Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH, The University of Cambridge)

Wellcome Collection

Image

The photograph is contained in an album which bears the title: "Studies in plague by pr. Dr Camillo Terni to be presented to the Committee of the Cragg's Research prize". The second page of the album bears the words: "carts and diagrams", and the fourth: "Photographies to be added to Dr. Terni's Studies in Plague". The album is made from sheets of lined paper, string-bound. The dimension of each page is 32.5 x 22 cm

The third pandemic of plague (in its bubonic and pneumonic clinical forms) struck the globe between 1894 and 1959. As Yersinia pestis spread from country to country and from continent to continent, it left behind it not only a trail of death and devastation, but also a vast visual archive. It was the first time that plague would reach and establish itself in all inhabited continents. But it was also the first time that any epidemic would be photographed. As plague spread from harbour to harbour, and amongst cities, towns and villages, so did photographs of the pandemic through reproductions in the daily and illustrated press. Rather than forming a homogeneous or linear visual narrative, these photographic documents provided diverse perspectives on the pandemic, which, more often than not, were not simply different from region to region, but in fact conflicting within any single locus of infection. Moreover this photographic production came to establish a new field of vision, what we may call “epidemic photography” which continues to inform the way in which we see, depict and imagine epidemics and their social, economic, and political impact in the age of Global Health.

Reaching the Brazilian port of Santos by November 1899, plague entered Rio de Janeiro by January 1900. Faced with opposition by ship-owners, epidemic control was eventually established by a combination of disinfection, quarantine and rodent control measures under the direction of Oswaldo Cruz. Other areas of Brazil would continue to be affected by plague in the following years, with the disease establishing itself in wild rodents in rural areas by the 1930s. Brazil’s leading epidemiological institution, Fundação Oswaldo Cruz (Fiocruz), played a key role in the study of sylvatic plague and its containment.

Brazil, Rio de Janeiro

1904