History of Science and Technology Colloquium

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, anthrax appeared in British, European, and American factories that processed animal wool, hair and hides. The dramatic and often tragic public health consequences stimulated natural historians, physicians, veterinarians and other investigators to try to understand anthrax's life cycle and patterns of infection. The questions they asked have been echoed by historians since: What comprised "anthrax," and where did it come from? How had this very localized disease become a global phenomenon? My talk will trace industrial anthrax using a novel combination of methodologies, including sociocultural, ecological, and phylogenetic analysis. Within the past ten years or so, computer models that simulate pathogens' ecology and genetic evolution have generated data that can inform historical narratives about disease. In the case of industrial anthrax, models demonstrate the relatively recent importation of rare Asian and Middle Eastern strains of anthrax bacilli into British factory towns, thus supporting the hypothesis that anthrax hitched a ride around the world in infected animal products. This combination of methodologies promises to give historians interested in disease new power to answer a central question: how human society and culture has interacted with the dynamic ecology and genetic development of disease-causing organisms.