How Plague Got Rats
Professor Christos Lynteris (University of St Andrews)
This seminar examines the ways in which plague became associated with rats in modern epidemiology. The seminar will discuss the transformations of the rat in epidemiological reasoning during the third plague pandemic (1894-1959). I will show how rats were instituted as “agents of plague” in their relating to other suspect agents (the soil, grain, the “infected house”, other animals and humans), and will discuss the impact of the discovery of the rat-flea transmission mechanism on relational understandings of plague. Arguing that the framing of rats as the first protagonists of zoonotic narratives in modern medicine entailed far more than their identification as disease hosts or vectors, the seminar will ask what attributes of epistemic complexity and uncertainty did the “plague rat” lend to the emergence of zoonosis as an epidemiological field of knowledge.
Image courtsey of the Needham Research Institute