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

Wellcome Collection

Image

Rat-catchers and rat-searchers suitably dressed and equipped for searching ships and warehouses for evidences of live rats and rats dead from plague infection. The following are shown: overalls, leggings, gloves, lamps (electric), forceps, bags for rats, rat-traps. Liverpool Port Sanitary Authority.

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.

With the exception of Suffolk where plague endured between 1906 and 1918, during the third pandemic the UK experienced only isolated outbreaks (e.g. Glasgow 1900). Nonetheless plague prevention policies were applied to UK ports, with fumigation of boats, rat-proofing and rat eradication used in vessels, wharves and harbours.

United Kingdom, Liverpool

1900