"Back to the Jungle": investigating rats, grass, scrub typhus, and plantations in Malaya, 1924 - 1974
In this article, I examine epidemiological research into scrub typhus in British Malaya between 1924 and 1974. Interwar research, I show, explained the incidence of the disease through conjunctions of rats, mites, plantations, lalang grass, and "jungle." In the process, interwar researcher...
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Format: | Article |
Language: | English |
Published: |
2023
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Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/10356/169961 |
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Institution: | Nanyang Technological University |
Language: | English |
Summary: | In this article, I examine epidemiological research into scrub typhus in British Malaya between 1924 and 1974. Interwar research, I show, explained the incidence of the disease through conjunctions of rats, mites, plantations, lalang grass, and "jungle." In the process, interwar researchers bridged a novel scientific vocabulary centering on disease "reservoirs" with older suspicions of plantations enabling "pests," as well as with a later, explicitly ecological understanding of infectious disease. In exploring this history I thereby help to re-historicize the emergence of ecological notions of disease reservoirs, whilst also pushing at the limit-points of influential notions of "tropicality." |
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