Paper short abstract:

The paper will examine the notion of pestis minor as an evidential strategy developed in the context of colonial medical science during the third plague pandemic (1855-1959).

Paper long abstract:

Pestis minor is a little used medical category today. Until one hundred years ago, however, at the height of the third plague pandemic, this was a notion that fuelled extensive debate and speculation amongst scientists. Referring to an attenuated or benign for plague, evidence of pestis minor was gleaned from medical reports across the world so as to raise the question of whether the disease could survive measures against it by means of temporary transformation. Afflicting its victims only by the slightest swellings, the disease could thus lurk in the human body until conditions allowed it to break out again in its true, malignant form. This paper will for the first time draw a history of this notion and the questions raised by it. More than that, however, it will ask how pestis minor was itself evidentialised; how, being based on the systematisation of loose and scattered evidence, it was rendered itself evidence of the true nature of plague, in other cases, a mechanism for disputing evidence about plague. The paper will examine these strategies of epidemiological reasoning within the context of inter-imperial antagonism regarding the truth of plague in the time of high colonialism.