"Back to the Jungle": investigating rats, grass, scrub typhus, and plantations in Malaya, 1924 - 1974

• Main Author: Greatrex, Jack Edward
• Other Authors: School of Humanities
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2023
• Subjects: Humanities::History; Malaya; Disease Reservoirs
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/169961
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

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."