Editors:
- Explores historical perspectives on non-human hosts and vectors of disease, exploring how the framing of animals as ‘epidemic villains’ has shaped medicine and public health
- Chapters cover a range of human-animal interactions across a number of regions and diseases
- Shows how our understanding of animals as carriers and causes of disease result from entangled ethical, aesthetic, epistemological and political ideas
Part of the book series: Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern History (MBSMH)
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Table of contents (10 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
About this book
This book takes a historical and anthropological approach to understanding how non-human hosts and vectors of diseases are understood, at a time when emerging infectious diseases are one of the central concerns of global health. The volume critically examines the ways in which animals have come to be framed as ‘epidemic villains’ since the turn of the nineteenth century. Providing epistemological and social histories of non-human epidemic blame, as well as ethnographic perspectives on its recent manifestations, the essays explore this cornerstone of modern epidemiology and public health alongside its continuing importance in today’s world. Covering diverse regions, the book argues that framing animals as spreaders and reservoirs of infectious diseases – from plague to rabies to Ebola – is an integral aspect not only to scientific breakthroughs but also to the ideological and biopolitical apparatus of modern medicine. As the first book to consider the impact of the image of non-humandisease hosts and vectors on medicine and public health, it offers a major contribution to our understanding of human-animal interaction under the shadow of global epidemic threat.
Editors and Affiliations
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Department of Social Anthropology, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK
Christos Lynteris
About the editor
Christos Lynteris is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, UK. A medical anthropologist investigating epistemological, biopolitical, and visual aspects of infectious disease epidemics, he is the author of The Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) Ethnographic Plague (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and co-author with Lukas Engelmann of Sulphuric Utopias: The History of Maritime Sanitation (forthcoming, 2020).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Framing Animals as Epidemic Villains
Book Subtitle: Histories of Non-Human Disease Vectors
Editors: Christos Lynteris
Series Title: Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern History
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26795-7
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-26794-0Published: 23 October 2019
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-26797-1Published: 23 October 2020
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-26795-7Published: 11 October 2019
Series ISSN: 2947-9142
Series E-ISSN: 2947-9150
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XX, 247
Number of Illustrations: 15 b/w illustrations, 1 illustrations in colour
Topics: World History, Global and Transnational History, History of Medicine, History of Science, Medical Anthropology