Jules Skotnes-Brown, postdoctoral research fellow, University of St Andrews
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Matheus Alves Duarte da Silva, postdoctoral research fellow, University of St Andrews.
Title : "Zoonotic Collecting” in Southern Africa and South America"
Abtract : Collections have played an important role in scientific understandings of diseases and their control in past and present, from anatomical collections assembled to study the natural history and taxonomies of human diseases, to zoological collections of disease reservoirs, to collections of microorganisms for pandemic preparedness, to teaching collections for the education of doctors, veterinarians, and lay publics. Extracting specimens, taxidermizing these, creating models and displaying them have been particularly important to the medical sciences. Simultaneously, outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics have played a critical, if underappreciated, role in the history of collecting. Outbreaks of zoonotic diseases provided zoologists with unprecedented funding and resources to collect rodents, mosquitoes, ticks, fleas, and microorganisms. Finally, specimen collecting itself has, at times, provoked fears that the act of capturing and transporting specimens might result in outbreaks of zoonotic disease, sparking new biosecurity and biopolitical measures.
This session brings together two short papers on the history of “zoonotic collecting”. Jules Skotnes-Brown shows how a series of natural history collecting expeditions into Namibia for the British and Amathole Museums (1923-1929) served epidemiological and public health purposes through surveying potential reservoirs of plague in the region, and their ecological relations with humans. Matheus Duarte shows how studies on plague led by the Argentinian expert José Maria de la Barrera in several countries of South America in the 1950s constructed new ideas about plague ecology in the continent and contributed to the circulation of the local fauna of rodents and insects in and beyond South America.
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** A set of suggested readings can be found at the bottom of this announcement **
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Jules Skotnes-Brown is a historian of science, animals and the environment, and a postdoctoral research fellow at University of St Andrews. His book, Segregated Species: Pests, Knowledge, and Boundaries in South Africa, 1910-1948 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024) is a more-than-human history of pests, science, and segregation. He is currently working on a history of rats, plague, and economic infrastructure, 1890s-1950s.
Matheus Alves Duarte da Silva, is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of St Andrews in the United Kingdom. His research focuses on the global history of microbiology, tropical medicine, and disease ecology. He co-edited the books Rural Disease Knowledge and Beyond Science and Empire.
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