Blaming the rat? Accounting for plague in colonial Indian medicine
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Authors
Evans, Nicholas
Publication Date
2018-06-25Journal Title
Medicine Anthropology Theory
ISSN
2405-691X
Publisher
Universiteit van Amsterdam
Volume
5
Issue
3
Language
English
Type
Article
This Version
VoR
Metadata
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Evans, N. (2018). Blaming the rat? Accounting for plague in colonial Indian medicine. Medicine Anthropology Theory, 5 (3) https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.5.3.371
Abstract
The medical-humanities literature on zoonosis has overwhelmingly stressed the manner in which cross-species diseases challenge anthropocentric accounts of society. This article explores the colonial discovery, between 1896 and 1910, that bubonic plague (the disease responsible for the medieval Black Death) was zoonotic. This scientific work involved a massive, almost industrialised, examination of rat corpses so as to produce an animal linkage in plague. I show that this production of animal agency paradoxically served to hasten an ongoing process whereby human behaviour was identified as the moral locus of disease. The scientific production of zoonosis thus enabled another form of reasoning and judging to come to the fore, which ultimately had the effect of strengthening and heightening existing racial stereotypes and hierarchies. Far from challenging an anthropocentric worldview, this zoonosis helped to re-establish one.
Sponsorship
This research was funded by a European Research Council Starting Grant (under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme/ERC grant agreement no. 336564).
Identifiers
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.5.3.371
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/264412
Rights
Licence:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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