Plague in Bombay and Urban Ecology with Emily Webster
Episode 67 - June 25, 2021
Emily Webster (University of Chicago) joins Merle and Lee to discuss the significant plague outbreaks in Bombay during the Third Plague Pandemic of the turn of the 20th century and the place of environmental history in studying disease. After first surveying the Pandemic and its particular impact in Bombay, Emily discusses why the experience of Bombay was central to how plague was conceptualized across the British Empire and the world. She then explains the importance of urban ecology to understanding the severity of these outbreaks, along with how sanitary measures in Bombay exacerbated the spread of plague, rather than reducing its severity. At the end, Emily talks about her time earning a masters in public health as she was finishing her dissertation along with implications it revealed about the work of historians and scientists.
Further Reading
- Pandemic Perspectives: How Bubonic Plague Reshaped Mumbai's Streets. Goats & Soda, March 2021.
- Green, Monica. The Four Black Deaths. American Historical Review 125(2020): 1601-1631.
- Kermack William Ogilvy and McKendrick A. G.1927."A contribution to the mathematical theory of epidemics." Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A115700–721.
- Arnold David, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
- Christos Lynteris’s Project: Global War Against the Rat and Epistemic Emergence of Zoonosis Project.
- Johnathan A. Patz, Peter Daszak, Gary M. Tabor, A. Alonso Aguirre, Mary Pearl, Jon Epstein, Nathan D. Wolfe, A. Marm Kilpatrick, Johannes Foufopoulos, David Molyneux, David J. Bradley and the Members of the Working Group on Land Use Change and Disease Emergence, “Unhealthy Landscapes: Policy Recommendations on Land Use Change and Infectious Disease Emergence,” Environmental Health Perspectives 112 (2004): 1092.
Our Guest
Emily Webster,
University of Chicago
