This is an introduction to the topical collection Microbes, Networks, Knowledge: Disease Ecology in the twentieth Century, based on a workshop held at Queen Mary, University London on July 6–7 2016. More than twenty years ago, historian of science and medicine Andrew Mendelsohn asked, “Where did the modern, ecological understanding of epidemic disease come from?” Moving beyond Mendelsohn’s answer, this collection of new essays considers the global history of disease ecology in the past century and shows how epidemics and pandemics (...) have made “microbes complex”. (shrink)

During the cold war, Frank Fenner and Francis Ratcliffe studied mathematically the coevolution of host resistance and parasite virulence when myxomatosis was unleashed on Australia’s rabbit population. Later, Robert May called Fenner the “real hero” of disease ecology for his mathematical modeling of the epidemic. While Ratcliffe came from a tradition of animal ecology, Fenner developed an ecological orientation in World War II through his work on malaria control —that is, through studies of tropical medicine. This makes Fenner at least (...) a partial exception to other senior disease ecologists in the region, most of whom learned their ecology from examining responses to agricultural challenges and animal husbandry problems in settler colonial society. Here I consider the local ecologies of knowledge in southeastern Australia during this period, and describe the particular cold-war intellectual niche that Fenner and Ratcliffe inhabited. (shrink)