Wildlife populations in the northern reaches of the globe have long been observed to fluctuate or cycle periodically, with dramatic increases followed by catastrophic crashes. Focusing on the early work of Charles S. Elton, this article analyzes how investigations into population cycles shaped the development of Anglo-American animal ecology during the 1920s–1930s. Population cycling revealed patterns that challenged ideas about the “balance” of nature; stimulated efforts to quantify population data; and brought animal ecology into conversation with intellectual debates about natural (...) selection. Elton used the problem of understanding wildlife population cycles to explore a central tension in ecological thought: the relative influences of local conditions (food supply, predation) and universal forces (such as climate change and natural selection) in regulating wild animal populations. He also sought patronage and built research practices and the influential Bureau of Animal Population around questions of population regulation during the 1930s. Focusing on disease as a local population regulator that could interact with global climatic influences, Elton facilitated an interdisciplinary and population-based approach in early animal ecology. Elton created a network of epidemiologists, conservationists, pathologists and mathematicians, who contributed to population cycle research. I argue that, although these people often remained peripheral to ecology, their ideas shaped the young discipline. Particularly important were the concepts of abundance, density, and disease; and the interactions between these factors and natural selection. However, Elton’s reliance on density dependence unwittingly helped set up conditions conducive to the development of controversies in animal ecology in later years. While ecologists did not come to consensus on the ultimate causes of population cycles, this phenomenon was an important early catalyst for the development of theory and practice in animal ecology. (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)

Reflecting on his scientific career toward the end of his life, the French-educated medical researcher René Dubos presented his flowering as an ecological thinker as a story of linear progression—the inevitable product of the intellectual seeds planted in his youth. But how much store should we set by Dubos’s account of his ecological journey? Resisting retrospective biographical readings, this paper seeks to relate the development of Dubos’s ecological ideas to his experimental practices and his career as a laboratory researcher. In (...) particular, I focus on Dubos’s studies of tuberculosis at the Rockefeller Institute in the period 1944–1956—studies which began with an inquiry into the tubercle bacillus and the physiochemical determinants of virulence, but which soon encompassed a wider investigation of the influence of environmental forces and host–parasite interactions on susceptibility and resistance to infection in animal models. At the same time, through a close reading of Dubos’s scientific papers and correspondence, I show how he both drew on and distinguished his ecological ideas from those of other medical researchers such as Theobald Smith, Frank Macfarlane Burnet, and Frank Fenner. However, whereas Burnet and Fenner tended to view ecological interactions at the level of populations, Dubos focused on the interface of hosts and parasites in the physiological environments of individuals. The result was that although Dubos never fully engaged with the science of ecology, he was able to incorporate ecological ideas into his thought and practices, and relate them to his holistic views on health and the natural harmony of man and his environment. (shrink)

Upon entering clinical medicine in the 1940s, antibiotic therapy seemed to complete a transformation of hospitals that originated in the late nineteenth century. Former death sinks had become harbingers of therapeutic progress. Yet this triumph was short-lived. The arrival of pathologies caused by resistant bacteria, and of nosocomial infections whose spread was helped by antibiotic therapies, seemed to be intimately related to modern anti-infective therapy. The place where such problems culminated were hospitals, which increasingly appeared as dangerous environments where attempts (...) to combat infectious diseases had instead created hothouses of disease evolution. This paper will focus on one aspect of that history. It caused clinical medicine and hospital hygiene in particular to pay attention to a dimension of infectious disease it had previously paid little attention to thus far: The evolution of infectious disease—previously a matter of mostly theoretical interest—came to be useful in explaining many phenomena observed. This did not turn hospital hygienists into geneticists, though it did give them an awareness that the evolution of infectious disease in a broad sense was something that did matter to them. The paper advances its argument by looking at three phases: The growing awareness of the hospital as a dangerous environment in the 1950s, comprehensive attempts at improving antibiotic therapy and hospital hygiene that followed from the 1960s and lastly the framing of such challenges as risk factors from the 1970s. In conclusion, I will argue that hospital hygiene, being inspired in particular by epidemiology and risk factor analysis, discussed its own specific version of disease emergence and therefore contributed to the 1980s debates around such topics. Being loosely connected to more specialized studies, it consisted of a re-interpretation of infectious disease centred around the temporality of such phenomena as they were encountered in day-to-day dealings of clinical wards. (shrink)

In 1960, American parasitologist Don Eyles was unexpectedly infected with a malariaparasite isolated from a macaque. He and his supervisor, G. Robert Coatney of the National Institutes of Health, had started this series of experiments with the assumption that humans were not susceptible to “monkey malaria.” The revelation that a mosquito carrying a macaque parasite could infect a human raised a whole range of public health and biological questions. This paper follows Coatney’s team of parasitologists and their subjects: from the (...) human to the nonhuman; from the American laboratory to the forests of Malaysia; and between the domains of medical research and natural history. In the course of this research, Coatney and his colleagues inverted Koch’s postulate, by which animal subjects are used to identify and understand human parasites. In contrast, Coatney’s experimental protocol used human subjects to identify and understand monkey parasites. In so doing, the team repeatedly followed malaria parasites across the purported boundary separating monkeys and humans, a practical experience that created a sense of biological symmetry between these separate species. Ultimately, this led Coatney and his colleagues make evolutionary inferences, concluding “that monkeys and man are more closely related than some of us wish to admit.” In following monkeys, men, and malaria across biological, geographical, and disciplinary boundaries, this paper offers a new historical narrative, demonstrating that the pursuit of public health agendas can fuel the expansion of evolutionary knowledge. (shrink)

The interest of F. Macfarlane Burnet in host–parasite interactions grew through the 1920s and 1930s, culminating in his book, Biological Aspects of Infectious Disease, often regarded as the founding text of disease ecology. Our knowledge of the influences on Burnet’s ecological thinking is still incomplete. Burnet later attributed much of his conceptual development to his reading of British theoretical biology, especially the work of Julian Huxley and Charles Elton, and regretted he did not study Theobald Smith’s Parasitism and Disease until (...) after he had formulated his ideas. Scholars also have adduced Burnet’s fascination with natural history and the clinical and public health demands on his research effort, among other influences. I want to consider here additional contributions to Burnet’s ecological thinking, focusing on his intellectual milieu, placing his research in a settler society with exceptional expertise in environmental studies and pest management. In part, an ‘‘ecological turn’’ in Australian science in the 1930s, derived to a degree from British colonial scientific investments, shaped Burnet’s conceptual development. This raises the question of whether we might characterize, in postcolonial fashion, disease ecology, and other studies of parasitism, as successful settler colonial or dominion science. (shrink)

During the mid-twentieth century, Soviet scientists developed the “natural focus” theory–practice framework to explain outbreaks of diseases endemic to wild animals and transmitted to humans. Focusing on parasitologist-physician Evgeny N. Pavlovsky and other field scientists’ work in the Soviet borderlands, this article explores how the natural focus framework’s concepts and practices were entangled in political as well as material ecologies of knowledge and practice. We argue that the very definition of endemic plague incorporated both hands-on materialist experience and ideological concepts (...) that supported Soviet colonization. Theorizing and fighting plague assisted with the goals of controlling and improving landscapes and peoples in southern Russia and Central Asia. The history of the natural focus framework illustrates how Soviet disease ecology co-developed with the needs of local and central political powers in the Soviet borderlands. (shrink)

Upon entering clinical medicine in the 1940s, antibiotic therapy seemed to complete a transformation of hospitals that originated in the late nineteenth century. Former death sinks had become harbingers of therapeutic progress. Yet this triumph was short-lived. The arrival of pathologies caused by resistant bacteria, and of nosocomial infections whose spread was helped by antibiotic therapies, seemed to be intimately related to modern anti-infective therapy. The place where such problems culminated were hospitals, which increasingly appeared as dangerous environments where attempts (...) to combat infectious diseases had instead created hothouses of disease evolution. This paper will focus on one aspect of that history. It caused clinical medicine and hospital hygiene in particular to pay attention to a dimension of infectious disease it had previously paid little attention to thus far: The evolution of infectious disease—previously a matter of mostly theoretical interest—came to be useful in explaining many phenomena observed. This did not turn hospital hygienists into geneticists, though it did give them an awareness that the evolution of infectious disease in a broad sense was something that did matter to them. The paper advances its argument by looking at three phases: The growing awareness of the hospital as a dangerous environment in the 1950s, comprehensive attempts at improving antibiotic therapy and hospital hygiene that followed from the 1960s and lastly the framing of such challenges as risk factors from the 1970s. In conclusion, I will argue that hospital hygiene, being inspired in particular by epidemiology and risk factor analysis, discussed its own specific version of disease emergence and therefore contributed to the 1980s debates around such topics. Being loosely connected to more specialized studies, it consisted of a re-interpretation of infectious disease centred around the temporality of such phenomena as they were encountered in day-to-day dealings of clinical wards. (shrink)

Environmental historians are not sufficiently aware of the extent to which mid twentieth-century thinkers turned to medical geography—originally a nineteenth-century area of study—in order to think through ideas of ecology, environment, and historical reasoning. This article outlines how the French–Croatian Mirko D. Grmek, a major thinker of his generation in the history of medicine, used those ideas in his studies of historical epidemiology. During the 1960s, Grmek attempted to provide, in the context of the Annales School’s research program under the (...) leadership of Fernand Braudel, a new theoretical framework for a world history of disease. Its development was inspired by several sources, most notably the French–American Jacques M. May, who was then pioneering an opening up of medical geography and movement towards the concept of disease ecology. The cornerstone of Grmek’s “synthetic approach” to the field was the notion of “pathocenosis”. The diverse uses of this notion in the course of time—from his early agenda focused on a longue durée history of diseases in Western Antiquity to his last, relating to the new epidemiological threat of emerging infectious diseases, specifically HIV/aids—enables us firstly, to note how concepts of ecology sat uneasily alongside those of medical geography; secondly, to assess the reach and limits of his theoretical contribution to historical epidemiology; and thirdly, to understand better the uneven fortunes of his concept of pathocenosis at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries. (shrink)

The Swiss-born medical researcher Karl Friedrich Meyer is best known as a ‘microbe hunter’ who pioneered investigations into diseases at the intersection of animal and human health in California in the 1920s and 1930s. In particular, historians have singled out Meyer’s 1931 Ludwig Hektoen Lecture in which he described the animal kingdom as a ‘reservoir of disease’ as a forerunner of ‘one medicine’ approaches to emerging zoonoses. In so doing, however, historians risk overlooking Meyer’s other intellectual contributions. Developed in a (...) series of papers from the mid-1930s onwards, these were ordered around the concept of latent infections and sought to link microbial behavior to broader bio-ecological, environmental, and social factors that impact hostpathogen interactions. In this respect Meyer—like the comparative pathologist Theobald Smith and the immunologist Frank Macfarlane Burnet—can be seen as a pioneer of modern ideas of disease ecology. However, while Burnet’s and Smith’s contributions to this scientific field have been widely acknowledged, Meyer’s have been largely ignored. Drawing on Meyer’s published writings and private correspondence, this paper aims to correct that lacuna while contributing to a reorientation of the historiography of bacteriological epidemiology. In particular I trace Meyer’s intellectual exchanges with Smith, Burnet and the animal ecologist Charles Elton, over brucellosis, psittacosis and plague—exchanges that not only showed how environmental and ecological conditions could ‘tip the balance’ in favor of parasites but which transformed Meyer thinking about resistance to infection and disease. (shrink)