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.