Posing the question in 1998 ‘where did the modern, ecological understanding of infectious disease come from?’, J. Andrew Mendelsohn argued that it was hard to see how ‘the fledgling ideas and methods of upstart population ecology, or the premises of parasitology could have conquered bacteriology’. Instead he suggested it was the challenge of frightening disease outbreaks after World War I, and the 1918-1920 influenza pandemic in particular, that compelled bacteriological epidemiology to become more “complex”.
Drawing on recent scholarship on the intellectual origins of modern ideas of disease ecology, this two day workshop at QMUL on 7-9 July 2016, will bring together prominent scholars in the medical humanities and allied sciences to present a series of papers re-interrogating Mendelsohn’s question.
Please see full details: Call for papers- Making Microbes Complex.pdf [PDF 357KB]