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Paper short abstract:

This paper takes as its focus a method of mosquito dissection pioneered by Soviet entomologists in the 1940s, and explores how an abandoned and largely unpracticed evidentiary practice can still articulate the pasts and afterlives of tropical medicine and global health research.

Paper long abstract:

What is the epistemic status of the abandoned technique? What light can effective, yet neglected, diagnostic methods and devices shed on the historicity of testing and the material cultures of knowledge production? This paper takes as its focus a method of mosquito dissection pioneered in the 1940s by a team of vector biologists based at the Moscow Martsinovsky Institute. The Detinova Technique offered a way to determine the exact physiological age of the female mosquito, providing critical insight into the ecological dynamics of disease transmission. Heralded as a game-changer for global malaria eradication efforts, the technique prompted new collaborations and rivalries between East and West played out in large part, across the African content. Its applied potential, however, was never realized, and while it remains the most accurate means of ascertaining the age—and, by extension the infectivity—of a vector population, the Detinova technique is today practiced by only a handful of entomologists. Drawing together empirical and archival materials from Africa, Russia and the UK this paper explores the historiographic significance of this method for our current understandings of malaria control and more broadly, the ways in which, an abandoned and largely unpracticed evidentiary practice articulates the pasts and afterlives of tropical medicine and global health research.