How Plague Became Globally Visible – Mapping as Method in Modern Western Medicine

The earliest global plague maps published in the 1880s (French) and 1890s (German) focused on circumscribing specific regions with corresponding risk of plague not on tracking its spread across these regions. After the 1894 plague outbreak in Hong Kong, however, medical researchers started to reconceptualise plague from “plague foyers” bounded by geographic factors to being transmittable across the globe via trains and ships. New sites of surveillance thus emerged wherever close contact among humans, rats, and fleas could be sustained. From 1894 on, an increasingly wider range of visual materials also made plague newly visible in cities across the globe. This new visualization of the Third Plague Pandemic contributed to worldwide maps of plague from about 1900 on. No longer depicted as geographically circumscribed foyers distributed across the globe, plague became visualized as a globally spread pandemic.

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PANEL DISCUSSION

How Plague became Globally Visible – Mapping as Method in Modern Western Medicine

• Ines Eben von Racknitz, FU Berlin
• Lukas Engelmann, University of Edinburgh
• Christos Lynteris, University of St. Andrews

Discussant:

• Marta Hanson, Academy of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore; Affiliate of MPIWG

THE LECTURE SERIES

Maps and Mapping in Global History and Culture II