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Paper short abstract:

This study examines the spread of diseases such as cholera, malaria 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, malaria 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.

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Paper short abstract:

Thought inconsequential by the lack of surviving accounts, no single epidemic proved deadlier to colonial New England than the throat distempers. The combination of cultural and demographic research reveals the extinction of entire families, the very individuals who could have left those accounts.

Paper long abstract:

In 1735, a new disease seized the northeastern mainland of British North America. While the throat distempers never achieved the notoriety of other diseases of the colonial era, no single epidemic of the period proved deadlier to European settlers. By 1739 alone the death toll in New England had exceeded 5,000 individuals; 98% of the dead were children. Despite their extreme and stunningly skewed mortality, and their arrival amidst the Great Awakening, the throat distempers remain an understudied tragedy in American history.

The rare few demographers to remark upon this catastrophe in the last half-century have equated the lack of surviving accounts to a lack of emotional impact. The deaths of children, even in the vast numbers fallen to the throat distempers, simply did not matter enough to compel surviving parents to leave note. Consequently, historians of epidemics—even of those with extraordinarily high death counts like the throat distempers—continue to dismiss such events as unimportant. Combining traditional research methodologies with computational humanities technology, I reconstruct this catastrophic event anew. Rather than go on as one might expect if this event had no impact, surviving parents withdrew from their faith communities, ceased or delayed further reproduction, and oftentimes died within a few years of losing their children, leaving no surviving testimony of their grief. This challenges the dominate models of epidemic reconstruction and, furnishing a new way to explore loss in early North America, leaves a medical-historical analogue to the “lost voice” of the subaltern.

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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.

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This paper uses the case of influenza to argue that critical approaches to zoonoses must be grounded in multispecies perspectives that integrate environmental, animal, biomedical and veterinary historiographies and tackle zoonoses as ecological, human-animal, and global health problems.

Paper long abstract:

Recognition that COVID-19 is caused by a virus that spilled-over from a non-human animal cast a sharp spotlight on the enormous challenges posed by “zoonoses”. A zoonotic event of this kind has been anticipated for decades while approaches have been rooted in developments in framing zoonoses as ecological and global health problems over the last seventy-five years. This paper uses the case of influenza to trace the changing ways in which zoonoses have been tackled as problems connected to human interactions with pathogens and animals, with changing environments, and with each other through transnational systems of animal food production and consumption. It highlights efforts to build partnerships across species to monitor and manage influenza in human and non-human animals, but also the daunting biological, economic, cultural, and geopolitical challenges that zoonoses present. The paper details how such partnerships have coalesced into ‘One Health’ frameworks and explores the assumptions of such frameworks, the agendas they serve, and their implications for human, animal, and planetary health. The takeaway message is that effective approaches to understanding and controlling zoonoses need to be grounded in multispecies perspectives of their complex bio-social ecologies, which integrate environmental, animal, biomedical, and veterinary historiographies, and anthropologies of zoonoses. Such perspectives can illuminate the ways in which zoonoses have been shaped by the changing scale and impact of human relations with pathogens, animals, and their environments, and by inequalities in the distribution of ‘one health’ resources within and between countries.

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During 1860–1930, diseases like kala-azar, malaria, and cholera killed 2,00,000 people in the northeast frontier of British India. This paper attempts to integrate medical, economic, and environmental history to examine how epidemics shaped labouring bodies and the colonial resource frontier.

Paper long abstract:

By the end of the nineteenth century, Assam, a province in the northeast of British India, had become a colonial resource frontier supplying tea, timber, elephants, and minerals. However, diseases like kala-azar (Visceral leishmaniasis), cholera, and malaria since the 1860s were constant obstacles in stabilizing and expanding the frontier. Largely due to epidemics, Assam’s population stagnated around five million during 1891-1911. The colonial government relied on indentured labourers from Central India to work on tea plantations in Assam. Cholera and malaria were major killers among the tea plantation workers. Kala-azar, on the other hand, took a huge toll on the peasants outside plantations. As the peasants abandoned their villages and cultivated fields to settle in newly cleared forests, the agrarian and forest frontiers perpetually ebbed and flowed and imperial revenues were threatened.

Despite such influences of diseases in the province’s economic conditions, extant scholarship has made scarce attempts to analyse epidemics and resource frontiers as a composite unit of analysis. This article attempts to show how diseases contended with the colonial state-making in Assam. The article will attempt a methodological exercise of integrating three strains of history – economic, medical, and environmental – to examine the nature and extent of the crisis caused by epidemics in the resource frontier of British India. It will foreground the lived experience of the peasants and tea plantation workers who had to negotiate simultaneously with the burden of diseases and the expectations of a revenue-seeking colonial state.

Key Words: Disease, Kala-azar, resource frontier, peasants

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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.

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This paper examines 21st century legacies of the proliferation of lead pipe water distribution systems in the US in the late 19th-early 20th centuries. It considers the consequences of exposure to lead in drinking water and questions of who should be responsible for remediation.

Paper long abstract:

Nearly a century ago, after many municipalities had turned away from lead pipe for water distribution systems, the lead industry engaged in campaigns to promote lead pipe in plumbing. Working through plumbers’ unions, lead industry representatives attempted to change plumbing codes to require the installation of lead pipes. Many cities stopped using lead pipe for distributing drinking water to homes decades before federal regulation, but it was not until the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1986 that new installation of lead pipes was banned. Nearly forty years since this ban on installing lead drinking water pipes, there continue to be landscapes of lead pipes in cities across the United States. Disproportionately found in deindustrialized and poorer areas, these pipes have been found to convey lead and cause lead poisoning, most notably in the case of Flint, Michigan. This paper examines the long-term impacts on communities that still have lead service pipes and engages with the question of where responsibility for replacement and remediation lies.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.