Dr Emily Webster emily.webster@durham.ac.uk
Assistant Professor
Over the last several decades, a growing group of environmental and medical historians have argued that engagement with the materiality of disease is critical to eroding the false boundaries between environment and health, and especially to the historical study of major epidemics and pandemics. This article evaluates the ways in which environmental and medical historians have engaged materiality when thinking through questions of infectious disease. It argues that far from eschewing cultural constructions of disease and analysis of medical systems, these works demonstrate that engagement with materiality in the study of disease articulates the stakes of medical regimes and practices of healing, and renders legible the multiple scales at which epidemics occur. Addressing key controversies in the use of sources, it provides examples of works that incorporate material objects, biological ideas and actors, and non-humans without falling prey to the extremes of “biological determinism” or “constructivism.” It argues that commonalities in the methods employed by these works – utilization of scientific frameworks and data, multispecies analysis, attention to scale, and spatial thinking – reveal unseen and untold aspects of past pandemics. It concludes with a brief example of how these frameworks come together in practice through a case study on the history of enteric fever in Dublin, Ireland.
Webster, E. (online). Environmental Materialities and the History of Pandemics. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Article jrae007. https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jrae007
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | May 13, 2024 |
Online Publication Date | May 23, 2024 |
Deposit Date | Jun 10, 2024 |
Publicly Available Date | Jun 10, 2024 |
Journal | Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences |
Print ISSN | 0022-5045 |
Electronic ISSN | 1468-4373 |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Article Number | jrae007 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jrae007 |
Keywords | materiality/neo-materialism, Anthropocene, history of disease, ecology, environmental history, epidemics |
Public URL | https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/2480396 |
Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages
Published Journal Article (Advance Online Version)
(16 Mb)
PDF
Interview: Pandemics, Empires, and the Lessons of History
(2020)
Digital Artefact
Interview: Plague in Bombay and Urban Ecology with Emily Webster
(2021)
Digital Artefact
Plague, Displacement, and Ecological Disruption in Bombay, 1896
(2021)
Book Chapter
About Durham Research Online (DRO)
Administrator e-mail: dro.admin@durham.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2024
Advanced Search