A Rat's Progress: Plague and the "Migratory Rat" in British India, 1896-1899.

IF 0.9 3区 哲学 Q4 HEALTH CARE SCIENCES & SERVICES
Christos Lynteris
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引用次数: 0

Abstract

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.

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来源期刊
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 管理科学-科学史与科学哲学
CiteScore
1.00
自引率
0.00%
发文量
40
审稿时长
>12 weeks
期刊介绍: Started in 1946, the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences is internationally recognized as one of the top publications in its field. The journal''s coverage is broad, publishing the latest original research on the written beginnings of medicine in all its aspects. When possible and appropriate, it focuses on what practitioners of the healing arts did or taught, and how their peers, as well as patients, received and interpreted their efforts. Subscribers include clinicians and hospital libraries, as well as academic and public historians.
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