A brief history of Guinea worm research in the modern period, 1698-1931.

Abstract

Guinea worm is a debilitating waterborne parasitic disease with a long history. This paper examines the ways guinea worm was understood in English-language scientific literature between 1688 and 1931. In the early eighteenth century, guinea worm was principally understood by English-speaking physicians as an exotic wonder of faraway lands. It became viewed as an African disease over the course of the eighteenth century, as transatlantic slavery exposed enslaved Africans to infection with the worm. Worms acquired in West Africa often emerged after arrival to the Caribbean, where the disease briefly established local transmission. However, British medicine only began to take any significant interest in guinea worm in the early nineteenth century, as British and British-employed troops in India began to contract the worm. This resulted in knowledge and specimens of guinea worm travelling to Britain, where they were used to develop the new science of zoology through the nineteenth century. Zoologists elsewhere, particularly in Germany, benefitted from British-Indian knowledge, which allowed Russian parasitologist Alexei Fedchenko to discover the full mechanism of guinea worm's transmission in Samarkand. This zoological knowledge, and zoological view of guinea worm, was then incorporated into the emerging tropical medicine of the 1890s and twentieth century. A long history of guinea worm therefore provides important insights into the circulation of knowledge along imperial networks, and into the history of tropical medicine and parasitology.