Paper short abstract:

This study examines the spread of diseases such as cholera, dysentery and kala azar within the Assam tea industry during the 1860s. It highlights the heightened vulnerability of "outsider coolies" to these epidemics due to their inadequate acclimatization to the local tropical environment.

Paper long abstract:

“when coolies succumb to the climate, the pity is felt, not for them, but for their employer” – Dowding, Reverend. Tea-Garden Coolies in Assam- A Letter, 1894.

The 'discovery' of tea in Assam during the nineteenth century marked a pivotal moment for the British Empire, as it presented an opportunity to challenge China's dominance in the global tea market. This article examines the transformative period from the 1860s, which is regarded as the onset of a 'tea mania,' fueled in part by the Fee Simple Act of 1862 that facilitated the sale of land at remarkably low prices. This era also witnessed the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, leading to a labour shortage in British colonies. The indentured labour system emerged as a crucial solution, with 'coolies' playing a vital role in the workforce. To maximize profits, planters turned to the 'arkattis,' the lowest tier of the recruitment system, to source inexpensive labour from outside Assam. However, the tropical climate proved unsuitable for these 'outsiders,' resulting in alarmingly high mortality rates due to prevalent diseases like cholera, dysentery and kala azar (black fever). This study focuses on the factors that contributed to the increased vulnerability of "outsider coolies" in the face of such epidemics, shedding light on the broader understanding of public health issues during that time.

Paper short abstract:

Looking to historical epidemics of C. diff in the US and UK and typhoid fever in India, this talk explores how socio-ecological approaches to disease can help us examine the intertwined and multi-scalar factors that influence the emergence, trajectory, and resolution of infectious diseases.

Paper long abstract:

Recent global experiences with large-scale epidemic disease has catalysed an equally seismic shift in thinking about human-environmental relationships. Environmental historians have increasingly called for a re-examination of the methodologies of the field, arguing that we must once again confront the ways that epidemic disease challenge our existing frameworks, and question the epistemological boundaries of health and environment as traditionally delineated in humanistic disciplines (Alagona et al., 2020). However, while many historians have articulated the need for this shift and grappled with theoretical aspects of the collapsing human-nonhuman divide, there have been fewer attempts to write histories that incorporate this shifting epistemology (LeCain, 2016).

This talk will introduce a multidisciplinary methodology for engaging the material environment in the history of epidemics. Drawing on frameworks from ecology, history, anthropology, and public health, it will explore the ways that Niche Construction Theory (NCT) can be adapted to address some of the central limitations of the environmental history of disease. Looking to major epidemics of two gastrointestinal bacteria– a seasonal epidemic of typhoid fever (caused by the bacterium Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi) in Bengaluru, India, in the mid-20th century, and multiple outbreaks of Clostridioides difficile infection (CDI) in the US, Canada, and the UK in 2002 – I argue that a socio-ecological approach grounded in NCT can enrich existing historical methods by providing a scaffolding through which to examine the intertwined and multi-scalar factors that influence the emergence, trajectory, and resolution of an epidemic.

Paper short abstract:

This performance dialogue combines ethnographic data collection with storytelling and advocacy practises to explore how Lyme disease, a historically invisible epidemic, can be made visible, and the patient epistemologies, medical knowledge, and social rendering this method reveals.

Paper long abstract:

Caused by the Borrelia burgdorferi bacteria and spread across Europe by ticks, the Lyme disease epidemic has remained a historically invisible event. However as its international visibility grows, debates continue to center on its contested nature: the tensions of medical knowledge production around diagnosis and whether a chronic form exists. In Scotland, patients and patient advocates striving for the recognition of a chronic form of the illness, adopt traditional medical epistemologies by learning the language of doctors so that they and their illness are not discredited. As a result, patient epistemologies of chronicity are well-known within patient communities but remain unknown to medical, social, and economic spaces: the body dysmorphia, suicidal thoughts, PTSD, hypervigilance, loss of social circles, changing relationships to nature, and the late-night conversations with a predatory more-than-human Other.

This presentation is a performance dialogue between Scottish author, patient and advocate Morven-May MacCallum and medical anthropologist and performer Ritti Soncco. We weave Soncco's 15 months of data collection across Scotland using traditional ethnographic methods with MacCallum's advocacy and storytelling practises, including her two semi-autobiographical novels "Finding Joy" (2017) and "Keeping Joy" (2023). Part presentation, part performance, we question and push with the boundaries between our work to explore how transdisciplinary methods can change how we have historically spoken about Lyme disease and how they make a historically invisible epidemic visible - but, importantly, the personal stories and the medical knowledge that are lost when we don't employ wider transdisciplinary methods.

Paper short abstract:

This paper considers disparate understandings of the “silent epidemic” of lead poisoning in the late 19th century United States. It suggests differing historical evaluations of risk facilitated the use of lead in urbanizing America and should inform efforts to address its continuing legacies.

Paper long abstract:

In the mid-19th century, some American chemists and medical doctors warned of the dangers of contracting lead poisoning from consuming water that was conveyed in lead pipes. In parts of the United States, community members' own experiences made them reject lead pipes for drinking water and led to family members' and neighbors' skepticism that lead pipe could safely carry water fit for human consumption. Yet as more advanced chemical analysis became possible in the second-half of the 1800s, prominent chemists asserted that their experiments proved that lead pipes did not leach lead into water passing through them under most conditions. In this way, these technical assertions of safety overtook commonplace concern that lead was an inappropriate material for conveying drinking water to households, and as a result many cities that installed drinking water pipes in the 1880s and 1890s used lead. This paper brings together scientific understandings of risk with non-specialist understandings of what was unsafe to investigate how scientific advances could actually increase vulnerability to the "silent epidemic" of lead poisoning. Bringing together multiple methodologies, it seeks to understand historical evaluations of the dangers of lead poisoning on a scientific and layperson's level. It suggests that examining the historical contradictions between technical claims of lead pipe's safety and common knowledge of lead pipe's dangers is crucial to understanding and addressing the ongoing legacies of lead poisoning in the 21st-century.

Paper short abstract:

Post-apocalyptic fiction offers a unique temporal structure where the present is defamiliarized as the recent past. By exposing the consequences of climate change and viral outbreak, these fictional future histories allow readers to consider how our present conditions can influence the future.

Paper long abstract:

Apocalyptic fiction has long been used as cautionary tales that reflect both the aspirations and fears of the moment in which it is produced. Though rooted in ancient religious texts, contemporary Western culture maintains a widespread obsession with imagining the eventual and seemingly inevitable collapse of modern society. Indeed, we are living in what many would term a pre-apocalyptic moment, constantly inundated with news of climate change and viral outbreak – compounding threats that seem almost impossible to solve and too significant to ignore. My paper argues that narratives about the end of the world offer a unique temporal structure that defamiliarizes the contemporary moment in which the text was produced as a pre-catastrophic past. And by asking readers to remember and reflect on fictionalized histories that have not yet (and may never) come to pass, post-apocalyptic fiction creates a space where readers are able critique the ways that the conditions of our present influence the future. As Raffaella Baccolini argues, “history, its knowledge, and memory are . . . dangerous elements that can give the dystopian citizen a potential instrument of resistance” (115). As such, by engaging with these post-apocalyptic histories of the future, like Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars and Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves where climate change creates global conditions where disease and pandemic outbreak are pervasive, readers are better able to critically examine our current trajectory toward possible mass-destruction and then consider the implications and possibilities of redesigning a more sustainable society from the bottom up.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the longue durée history of how carbolic acid (Phenol) became a leading disinfectant from the 19th century, and how, in the process, led to a series of toxicities—on humans, animals, and the environment that persist today.

Paper long abstract:

Chemical-based disinfection arose as a western public health strategy in the middle of the nineteenth century. Initially fueled by the doctrine of destroying fermenting miasmas in the environment, disinfection was justified in the early twentieth century through laboratory-based experiments which proved that carbolic acid could kill disease-causing microorganisms. A byproduct of the coal industry, carbolic acid was the first household disinfectant. It prevented infection in surgery, and was the central armament of human and animal public health. Barreled and shipped throughout the world by British and German factories, carbolic acid was the first global western industrial public health chemical. As this paper explores, however, carbolic acid had a series of toxic effects. It quickly destroys human skin tissue and is lethal if ingested even in small quantities. While European chemists, coroners and toxicologists clamored for regulation and reform, it took decades for politicians and manufacturers to agree on legislation to mitigate phenol-related deaths. Even after legislation, in the twentieth century phenol accidents became commonplace “everyday” environmental disasters through leaks and spills associated with the chemical’s use in the plastics, explosives, and dye industries. Thinking across the longue durée history of carbolic acid, this paper rethinks the afterlives of the most important chemical used in the public health fight against infectious disease. Bridging the fields of the history of disease and public health, environmental history, and disaster studies, this paper shows the commingled ways that the long arc of industrialization, chemistry, and health practices led to a variety of environmental toxicities.

Paper short abstract:

This talk argues that we should consider how one or two environmental things, both living and non-living, can promote multiple diseases at the same time, informing how we address epidemic outbreaks. What can one element like water or one non-human like a cow tell us about epidemic incidences?

Paper long abstract:

When I began my current project on water management and urban public health in nineteenth-century South Africa, I expected to focus on one, maybe two, diseases. Yet I soon realized that the lens of water in fact tackled a slew of diseases, often simultaneously. These diseases included but were not limited to typhoid, cholera, dysentery, smallpox, and various “fevers,” both biomedically and popularly named. Scholars of public health and epidemiology have long centered their analyses on one or two epidemics and how they influenced different policies, reactions, and contexts. My roundtable talk instead argues that we should consider how environmental things, both living and non-living, can promote multiple diseases at the same time, informing how we address epidemic outbreaks. By centering our focus on a "natural" resource like water, for example, we can more closely examine the connection between infectious disease and the living and non-living environment. How have people historically understood what constitutes an epidemic threat in relation to particular environmental elements? How does a resource or control method target multiple threats simultaneously? Above all, what can one element like water or one non-human like a cow tell us about epidemic incidence writ large? When we look at disease through one environmental thing, we thus flip the traditional epidemiological script and underscore how different diseases move and transform in the same spaces and bodies.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the socio-environmental history of the 1938 November Pogrom through the lens of a typhoid epidemic that broke out in Buchenwald, a National Socialist concentration camp. It examines the origins and effects of the outbreak on prisoners, camp personnel, and the wider community.

Paper long abstract:

The November 1938 pogroms launched against Jews in Third Reich (also known as Kristallnacht) included mass arrests of Jewish men, swelling the populations of concentration camps. In the Buchenwald camp, the rapid influx of nearly 10,000 persons, intentional overcrowding in segregated barracks, and the long-standing lack of adequate water and sewage infrastructure led to an outbreak of typhoid fever—a water-borne disease that flourishes in these conditions. Thousands were sickened, and hundreds of prisoners in Buchenwald died in just a few months.

This paper explores the socio-environmental history of the November Pogrom through the lens of this epidemic, contextualizing it within the longer history of the inadequate water infrastructure in National Socialist camps and the distinct topography of Buchenwald. Drawing on insights from social and environmental history, political ecology, epidemiology, and geology, this paper analyzes the origins of the outbreak and its impact on the camp and the communities surrounding it, as well as the responses by authorities to end it and prevent future epidemics. During the Holocaust, water was used to sustain and destroy life; it was used to hide from perpetrators and to hide crimes. By analyzing the role of the environment in the history of the Holocaust and foregrounding the experiences of victims, whose testimonies highlighted the horrible conditions they confronted in NS carceral spaces, this paper shows the importance of non-human forces like water to the Holocaust, and genocide more generally.