Zoonotic Collecting: Perspectives from the Humanities, Social Sciences and Life Sciences

Collections have played an important role in scientific understandings of diseases and their control in past and present, from anatomical collections assembled to study the natural history and taxonomies of human diseases, to zoological collections of disease reservoirs, to collections of microorganisms for pandemic preparedness, to teaching collections for the education of doctors, veterinarians, and lay publics. Extracting specimens, taxidermizing these, creating models and displaying them have been particularly important to the medical sciences. Natural history museums, for example, have been instrumental in the science of disease ecology and the control of zoonotic diseases. In the past, they have served as key sites for the identification and cataloguing of animals deemed to be vectors and reservoirs of diseases, and for charting their ecological relations with the environment. In the present, microbes are often collected and preserved in laboratories for the study of infectious diseases and the improvement of human, animal, and plant health, or, more sinisterly, the development of bioweapons.

Simultaneously, outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics have played a critical, if underappreciated, role in the history of collecting. Outbreaks of zoonotic diseases provided zoologists with unprecedented funding and resources to collect rodents, mosquitoes, ticks, fleas, and microorganisms. Widespread campaigns against disease vectors likewise mobilized civilians to kill and send in thousands of verminous animals for inspection at medical institutions and museums, in many cases furnishing institutions with large collections. In other cases, doctors and epidemiologists used the resources provided by public health campaigns to make vast ethnographic collections of human culture in the course of their duties. Finally, specimen collecting itself has, at times, provoked fears that the act of capturing and transporting specimens might result in outbreaks of zoonotic disease, sparking new biosecurity and biopolitical measures.

Bringing together perspectives from the history and anthropology of medicine, museum studies, animal studies, ecology, and other disciplines, this conference seeks to understand the relationships between collecting (broadly construed) and zoonosis. In so doing, it aims to chart how collecting has been linked with medical and health questions; the material, epistemological, and political lives of medical collections; and how collecting in times of outbreaks, epidemics, and even pandemics has shaped the lives of humans, plants, microbes, animals, and insects.

Convenors:

Matheus Alves Duarte da Silva and Jules Skotnes-Brown

Monday 24 June 2024
11:00-11:30	Welcome and Coffee United College Seminar Room 50 (St Salvator’s Quadrangle) – speakers, discussants and chairs only
11:00	Guided Tour of the Bell Pettigrew Museum (The Bute Building, Queens Terrace) speakers, discussants and chairs only
12:15	Lunch, Social Anthropology Coffee Room United College – UCO: 45 speakers, discussants and chairs only
14:00-15:45	Panel 1: Collecting and Circulating United College: School II Chair: Jules Skotnes-Brown (University of St Andrews) Circulating South American Fauna: José Maria de la Barrera’s Plague Studies Through the Lens of a Flea Collection in England (1938-1960s) | Matheus Alves Duarte da Silva (University of St Andrews) “Collections of Parasites and Predators”: Living Collections and the Commonwealth Institute of Biological Control | Lauren Killingsworth (Yale University) Mapping Viral Passages: Experimental Animals, Kinship, and Pathology at the Imperial Institut Pasteur | Kathleen Pierce (Smith College, Massachusetts)
15:45-16:00	Coffee Break, Social Anthropology Coffee Room United College – UCO: 45
16:00-17:45	Keynote lecture – United College: School II Frédéric Keck (CNRS-Collège de France-EHESS) From Cynegetic Power to Cryopolitics: Anthropological Hypotheses on the Biopolitics of Virus Hunters Chair: Christos Lynteris (University of St Andrews) Discussant: Dominik Hünniger (German Port Museum)
19:00	Dinner The Bothy, Church Square, St Andrews

Tuesday 25 June 2024
09:00-10:45	Panel 2: Collecting Between the Local and the Global United College: School II Chair: Aileen Fyfe (University of St Andrews) Contagious Diseases and Zoonotic Collecting in the Bacteriological Laboratories in British Colonial Madras, 1897-1937 | Santhosh Abraham (IIT Madras, Chennai) & Teresa Joshy (Shiv Nadar University, Delhi) Blood, Tick, and Bird Collection and the Figuring of Malaysia as a Siberian-Australian Borderland | Jack Greatrex (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) Taxonomic Evaders: The “Chaos of the Indian Muridae” on the Eve of Zoonosis | Oliver French (University of St Andrews)
10:45-11:00	Coffee Break, Social Anthropology Coffee Room United College – UCO:45
11:00-12:45	Panel 3: Collecting Pathogens – United College: School II Chair: Matheus Alves Duarte da Silva (University of St Andrews) The Białowieża Bison and its Helminths in the Collections of St Petersburg Zoological Institute | Anastasia Fedotova (Institute for the History of Science and Technology, St Petersburg) Museums, Microbes, and the Machine: AI-Driven Pathogen Surveillance in Natural History Collections | Maya Juman (University of Cambridge) Zoonotic Prospecting: Looking for Ebola & Monkeypox in Northwestern DRC | Jules Villa (Institut Pasteur, Paris)
12:45-14:00	Lunch Break , Social Anthropology Coffee Room United College – UCO:45
14:00-15:45	Panel 4: Collecting Fragments United College: School II Chair: Conall Treen (University of St Andrews) Collection for Extermination: Rat Tails, Plague Narratives, and Farmer Mobilization in Cold War Taiwan, 1957-1972 | Leo Chu (University of Cambridge) ‘Living Factories’ – Diphtheria and Collecting Antitoxins from Horses | Suzanne Z. Gottschang (Smith College, Massachusetts) Plague Collecting: Guy Chester Shortridge and the Amathole Museum’s Mammal Collections, 1920s | Jules Skotnes-Brown (University of St Andrews)
15:45-16:00	Coffee Break, Social Anthropology Coffee Room United College – UCO:45
16:00-17:00	Final Discussion – United College: School II

Santhosh Abraham | IIT Madras, Chennai

Teresa Joshy | Shiv Nadar University, Delhi (Virtual Presentation)

Contagious Diseases and Zoonotic Collecting in the Bacteriological Laboratories in British Colonial Madras, 1897-1937

‘Specimens of natural and experimental lesions, as well as cultures of the organism and smears, were exhibited to the members of the Medical and Veterinary Research section of the Sixteenth session of Indian Science Congress held in January’. (Report, Civil Veterinary Department, Government of Madras, 1929)
In 1929, while referring to the British colonial veterinary initiatives to contain contagious cattle diseases in the Madras Presidency, T.J. Hurley, the Acting Principal of Madras Veterinary College mentioned the above statement in the Annual Veterinary Administration report. This statement brings the importance of veterinary laboratory development and zoonotic collecting in the Madras Presidency of British colonial South India. Earlier, in 1897, the Civil Administrative Report of British India reported that Madras was the only Presidency where there were many cases of anthrax. Following the report, the Madras Veterinary College initiated touring Veterinary Assistants and established bacteriological laboratories to collect specimens from affected animals for microscopical examination. This paper examines the major zoonotic diseases and colonial institutional histories of zoonotic collecting in Madras presidency. Locating various colonial veterinary archives between 1897 to 1937, this paper will examine the ‘scientific’, ‘comparative’ and ‘transnational’ contexts of zoonotic collecting in the laboratories attached to Madras Veterinary College in Madras Presidency.

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Leo Chu | University of Cambridge

Collection for Extermination: Rat Tails, Plague Narratives, and Farmer Mobilization in Cold War Taiwan, 1957-1972

This paper traces the materiality of rat tails in the rodent extermination campaign in Taiwan. Even though most rodent-borne diseases had disappeared from the island by the 1950s, the government continued to invoke the threats of plague to mobilize the rural population in rat baiting and offered cash reward for rat tails. Amid Cold War tensions with mainland China, the government considered food production and public health vital for national security. The collection of rat tails was turned into a national concern and a spectacle: not only were the figures used to compute the number of rats eliminated, but rat tails in plastic bags were exhibited in villages before being burned publicly. However, with rapid urbanization and industrialization, people began to see collection of rat tails as a health threat itself by the 1960s. In place of mass mobilization, the government scaled up its surveillance network for rodent density with collections made by medical and agricultural officers. Using archival records, extension magazines, and education films as the primary source, this paper shows how the destruction of collection can become part of knowledge production processes, and how physical traces of animal can be eliminated in changing political and epistemic circumstances.

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Matheus Alves Duarte Da Silva | University of St Andrews

Circulating South American Fauna: José Maria de la Barrera’s Plague Studies Through the Lens of a Flea Collection in England (1938-1960s)

For more than twenty years, the Argentinian doctor José Maria de la Barrera corresponded on a regular basis with Karl Jordan and F. G. A. M. Smit, two flea experts working at the annex of the British Natural History Museum (BNHM), in Tring. The letters were usually accompanied by hundreds of fleas and other ectoparasites. These insects had been collected by de la Barrera during missions to study plague among wild rodents in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela. In exchange for the fleas sent for free, de la Barrera asked for their taxonomic names. The circulation of these animals between South America and Europe fulfilled two distinct but complementary goals. For the experts in England, de la Barrera’s despatches helped to enlarge the flea collection of the BNHM with hitherto unknown species coming from areas rarely opened to foreign experts, such as the Brazilian “sertão” or the Bolivian jungle. For de la Barrera, Jordan and Smit provided a taxonomic expertise that he mobilized to strengthen his conclusions vis-à-vis the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO), which sponsored most of his missions. Therefore, by focusing on these letters and the fleas, this presentation will argue that this specific collection of South American insect fauna in England is an important source of the production of knowledge on plague ecology in South America and of scientific collaborations between the “field” and the “museum”.

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Anastasia Fedotova | Institute for the History of Science and Technology, St Petersburg (Virtual Presentation)

The Białowieża Bison and its Helminths in the Collections of St Petersburg Zoological Institute

For the last few decades, helminths are considered to be an important factor affecting the high mortality rate of the European bison – the iconic species for nature protection. Even though parasitology of the wild ungulates is a relatively young field of research there were some interesting exceptions. One of these exceptions dates back to 1906-08, when a group of naturalists from Moscow and St. Petersburg organized an expedition to study the Białowieża bison as an endangered species, a remnant of the tertiary megafauna. The collections of the expedition were huge – skeletons and skins of more than a hundred bison, and even more specimens of other taxa. Most are kept at the Zoological Institute in St. Petersburg but part of them was considered lost. Last autumn several boxes with jars labelled “Białowieża Forest, 1906-08” were found in some dark corner of the Zoological Institute. The jars contain pieces of bison organs affected by helminths and helminths extracted from various bison organs. In my presentation, I will talk about this expedition and set out to study the processes of degeneration of the species which was (as naturalists believed at that time) doomed to inevitable extinction. Instead, more prosaic problems were discovered – helminths, diseases, and malnutrition without any sign of degeneration.

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Oliver French | University of St Andrews

Taxonomic Evaders: The “Chaos of the Indian Muridae” on the Eve of Zoonosis

In 1868, the eminent British naturalist, William Blanford, submitted what would be one of his final papers to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, that aimed to “clear up “the apparent “chaos of the Indian Muridae”. Drawing on assorted references scattered throughout naturalist literature, Blanford framed the confusion as a problem of nomenclature. Whilst this contention attracted criticism from authors both in India and Britain, it mobolised the first concerted efforts to assemble and codify the diversity of rat species in India. This paper explores the problematisation of rat taxonomy in Indian naturalist writings prior to the third plague pandemic. It follows how colonial collecting cultures, preservation practices and the materialities of classificatory work coalesced to produce this ‘lacuna’. It asks how pervasive framings of rats as elusive ‘vermin’ productively intersected with these factors to configure rats as simultaneously omni-present pests yet largely obscure. At the turn of the 20th century, as rats were increasingly integrated in diverse aetiologies of plague, this apparent dearth of knowledge about their life histories, behaviours and categorisation formed a salient topic of concern and anxiety for colonial officers. The paper argues that rather than simply obstructing the work of plague science, the supposed ‘ignorance’ about these creatures was an important space for imagining the diverse ways in which rats could relate to these diseases.

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Suzanne Z. Gottschang | Smith College, Massachusetts

‘Living Factories’ – Diphtheria and Collecting Antitoxins from Horses

Once a major cause of illness and death in children, access to vaccinations and antitoxin treatments ensures that diphtheria is a relatively rare occurrence in the twenty first century. The only cure for diphtheria was discovered in 1888 by French physician-researchers Roux and Yersin. They found that diphtheria antitoxin derived from the blood serum of an animal previously exposed to the diphtheria bacteria cured people. In their search for ways to produce large quantities of the antitoxin, they found the horse to be an ideal source. Horses could be exposed to diphtheria with minimal effects, produce an effective antitoxin for humans in their blood, and provide larger volumes of blood than other domesticated animals. Horse herds for diphtheria antitoxin collection were quickly established by some major cities in the US in the early 1900s to ensure adequate supplies during outbreaks. Yet, today, horses remain the only source of diphtheria antitoxin. As recently as 1987, New York City retired police horses served as sources for commercial production of the antitoxin. This paper examines how the collection of diphtheria antitoxin from horses extends nineteenth-century notions of horses as technology as they continue to serve as ‘living serum factories’ in the twenty-first century. 

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Jack Greatrex | Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (Virtual Presentation)

Blood, Tick, and Bird Collection and the Figuring of Malaysia as a Siberian-Australian Borderland

When disease ecologist Jack Ralph Audy arrived in Malaya in 1947, his research was hindered: reference collections for Malaya’s fauna were incomplete. As a first step in elucidating diseases such as scrub typhus, Japanese encephalitis, and leptospirosis Audy and his colleagues built a collection of the Malayan fauna. By 1953, they had collected and investigated some 20,000 animals and parasites. Across the next three decades, Audy developed a theory of scrub typhus rooting the disease in altered landscapes connecting soil, grasses, rats, ticks, and people. Audy’s theories focused on the “localization” of disease in specific spaces. But his collections were drawing in an enormous network. His research would balloon into a “dragnet” study to collect and analyse the arboviruses of the Malaysian rainforest, funded by the U. S. military. They would feed into the Migratory Animal Pathological Survey of H. Elliott McClure, which, if centred on Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Bangkok (Keck, 2020: 105) was also rooted in postwar Malayan ecology. They extended outwards to parallel studies of the ticks of Malaya and the Belgian Congo. This paper explores this extensive collection, which simultaneously became hyper-focused on parasites of specific landscapes, sites, and animal bodies, and also global in scale, linking outward to Japan, Australia, the Congo, and Siberia.

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Maya Juman | University of Cambridge

Museums, Microbes, and the Machine: AI-driven Pathogen Surveillance in Natural History Collections

Museum collections remain largely untapped resources for cheap, efficient, and proactive zoonotic reservoir identification. Historical specimens also provide opportunities to examine disease prevalence and spillover risk across both space and time. However, the vastness of collections poses a challenge: which specimens should be screened for a particular pathogen? This paper is a work-in-progress case study of model-guided viral discovery in museum collections, focusing on paramyxoviruses in fruit bats. I employ a trait-based machine learning algorithm to predict which unsampled species are likely “novel” paramyxovirus hosts. Preliminary models have high predictive capacity (92%), suggesting that small, geographically widespread bats are suitable hosts. Based on this trait profile, ten species (n = ~600 specimens) have been selected for tissue screening at three museums. This targeted testing could identify unknown hosts and clarify the extent of their spatial overlap with humans. More broadly, I present a framework for harnessing modern methods to unlock pathogen data hidden in old specimens. I also consider the risks associated with using artificial intelligence to tackle this problem—which perspectives are lost when predictive work is outsourced to an algorithm? What biases are introduced, both by AI and the collections themselves? Can we incorporate traditional knowledge into computational surveillance studies?

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Frédéric Keck | CNRS-Collège de France-EHESS

From Cynegetic Power to Cryopolitics : Anthropological Hypotheses on the Biopolitics of Virus Hunters

For the last fifty years, following the paradigms of ecology of infectious diseases and “One Health”, virologists have collected samples from non-human animals to anticipate spillover events causing pandemics among humans. This daily work of monitoring, moving between farms, markets, borders and laboratories, has introduced animals in human communities as sentinels perceiving early warning signals, by contrast with spectacular killings of suspicious animals which redraw the boundaries between humans and animals. This talk will ask what kind of biopolitics emerges from such a surveillance of animals for pandemic preparedness. Discussing authors such as Chamayou, Mbembe, Descola, Povinelli, Landecker and Caduff, it will test the hypothesis that modernity is a shift not only from sovereign power to biopolitics, but also from cynegetic power to cryopolitics. If the subject of cryopolitics is not populations but collection, what kind of emancipation can be conceived for this new form of biopolitics?

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Lauren Killingsworth | Yale University

“Collections of Parasites and Predators”: Living Collections and the Commonwealth Institute of Biological Control

This paper examines the material history of biological control in the twentieth century through the records of the Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences International (CABI) and its predecessors: the Commonwealth Institute for Biological Control (CIBC), the Imperial Parasite Service, and the Entomological Research Committee of Tropical Africa. These organizations have a deep colonial history spanning over 100 years, in which they have shipped millions of living organisms across the globe in an attempt to control plant and animal diseases to make the tropics hospitable for colonization. Biological control gained traction in the twentieth century as a “naturalistic” alternative to chemical methods of pest control. The CIBC organized reconnaissance missions to collect live fungi and insect species that might be “helpful to man” in “combatting pests and disease.” How can we trace this collection and exchange of millions of organisms in both the historical archive and living environment? I focus on efforts to procure “natural enemies” of the mosquito and the tsetse fly. The CIBC experimented with organisms in the laboratory and in the wild, releasing nematode parasites in the Pacific islands to destroy mosquitoes, and releasing sterilized tsetse flies in Tanganyika to control trypanosomiasis. This paper asks how we might recover the histories of ephemeral living collections, with an eye towards technologies of collecting, shipping, and propagation.

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Kathleen Pierce | Smith College, Massachusetts

Mapping Viral Passages: Experimental Animals, Kinship, and Pathology at the Imperial Institut Pasteur

In 1911, Institut Pasteur-Tunis director Charles Nicolle published recent experimental work on typhus that relied heavily on a technique known as serial passage. Within serial passage, experimenters extracted disease matter from one individual, which they subsequently used to inoculate another. This process could be repeated across innumerable individuals, often across species. Serial passage could model and explicate contagion, yet it also told crucial stories about the relationships among different kinds of animals. One of Nicolle’s passages joined more than 54 human and animal bodies, which he mapped with a diagram resembling a family tree. This paper interrogates the methodology of serial passage as deployed by Institut Pasteur researchers to illuminate material and epistemological relationships among collecting, imperialism, and medical knowledge production. This technique, after all, fundamentally depended on the acquisition of significant numbers of animals, especially apes and monkeys. Researchers sourced many simians from colonial geographies, relying on indigenous animal furnishers; others arrived at the laboratory from the zoo or the natural history museum. What’s more, shifting ethnographic and zoological hierarchies, and relationships among projects of racialization and primate speciation, underpinned researchers’ thinking about experimental bodies. This paper locates serial passage—a laboratory induced zoonosis—as a technique intimately embedded within imperial expansion, bound up with both medical and political efforts to model and map cross-species proximity and distance, kinship and difference.

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Jules Skotnes-Brown | University of St Andrews

Plague Collecting: Guy Chester Shortridge and the Amathole Museum’s Mammal Collections, 1920s

This paper examines the unlikely relationship between a global pandemic of bubonic plague and the development of the Amathole Museum as an international centre for the study of southwest African fauna. The Amathole Museum is a South African natural history museum in the Eastern Cape, which contains one of the largest mammal collections in the southern hemisphere. It owes much of its collections to a series of six expeditions into Namibia, Angola, and Botswana conducted by director Guy Chester Shortridge in the 1920s. During these expeditions, Shortridge established himself as an expert on southwest African fauna and forged transnational networks with Indigenous Ovambo, San, Khoekhoe, and Herero people, as well as zoologists at the British Museum. However, these expeditions were not simply driven by a desire to produce knowledge about the fauna of this region. Shortridge’s expeditions took place during a period of unprecedented panic about plague becoming endemic in the southern African countryside and were partially funded as rodent surveys to determine the risks of plague spreading to the Namibian veld. In this paper, I explore how Shortridge’s “plague collecting” led to the development of the Amathole Museum’s collections, and the systematisation of Namibian, Angolan, and Botswanan fauna. I argue firstly that fears and fantasies about zoonotic diseases were utilised by naturalists to source funding for their expeditions. Secondly, I show how the Amathole Museum, a relatively unremarkable museum became a global centre for the collection, categorisation, and study of African mammals. Finally, I show how Shortridge’s fieldnotes are an invaluable resource for integrating Indigenous southern African people into the global history of natural history.

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Jules Villa | Institut Pasteur, Paris

Zoonotic Prospecting: Looking for Ebola & Monkeypox in Northwestern DRC

This paper proposes the concept of zoonotic prospecting to describe how a specific place, in this case, the Equateur province in northwestern DRC, was turned into a valuable site for pathogen investigation in the early 1980s. After two successive Ebola outbreaks in 1976 and 1977 and multiple monkeypox human cases since 1970, the region was considered worth exploring by an international team of scientists, sponsored by the WHO and the CDC. After the failure of a first expedition in 1979 to uncover clues about these pathogenic dynamics that had adopted a “catch all, analyze all” strategy, a longer-lasting program was set up that adopted a more ecologically-sound approach between 1981 and 1985. It was during this sampling campaign that a squirrel (Funisciurus anerythrus) with skin eruptions was captured and was shown to harbour living monkeypox virus. Contrary to what could have been anticipated, this discovery did not lead to more field inquiries in the region to better understand the ecosystem in which the virus thrived. The program was officially shut down in 1986 and the land of promise and great scientific discoveries turned into a distant memory.