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Plague Image and Imagination from Medieval to Modern TimesPlague in India: Contagion, Quarantine, and the Transmission of Scientific Knowledge

Plague Image and Imagination from Medieval to Modern Times: Plague in India: Contagion,... [This chapter begins and ends with the now famous debate over contagionism and anticontagionism, sparked by Erwin Ackerknecht in 1948. It extends that debate into the early twentieth century with a zoonotic disease—plague—and focuses on social history instead of a history of ideas. It explores controversies over plague in India from its first incursions in Mumbai between 1896 and 1902, arguing that Europe’s historical past of the Black Death to London’s plague of 1665 formed the template to understand plague of the Third Pandemic as a highly contagious, person-to-person pandemic with quarantine as the cornerstone of its prevention. This distant historical past caused British bureaucrats to resist new scientific evidence on plague transmission then being discovered in the Indian subcontinent. On the other hand, indigenous populations from intellectuals, activists, and newspaper editors such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak to communities of urban workers and villagers rapidly changed their minds about plague transmission as seen in village and urban resolutions, mass demonstrations, and riots that condemned ruthless and useless quarantine measures that employed humiliating strip-inspections in public places and military searches for plague victims. This chapter hypothesises that the sharp rise and fall in plague protest and social violence at the turn of the nineteenth century rested on a mismatch between colonial plague policies and the evolving scientific knowledge of plague. The violence did not arise from Indians’ refusal to accept the latest science, their supposed fatalism, or ignorance as initially pictured in the international press and proclaimed by colonial officials. Rather, it hinged on these officials’ inability to dislodge historic images of plague as a highly contagious disease. Until 1902, intrusive and destructive quarantine measures continued to be imposed, despite findings of Western and Eastern science alike that plague in India was a disease spread principally by rats. These years coincided with the most frequent, largest, and most violent plague protests anywhere across the globe.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

Plague Image and Imagination from Medieval to Modern TimesPlague in India: Contagion, Quarantine, and the Transmission of Scientific Knowledge

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Publisher
Springer International Publishing
Copyright
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
ISBN
978-3-030-72303-3
Pages
191 –203
DOI
10.1007/978-3-030-72304-0_7
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[This chapter begins and ends with the now famous debate over contagionism and anticontagionism, sparked by Erwin Ackerknecht in 1948. It extends that debate into the early twentieth century with a zoonotic disease—plague—and focuses on social history instead of a history of ideas. It explores controversies over plague in India from its first incursions in Mumbai between 1896 and 1902, arguing that Europe’s historical past of the Black Death to London’s plague of 1665 formed the template to understand plague of the Third Pandemic as a highly contagious, person-to-person pandemic with quarantine as the cornerstone of its prevention. This distant historical past caused British bureaucrats to resist new scientific evidence on plague transmission then being discovered in the Indian subcontinent. On the other hand, indigenous populations from intellectuals, activists, and newspaper editors such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak to communities of urban workers and villagers rapidly changed their minds about plague transmission as seen in village and urban resolutions, mass demonstrations, and riots that condemned ruthless and useless quarantine measures that employed humiliating strip-inspections in public places and military searches for plague victims. This chapter hypothesises that the sharp rise and fall in plague protest and social violence at the turn of the nineteenth century rested on a mismatch between colonial plague policies and the evolving scientific knowledge of plague. The violence did not arise from Indians’ refusal to accept the latest science, their supposed fatalism, or ignorance as initially pictured in the international press and proclaimed by colonial officials. Rather, it hinged on these officials’ inability to dislodge historic images of plague as a highly contagious disease. Until 1902, intrusive and destructive quarantine measures continued to be imposed, despite findings of Western and Eastern science alike that plague in India was a disease spread principally by rats. These years coincided with the most frequent, largest, and most violent plague protests anywhere across the globe.]

Published: Jul 30, 2021

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