Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Michelle Murphy is an assistant professor in the Department of History and the Institute for Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto.

Christopher Sellers is an associate professor of history at Stony Brook University.

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Osiris, Volume 19

The University of Chicago Press

Contents

LANDSCAPES OF EXPOSURE: KNOWLEDGE AND ILLNESS IN MODERN ENVIRONMENTSGREGG MITMAN, MICHELLE MURPHY, CHRISTOPHER SELLERS: Introduction: A Cloud over History.........................................................................................................1ECOLOGY AND INFECTIONHELEN TILLEY: Ecologies of Complexity: Tropical Environments, African Trypanosomiasis, and the Science of Disease Control Strategies in British Colonial Africa, 1900-1940.....................21WARWICK ANDERSON: Natural Histories of Infectious Disease: Ecological Vision in Twentieth-Century Biomedical Science...........................................................................39NICHOLAS B. KING: The Scale Politics of Emerging Diseases......................................................................................................................................62ECONOMY AND PLACECONEVERY BOLTON VALENCIUS: Gender and the Economy of Health on the Santa Fe Trail..............................................................................................................79GREGG MITMAN: Geographies of Hope: Mining the Frontiers of Health in Denver and Beyond, 1870-1965..............................................................................................93GIOVANNA DI CHIRO: "Living is for Everyone": Border Crossings for Community, Environment, and Health...........................................................................................112MATERIAL FLOWS AND PUBLIC HEALTHSUSAN D. JONES: Mapping a Zoonotic Disease: Anglo-American Efforts to Control Bovine Tuberculosis Before World War I...........................................................................133HAROLD PLATT: "Clever Microbes": Bacteriology and Sanitary Technology in Manchester and Chicago During the Progressive Age.....................................................................149SCOTT KIRSCH: Harold Knapp and the Geography of Normal Controversy: Radioiodine in the Historical Environment..................................................................................167CRISTOPHER SELLERS: The Artificial Nature of Fluoridated Water: Between Nations, Knowledge, and Material Flows.................................................................................182EXPOSURE AND INVISIBILITYLINDA NASH: The Fruits of Ill-Health: Pesticides and Workers' Bodies in Post-World War II California...........................................................................................203LUISE WHITE: Poisoned Food, Poisoned Uniforms, and Anthrax: Or, How Guerillas Die in War.......................................................................................................220RONNIE JOHNSTON AND ARTHUR MCIVOR: Oral History, Subjectivity and Environmental Reality: Occupational Health Histories in Twentieth-Century Scotland...........................................234ADRIANA PETRYNA: Biological Citizenship: The Science and Politics of Chernobyl-Exposed Populations.............................................................................................250MICHELLE MURPHY: Uncertain Exposures and the Privilege of Imperception: Activist Scientists and Race at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency...............................................266KIM FORTUN: From Bhopal to the Informating of Environmentalism: Risk Communication in Historical Perspective...................................................................................283NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS..........................................................................................................................................................................297INDEX..........................................................................................................................................................................................299

Chapter One

ABSTRACT

Tropical Africa was one of the last regions of the world to experience formal European colonialism, a process that coincided with the advent of a range of new scientific specialties and research methods. The history of British attempts to understand and control African trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness in humans and nagana in cattle), following the intense human epidemics that broke out between 1895 and 1910, reveals hitherto ignored scientific research in the fields of ecology, epidemiology, and tropical medicine that helped produce a new understanding of the "ecology of disease." Often generated within a transnational and interdisciplinary context, this knowledge increasingly assumed that vector-borne diseases in tropical environments were highly complex, dynamic, and interrelated phenomena. Thus while many people continued to hope that trypanosomiasis could be eradicated, research results made this prospect seem unlikely, if not impossible.

INTRODUCTION

In August 1939, Kenneth Morris, a young entomologist employed in Britain's Gold Coast medical department, wrote two articles for The Times (London) on his experiences "fighting a fly." Morris had worked in West Africa since the late 1920s and was one of the first entomologists there to undertake systematic field investigations of the various tsetse flies in the region, adopting what was then called a "bionomic," or environmental, approach. Morris's preoccupation with understanding life from the fly's point of view was evident in his articles. "This small grey insect ... which dominates so much of Africa's most fertile land," he told his audience, "is an aristocrat of the insect world.... [H]e is quick and sly in his habits and is remarkable among insects in possessing so few natural enemies. And in the wild untouched bush of his natural home he exists in millions." Much as it was for aristocrats in Britain, one of the fly's main occupations was the hunt for prey. At this point, Morris's admiration for the tsetse fly was superseded by his allegiance to his own species, for among the fly's prey were humans. "[E]very one of the tsetse is a potential carrier of trypanosomiasis," the parasitical disease that causes the fatal illnesses of sleeping sickness in humans and nagana in cattle. "Civilization," the entomologist concluded, "is incompatible with the presence of the tsetse fly."

For Morris, hope for future progress in tropical Africa lay "[o]nly in the quiet persistence of science in discovering and exploiting [the tsetse's] weaknesses." Researchers were subjecting to scientific scrutiny all facets of the fly's breeding grounds, including soil and climate, its means of securing blood meals, its digestive processes, its manner of infection by the trypanosomes, its affinity with particular flora and fauna, and even its "activity from hour to hour throughout the day." From his experience in the field, Morris felt that "tackling the problem from one aspect only, is bound to be a failure." What was needed was a comprehensive approach, which "combined the forces of entomology and medicine, veterinarians and agricultural experts," to reclaim land where humans, animals, and tsetse...