences under colonial rule, their commitment to ensure the whole region's independence, and the new realities of their dependence on international donor support. This support entrenched a reliance on techno-chemical interventions at a time when the global environmental movement against pesticides was particularly strong. Southern Africa's international collaborators ultimately ignored this global movement, and locust control in the region continued to depend on the application of organochlorines. However, faith in techno-science failed to address the social, political, and ecological conditions that allowed locusts to flourish. Consequently, the pests remained a threat.

The trajectory of condurango, an Andean vine, included a meteoric global rise in the 1860s as a cancer specific, a fall from grace, an enduring phase as a cancer adjuvant, and a return to various national pharmacopeias as a stomachic, all the while continuing to elicit laments from clinicians who insisted into the 1920s that the vine's anti-cancer properties never got a fair trial. This article contextualizes condurango's unsettled relevance by highlighting the phenomenally diverse and globally connected health cultures of the nineteenth-century Andes. Faith in and disappointment with condurango pivoted on the momentum of a national modernization project, the appeal of non-surgical therapeutic options for cancer, and the consideration of sustained improvements and positive unexpected outcomes as beneficial by healers, patients, and their caregivers. Condurango thus makes for a valuable case study about the influence of policies enacted in/by former colonies on the availability and significance of certain resources; the national and professional variations that shaped the consideration of new therapeutic options; and the importance of family caregivers as stakeholders in cancer care.

This article investigates the array of techniques used in the Roman Imperial period to induce menstruation - techniques such as cupping, bloodletting, inserting pessaries, ingesting or applying materia medica, or wearing amulets - and seeks to understand the range of social contexts in which they might have been used. This study focuses particularly on how menstrual induction technologies could be deployed in agonistic settings within the medical marketplace, such as competitions between healthcare providers or conflicts between different healthcare consumers who sought to control women's reproductive health. This category would have included not only menstruators themselves, but also menstruators' family members, enslavers, employers, and physicians. By examining the positive evidence for menstrual induction in the Roman period and using the methodological tools of critical speculation and reading against the grain to explore the interpretive possibilities that evidence presents, this paper demonstrates how menstrual induction technologies could be deployed both to grant and to deprive menstruators of agency over their own bodies, as well as to fortify or undermine hierarchies of gender, class, and civic status.