2011-2013 CHR Series steering committee:
John Brooke, History
Timothy Buckley, Public Health
Chris Otter, History
April 6: Nukhet Varlik (Rutgers)
Plague epidemics in the post-Black Death Mediterranean and the Ottoman Empire
Exploring the interplay between epidemic disease and empire in the historical example of the early modern Ottoman Empire, my research aims to demonstrate that the histories of the two phenomena are intertwined. By tracing the territorial growth of the empire through conquests and the subsequent establishment of networks of trade and communication between the newly conquered territories, and the growth of new urban centers, we will see that plague epidemics attained new trajectories through which they could spread to a more extensive area and expanded in new directions in the post-Black Death era. More specifically, I shall analyze the outbreaks of plague in this era in three distinct phases on the basis of their spread patterns, area of diffusion, and frequency of recurrence. The first phase (1453-1517) is characterized by the emergence of an east-west axis in the Mediterranean. The second phase (1517-1570) witnessed the rise of multiple networks of plague-spread. And the last phase (1570-1600) marks the emergence of Istanbul as the plague-hub of the empire.
Comment: Carter Findley, Dept. of History, Ohio State
Location: 168 Dulles Hall
April 13: Katherine Arner (Johns Hopkins, CHR Dissertation Fellow)
Fever, Commerce and Diplomacy: Consuls, Commercial Agents and the Transformation of Warm Climate Medicine in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions
From colonial medical officers to WHO advisors to Doctors without Borders, border crossers who link medical cultures in disparate parts of the world have recently captured the attention of historians of disease control. By and large, however, those scholars continue to look to the late nineteenth and twentieth century, situating the emergence of border crossers in the rise of modern globalization. This paper challenges this outlook by introducing an overlooked actor from an earlier period: the consul. Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, consuls became an increasingly prominent component of international statecraft as European and new Atlantic nations jostled in the arena of global commerce. Commerce and warfare introduced new patterns of disease to port cities, and the consuls in those cities began to take on new roles in disease control. They kept tabs on mortality rates, established disease surveillance networks, translated health regulations, networked with public health authorities and medical cultures abroad.
This paper focuses on the context of new challenges in the international community around the turn of the nineteenth century. In the wake of the American Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, the United States sought to establish itself as a player in long-distance trade. At the same time, Americans and Europeans confronted an unprecedented surge and spread in both yellow fever and plague. As American agents interacted with regulatory and medical cultures abroad, they helped to shape policy decisions, surveillance practices, new ideas about disease and new geographies of medical cultures. By recovering the activities of consuls, this paper seeks to raise questions about the place of the eighteenth and nineteenth century in histories of global health. By directing our attention to overlooked sites of statecraft and medicine, this paper also suggests the need to refine the categories of “governance” and “medicine” in the longue durée of global health history.
Comment: Thomas McDow, Department of History, Ohio State
Location: 168 Dulles Hall
Cosponsored by the Ohio Seminar in Early American History
April 20: Marta Hanson (Johns Hopkins University; currently Visiting Fellow, International Consortium for Research in the Humanities, University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany)
Visualizing the Geography of Diseases in China, 1870s-1920s
From the beginning, medical mapping was not just a way of thinking but a way to visualize certain conceptions of knowledge. Physicians used them for various functions in China from the 1870s, when they first published them to work out causal relationships, to the 1910s and 20s, when they transformed them for new political purposes. They were also one of the most succinct ways to circulate complex syntheses of then current medical knowledge. The earliest disease maps were statements in an argument, evidence furthering a specific case, and visualizations of possible causal relationships. On the one hand, disease incidence, and on the other hand, potential causes—the climate or weather, water and air quality, geological features such as elevation, waterways and mountains, or an unknown poison in the environment. Over 50 maps of diseases in China were published from the 1870s to the 1920s. They were both analytical tools intended to visualize the relationship between space and disease and political images that legitimated colonial control (Russian in Harbin, English in Hong Kong). Later, they provided evidence of Chinese state power over their populations. They also present a visual history of major changes in the conception of what was modern Western knowledge within China from the mid nineteenth-century peak of medical geography to the eventual victory of laboratory medicine by the early twentieth century. The earliest disease maps, like nineteenth-century vital statistics and Petri-dishes, made causal relations newly visible. During the 1910-20s, however, new kinds of maps of diseases in China functioned more to legitimate colonial and later Chinese state-populace relationships than to elucidate causal disease-agent ones. Finally, the first disease maps in vernacular Chinese were of the distribution of bubonic plague, pneumonic plague, cholera, and apoplexy in China and the world. Published on public-health posters in the late 1920s, they attempted to convince a wary public of an entirely novel way of seeing epidemic disease, themselves, and their place in a newly globalizing world.
Comment: Song Liang, College of Public Health, Ohio State
Location: 140 Cunz Hall
May 4: Liu Shiyung (Taiwan University, CHR Senior Fellow )
Disease, People, and Environment: The Plague in China
Many of the biological organisms and processes linked to the spread of infectious diseases are especially influenced by fluctuations in climate variables, notably temperature, precipitation and humidity. Evidently, in its passage from one individual to another, a pathogen is dependent on a specific mode of transmission and a particular configuration of various external factors. Temperature and humidity are crucial with respect to its reproduction, survival and infectiousness. Micro-climatic factors in urban areas also affect the contagiousness of infectious disease by mutually influencing human and social behavior. Black Death or epidemic plague appeared in the 14th century in both Europe and China, cost almost half their populations, is a good case to prove the hypotheses above.
Taking China as a case study, the author indicates that the human assisted migration and subsequent successful colonization of new habitats in inland China after the 18th century and the rapid spread to the coastal regions as well as the rest of global by business routes in the 19th century to early 20th century, is proof that at least some rodent species can establish themselves in distant new environments within decades. One of the natural features in monsoon China is regular rainy season. However, man-made environment such as routes of frequent migration and crowed market-towns played much important role in spreading plague in China since the 18th century.
Numerical data from local gazettes, modern observation of tree-rings, and merchants’ diaries between the 16th and 19th century are collected while GIS (Geographic Information System) technology is applied to analysis. The author intends to identify the trading hub and environmental changes to spreading plague in 18th century China. In general, the author wants to illuminate that epidemic plague in China since 18th century is the result of interaction between human exploitation and natural response.
Comment: Phillip Brown, Department of History, Ohio State
Location: 168 Dulles Hall
May 18: James Webb (Colby College)
Malaria Redux: The History and Ethics of Malaria Eradication and Control Campaigns in Tropical Africa
During the 1950s, colonial malariologists, in conjunction with experts from the World Health Organization, set up malaria eradication pilot projects across tropical Africa. They deployed new synthetic insecticides such as DLD, HCH, and DDT, and new antimalarials, such as chloroquine and pyrimethamine, in an effort to establish protocols for eradication. These efforts ‘protected’ some fourteen million Africans. Yet by the early 1960s, the experts concluded that eradication was not feasible, and the pilot projects were disbanded. The ‘protected’ populations had lost their acquired immunities to malaria during the years of the projects, and in the aftermath of the projects, the Africans were subject to severe malaria, which sometimes afflicted entire communities in epidemic form, until they regained their immunities.
With the establishment of the Global Fund in 2002, the President’s Malaria Initiative in 2005, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s call in 2007 for a new campaign of global malaria eradication, a new chapter in the history of African malaria eradication opened. The campaign has deployed some well-established malaria control tools, such as indoor residual spraying with insecticides, and has increased the availability of a new generation of antimalarials (ACTs, artemisinin combination therapies). The new campaign has forged ahead without an endgame in sight. The funders trust that the malaria control tools, perhaps in conjunction with technological advances in vaccines, transgenic mosquitoes, and antiparasitic fungi, will ultimately defeat malaria. The campaign, however, is already facing the specter of mosquito resistance to the synthetic insecticides and parasite resistance to the antimalarials. The danger is of a replay of the epidemic malaria that followed on the abandonment of the malaria eradication campaign in the mid-twentieth century.
This paper explores the parallels and differences between the two campaigns and the ethical dimensions of medical interventions that potentially create higher health risks for ‘protected’ populations. In what ways has the malaria problem itself changed over time? What can the study of antimalaria campaigns in the past tell us about the present?
Comment: Alison Norris, College of Public Health, Ohio State
Location: 140 Cunz Hall
AUTUMN, 2011:
Sept. 30:
John McNeill (Georgetown University)
Epidemics and Empires: The Case of the Caribbean (1620-1920) in World Historical Context
Time: 2:00-3:30, followed by a brief reception
Location: Thompson 165
Autumn 2011 Seminars: Transitions and the Long Term
Predistributed papers will be posted on this site and copies will be made available at various departments several weeks before each session.
Oct. 14:
Susan Klepp (Temple University)
Culture, the Revolution, and the Beginnings of the American Fertility Transition
Time: 3:30-5:00
Location: Psychology Building 10
Economic, demographic, and sociological studies of historical fertility transitions have tended to seek direct, quantifiable correlations between economic change and the fiscal well-being of heads of household–that is, of men. The prevailing assumption has been that men make fertility decisions and that they make these decisions based entirely on simple cost-benefit analyses. Women’s perceptions and goals have been largely ignored as have cultural and political transformations. This study looks at women during the American Revolution who began to construct new understandings of femininity and fertility.
Comment: John B. Casterline, Department of Sociology, Ohio State
Oct. 28:
Clark Larsen & Richard Steckel (Ohio State)
Health and Aging in the Very Long Term: An Interim Report of the OSU European and Global Health Projects.
Time: 3:30-5:00
Location: Thompson 165
The public health community has long been interested in research on the subjects of violence, degenerative conditions, infectious and metabolic diseases, impacts of the environment on health, inequality and health, and childhood origins of adult disease. However, nearly all of the research on these themes has been conducted on relatively modern societies, that is, populations that have lived or are living in the industrial age, or in the past one or possibly two centuries. One might think that populations living in poor developing countries meet the diversity challenge but even they have been influenced in varying degrees by the modern world, including its products, technology, pathogens, and political structures. Scientists know that diversity in the circumstances under which events occur, including health challenges, is desirable for discovering underlying relationships and measuring them with precision. On these grounds medical researchers should welcome the study of health outcomes generated by the wide range of ecological and socioeconomic conditions that have existed since the Neolithic Revolution. We surmise that many if not most of these researchers, however, are unlikely to know how this might be done and therefore have given the idea little thought. This application explains and gives examples of how the diversity of the human experience over the millennia can be brought to bear on modern public health concerns, and how this effort might engage medical researchers. Our specific aims are to:
- Explain the research value of skeletal remains.
- Explain the importance of contextual information
- Apply the study of skeletal remains and their context to public health problems.
- Engage the medical profession in the research of this application.
Nov. 18:
Tamara Mann (Columbia University/CHR Dissertation Fellow)
From Pastoral Care to Health Care: The First National Conference on Aging, 1950.
Time: 3:30-5:00
Location: Dulles 168
This paper explores the ethical debates spurred by the demographic transition that extended the average American lifespan to 68.1 years of age in 1950, a twenty-year jump from 1900. How should old age be defined? Where will the infirm elderly live? Where will they die?What responsibility does the state have to care for the elderly? This paper resuscitates the first moment in the American past where religious leaders, foundation heads, and federal officials all took on these questions and sought lasting solutions to the mounting problem of old age.
Comment: Sarah Brooks, Dept. of Political Science, Ohio State
Dec. 2: Kim Bowes (University of Pennsylvania)
Measuring quality of life among Ancient Roman Populations
Time: 3:30-5:00
Location: Dulles 168
This talk will focus the problems of applying data from the ancient world to modern metrics for quality of life, and offer some solutions, looking particularly data on the rural poor. The Roman rural poor are typically assumed to have had very low quality of life by any number of indeces, particularly climatic and agricultural factors that lead to a precarious subsistence living, low life expectancy, and only very distant ties to a market economy which limited income. Our new data a far more complex situation with multiple contradictory indicators.
Comment: Nathan Rosenstein, Dept. of History, Ohio State
Spring 2012 Seminars: Epidemiology in World History
All sessions are from 3:30-5:00, at locations on the main campus.
Predistributed papers will be posted on this site and copies will be made available at various departments several weeks before each session.
April 6: Nukhet Varlik (Rutgers)
Plague epidemics in the post-Black Death Mediterranean and the Ottoman Empire
Exploring the interplay between epidemic disease and empire in the historical example of the early modern Ottoman Empire, my research aims to demonstrate that the histories of the two phenomena are intertwined. By tracing the territorial growth of the empire through conquests and the subsequent establishment of networks of trade and communication between the newly conquered territories, and the growth of new urban centers, we will see that plague epidemics attained new trajectories through which they could spread to a more extensive area and expanded in new directions in the post-Black Death era. More specifically, I shall analyze the outbreaks of plague in this era in three distinct phases on the basis of their spread patterns, area of diffusion, and frequency of recurrence. The first phase (1453-1517) is characterized by the emergence of an east-west axis in the Mediterranean. The second phase (1517-1570) witnessed the rise of multiple networks of plague-spread. And the last phase (1570-1600) marks the emergence of Istanbul as the plague-hub of the empire.
April 13: Katherine Arner (Johns Hopkins, CHR Dissertation Fellow)
Fever, Commerce and Diplomacy: Consuls and the Transformation of Disease Control in the Era of Atlantic Revolutions
From colonial medical officers to WHO advisors to Doctors without Borders, border crossers who link medical cultures in disparate parts of the world have recently captured the attention of historians of disease control. By and large, however, those scholars continue to look to the late nineteenth and twentieth century, situating the emergence of border crossers in the rise of modern globalization. This paper challenges this outlook by introducing an overlooked actor from an earlier period: the consul. Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, consuls became an increasingly prominent component of international statecraft as European and new Atlantic nations jostled in the arena of global commerce. Commerce and warfare introduced new patterns of disease to port cities, and the consuls in those cities began to take on new roles in disease control. They kept tabs on mortality rates, established disease surveillance networks, translated health regulations, networked with public health authorities and medical cultures abroad.
This paper focuses on the context of new challenges in the international community around the turn of the nineteenth century. In the wake of the American Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, the United States sought to establish itself as a player in long-distance trade. At the same time, Americans and Europeans confronted an unprecedented surge and spread in both yellow fever and plague. As American agents interacted with regulatory and medical cultures abroad, they helped to shape policy decisions, surveillance practices, new ideas about disease and new geographies of medical cultures. By recovering the activities of consuls, this paper seeks to raise questions about the place of the eighteenth and nineteenth century in histories of global health. By directing our attention to overlooked sites of statecraft and medicine, this paper also suggests the need to refine the categories of “governance” and “medicine” in the longue durée of global health history.
April 20: Marta Hanson (Johns Hopkins, Visiting Scholar, 2011- 2012, International Consortium for Research in the Humanities, Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany )
Visualizing the Geography of Disease in China, 1870s-1920s
From the beginning, medical mapping was not just a way of thinking but also a way to visualize certain conceptions of knowledge. The physicians who had them published in China, from the 1870s when they first appeared to the 1910s and 20s when they were transformed, used them for various functions. They were also one of the most succinct ways to circulate complex syntheses of then current medical knowledge. The earliest disease maps were statements in an argument, evidence furthering a specific case, and visualizations of possible causal relationships. On the one hand, disease incidence, and on the other hand, potential causes—the climate or weather, water and air quality, geological features such as elevation, waterways and mountains, or an unknown poison in the environment. These disease maps were never merely descriptive but useful ways for researchers to think through the yet unknown relationships between the nature of any given disease and the specific environment that produced it. Over 50 maps of diseases in China were published from the 1870s to the 1920s. They were both analytical tools intended to visualize the relationship between space and disease and political images that legitimated colonial control (Russian in Harbin, English in Hong Kong), and later provided evidence of Chinese state power, over their populations. They also present a visual history of major changes in the conception of what was modern Western knowledge within China from the mid nineteenth-century peak of medical geography to the eventual victory of laboratory medicine by the early twentieth century. The earliest disease maps, like nineteenth-century vital statistics and Petri-dishes, made causal relations newly visible. During the 1910-20s, however, new kinds of maps of diseases in China appeared that functioned more to legitimate colonial, and later Chinese, state-populace relationships than to elucidate causal disease-agent ones. Finally, the first Chinese-language distribution maps of bubonic plague, pneumonic plague, cholera, and apoplexy that first circulated on public-health posters in the late 1920s had yet a new function. They were some of the earliest attempts to convince a wary public of an entirely new way of seeing themselves, the causes of epidemic diseases, and the global world in which they lived.
May 4: Liu Shiyung (Taiwan University, CHR Senior Fellow )
Using diseases as an index of environmental changes: a preliminary study on plague in China
Many of the biological organisms and processes linked to the spread of infectious diseases are especially influenced by fluctuations in climate variables, notably temperature, precipitation and humidity. Evidently, in its passage from one individual to another, a pathogen is dependent on a specific mode of transmission and a particular configuration of various external factors. Temperature and humidity are crucial with respect to its reproduction, survival and infectiousness. Micro-climatic factors in urban areas also affect the contagiousness of infectious disease by mutually influencing human and social behavior. Black Death or epidemic plague appeared in the 14th century in both Europe and China, cost almost half their populations, is a good case to prove the hypotheses above.
Taking China as a case study, the author indicates that the human assisted migration and subsequent successful colonization of new habitats in inland China after the 18th century and the rapid spread to the coastal regions as well as the rest of global by business routes in the 19th century to early 20th century, is proof that at least some rodent species can establish themselves in distant new environments within decades. One of the natural features in monsoon China is regular rainy season. However, man-made environment such as routes of frequent migration and crowed market-towns played much important role in spreading plague in China since the 18th century.
Numerical data from local gazettes, modern observation of tree-rings, and merchants’ diaries between the 16th and 19th century are collected while GIS (Geographic Information System) technology is applied to analysis. The author intends to identify the trading hub and environmental changes to spreading plague in 18th century China. In general, the author wants to illuminate that epidemic plague in China since 18th century is the result of interaction between human exploitation and natural response.
May 18: James Webb (Colby College)
The Historical Epidemiology of African Malaria, 1945-1965
The President’s Malaria Initiative, the Global Fund, and the Gates Foundation are currently funding an ambitious program of malaria reduction with a long-term goal of eradicating the disease in Africa. In the 1950s and 1960s, the World Health Organization, as part of its malaria eradication program (1955-1969), undertook a series of pilot projects to develop protocols to eradicate malaria in tropical Africa. The projects encountered a spate of difficulties that were unable to be surmounted.
What can the study of antimalaria campaigns in the past tell us about the present? In what ways has the malaria problem itself changed over time? In what ways can the fields of historical epidemiology and global health history improve the practice of public health?