The Invisible and Indeterminable Value of Ecology: From Malaria Control to Ecological Research in the American South (2015)
Way, Albert G. (Author)
Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 106, no. 2
Issue: 2
Pages: 310-336
This essay tells the story of the Emory University Field Station, a malaria research station in southwest Georgia that operated from 1939 to 1958. Using the tools of environmental history and the history of science, it examines the station's founding, its fieldwork, and its place within the broader history of malaria control, eradication, and research. A joint effort of Emory University, the U.S. Public Health Service, and the Communicable Disease Center (CDC), this station was closely aligned with a broader movement of ideas about tropical diseases across the globe, but it also offers a case study of how science in the field can veer from mainstream thinking and official policy. As the CDC and other disease-fighting organizations were moving toward a global strategy of malaria eradication through the use of DDT, the Emory Field Station developed a postsanitarian approach to malaria. Drawing on resistance among American conservationists to environmental transformation in the name of malaria control, the station's staff embraced the science and worldview of ecology in an effort to lighten public health's hand on the land and to link human health to the environment in innovative, if sometimes opaque, ways. This essay, then, argues that the Emory Field Station represents an early confluence of ecology with the biomedical sciences, something very similar to what is now the important discipline of disease ecology.
...MoreDescription On the Emory University Field Station, a malaria research station in southwest Georgia that operated from 1939 to 1958.
Similar Citations
Book
James C. McCann;
(2015)
Historical Ecology of Malaria in Ethiopia: Deposing the Spirits
(/isis/citation/CBB319837036/)
Article
Carter, Eric D.;
(2014)
Malaria Control in the Tennessee Valley Authority: Health, Ecology, and Metanarratives of Development
(/isis/citation/CBB001450338/)
Article
Webb, James L. A., Jr.;
(2011)
The First Large-Scale Use of Synthetic Insecticide for Malaria Control in Tropical Africa: Lessons from Liberia, 1945--1962
(/isis/citation/CBB001034285/)
Article
Yeo, I. S.;
(2015)
U.S. Military Administration's Malaria Control Activities (1945--1948)
(/isis/citation/CBB001422433/)
Article
Sallares, Robert;
(2005)
Pathocoenoses Ancient and Modern
(/isis/citation/CBB000670620/)
Thesis
Apel, Thomas;
(2012)
Feverish Bodies, Enlightened Minds: Yellow Fever and Common-Sense Natural Philosophy in the Early American Republic, 1793--1805
(/isis/citation/CBB001561011/)
Article
Andrew C. Baker;
(2019)
Risk, Doubt, and the Biological Control of Southern Waters
(/isis/citation/CBB702218146/)
Book
Robin Wolfe Scheffler;
(2019)
A Contagious Cause: The American Hunt for Cancer Viruses and the Rise of Molecular Medicine
(/isis/citation/CBB660913926/)
Book
Jones, David Shumway;
(2004)
Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600
(/isis/citation/CBB000640107/)
Thesis
Eric C. Westbrook;
(2021)
A Forest of Fire: Limning Materiality and Interpretation in the Morphology of the Longleaf Pine Forest as a Cultural Landscape
(/isis/citation/CBB322143622/)
Book
Leung, Angela Ki Che;
Furth, Charlotte;
(2010)
Health and Hygiene in Chinese East Asia: Policies and Publics in the Long Twentieth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB001252082/)
Book
Humphreys, Margaret;
(2001)
Malaria: Poverty, Race and Public Health in the United States
(/isis/citation/CBB000101070/)
Book
Bell, Andrew McIlwaine;
(2010)
Mosquito Soldiers: Malaria, Yellow Fever, and the Course of the American Civil War
(/isis/citation/CBB001231808/)
Article
MacDougall, Heather;
(2007)
Toronto's Health Department in Action: Influenza in 1918 and SARS in 2003
(/isis/citation/CBB000671330/)
Book
Sheila Zurbrigg;
(2019)
Malaria in Colonial South Asia: Uncoupling Disease and Destitution
(/isis/citation/CBB449823915/)
Article
Nussenzweig, Ruth Sonntag;
(2011)
Breakthroughs towards a Malaria Vaccine
(/isis/citation/CBB001420528/)
Article
Miller, Franklin G.;
(2015)
The Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Experiments: A Case Study in Retrospective Ethical Assessment
(/isis/citation/CBB001552678/)
Article
Slater, Leo B.;
(2004)
Malaria Chemotherapy and the “Kaleidoscopic” Organisation of Biomedical Research during World War II
(/isis/citation/CBB000470836/)
Book
Yip, Ka-che;
(2009)
Disease, Colonialism, and the State: Malaria in Modern East Asian History
(/isis/citation/CBB001210662/)
Book
Verhave, J. P.;
(2011)
The Moses of Malaria: Nicolaas H. Swellengrebel (1885--1970) Abroad and at Home
(/isis/citation/CBB001510194/)
Be the first to comment!