Suchergebnisse

Diagrams are found at the heart of the modern history of epidemiology. Epidemiologists used spatial diagrams to visualize concepts of epidemics as arrangements of biological, environmental, historical, as well as social factors and to analyze epidemics as configurations. Often, they provided a representation of the networks of relationships implied by epidemics, rather than to offer conclusions about origin and causation. This article will look at two spatial diagrams of plague across a period in which an epidemiological way of reasoning stood in stark contrast to arguments provided about plague in the rising field of bacteriology and experimental medicine. This historical genealogy of epidemiologists working with diagrams challenges perceptions of epidemic diagrams as mere arguments of causality to emphasize diagrammatic notions of uncertainty, crisis, and invisibility.

Summary
The article explores and expands the historiography of medical photography. First, it revisits historical scholarship on medical photography to demonstrate the absence of a consensus as to what counts as medical photography and what does not. Secondly, the article illustrates the shortcomings of current analytical perspectives with two examples. The first picture was taken by the board of health in Honolulu in 1900 to visualise bubonic plague but resists recognition as a medical representation. The second, a 1986 picture of a person with AIDS, has been perceived as a medicalised photograph contrary to the artist's intention. Both pictures, rather than delivering diagnostic inferences sustained notions of uncertainty and unusualness. With these examples, I outline the often overlooked significance of picturing uncertainty in the historiography of medical photography. Finally, I ask if these visualisations might be better addressed as elements of experimental systems rather than as representations of disease.

Abstract
The arrival of bubonic plague in San Francisco in 1900 has become a pivotal case study in the history of American public health. The presence of plague remained contested for months as the evidence provided by the federal bacteriologist Joseph Kinyoun of the Marine Hospital Service was rejected, his laboratory methods disputed and his person ridiculed. Before the disease diagnosis became widely accepted, Kinyoun had been subjected to public caricature; his expensive and disruptive pragmatics for containing the epidemic were ridiculed as a plague of 'Kinyounism'. Not only does this history offer insight into the difficult and contradictory ways in which bacteriology became an established science, it also provides an early twentieth-century example of 'politicised science'. This paper revisits the controversy around Kinyoun and his bacteriological practice through the lens of caricature to sharpen the historical understanding of the shifting and shifty relationships between science, medicine, public health and politics.

The 1899/1900 arrival of bubonic plague in Argentina had thrown the model status of Buenos Aires as a hygienic city into crisis. Where the idea of foreign threats and imported epidemics had dominated the thinking of Argentina's sanitarians at that time, plague renewed concerns about hidden threats within the fabric of the capital's dense environment; concerns that led to new sanitary measures and unprecedented rat-campaigns supported by the large-scale application of sulphur dioxide. The article tells the story of early twentieth-century urban sanitation in Buenos Aires through the lens of a new industrial disinfection apparatus. The Aparato Marot, also known as Sulfurozador was acquired and integrated in the capital's sanitary administration by the epidemiologist José Penna in 1906 to materialise two key lessons learned from plague. First, the machine was supposed to translate the successful disinfection practices of global maritime sanitation into urban epidemic control in Argentina. Second, the machine's design enabled public health authorities to reinvigorate a traditional hygienic concern for the entirety of the city's terrain. While the Sulfurozador offered effective destruction of rats, it promised also a comprehensive – and utopian – disinfection of the whole city, freeing it from all imaginable pathogens, insects as well as rodents. In 1910, the successful introduction of the Sulfurozador encouraged Argentina's medico-political elite to introduce a new principle of 'general prophylaxis'. This article places the apparatus as a technological modernisation of traditional sanitary practices in the bacteriological age, which preserved the urban environment – 'el terreno' – as a principal site of intervention. Thus, the Sulfurozador allowed the 'higienistas' to sustain a long-standing utopian vision of all-encompassing social, bodily and political hygiene into the twentieth century.

Tuberculosis and HIV co-infection came to figure as one of the major global health problems at the beginning of the twenty-first century, with multiple attempts to tackle this intricate issue on epidemiological, clinical, and public health levels. In this article, we propose thinking beyond the practical problems caused by co-infections in order to explore medicine's epistemological attachment to the idea of single diseases, using TB/HIV as an analytical lever. We retrace how TB/HIV co-infection has been problematised in public health discourses since the 1990s, particularly in WHO reports and international public health journals, and show that it has been mainly discussed as a complex biosocial phenomenon in need of more resources. The epistemological interrogation of the concept of co-infection itself – as an entangled object of two or more diseases with different histories and social, political, and scientific identities – is largely missing. To elaborate on this gap, we look at the translational processes between the two diseases and their communities, and suggest concrete historical and ethnographic entry points for future research on this global health phenomenon.

Philip Steadman's epilogue suggests that the copying of drawings (and its study) by anthropologists, psychologists, architectural students, and Surrealists is revealing not only of processes of diagrammatization but also of the fact that there is something 'diagrammatic' about the way in which designs are represented mentally, which affects how they are seen and altered when they are reproduced. The work of diagrams, not only as visual objects but also as mental processes, is shown by the articles in this special issue to play a central role in fields as diverse as psychoanalysis, anthropology, epidemiology, and biology. More often than not, the synergy between these fields is facilitated, and sometimes catalyzed, by shared diagrammatic practices. As the studies examined in the epilogue demonstrate, diagrams form a privileged visual field of interdisciplinary dialogue and exchange. But importantly, they also facilitate a way of information processing—what the editors of this special issue call 'diagrammatic reasoning'—through which data are processed, presented, and reconfigured in clear and easily assimilated forms.

Klappentext: Arising from the need to go beyond the semiotic, cognitive, epistemic and symbolic reading of diagrams, this book looks at what diagrams are capable of in scholarly work related to the social sciences. Rather than attempting to define what diagrams are, and what their dietic capacity might be, contributions to this volume draw together the work diagrams do in the development of theories. Across a range of disciplines, the chapters introduce the ephemeral dimensions of scientist's interactions and collaboration with diagrams, consider how diagrams configure cooperation across disciplines, and explore how diagrams have been made to work in ways that point beyond simplification, clarification and formalization.

This article proposes an analytical approach to algorithms that stresses operations of folding. The aim of this approach is to broaden the common analytical focus on algorithms as biased and opaque black boxes, and to instead highlight the many relations that algorithms are interwoven with. Our proposed approach thus highlights how algorithms fold heterogeneous things: data, methods and objects with multiple ethical and political effects. We exemplify the utility of our approach by proposing three specific operations of folding-proximation, universalisation and normalisation. The article develops these three operations through four empirical vignettes, drawn from different settings that deal with algorithms in relation to AIDS, Zika and stock markets. In proposing this analytical approach, we wish to highlight the many different attachments and relations that algorithms enfold. The approach thus aims to produce accounts that highlight how algorithms dynamically combine and reconfigure different social and material heterogeneities as well as the ethical, normative and political consequences of these reconfigurations.

This article proposes an analytical approach to algorithms that stresses operations of folding. The aim of this approach is to broaden the common analytical focus on algorithms as biased and opaque black boxes, and to instead highlight the many relations that algorithms are interwoven with. Our proposed approach thus highlights how algorithms fold heterogeneous things: data, methods and objects with multiple ethical and political effects. We exemplify the utility of our approach by proposing three specific operations of folding—proximation, universalisation and normalisation. The article develops these three operations through four empirical vignettes, drawn from different settings that deal with algorithms in relation to AIDS, Zika and stock markets. In proposing this analytical approach, we wish to highlight the many different attachments and relations that algorithms enfold. The approach thus aims to produce accounts that highlight how algorithms dynamically combine and reconfigure different social and material heterogeneities as well as the ethical, normative and political consequences of these reconfigurations.

This article proposes an analytical approach to algorithms that stresses operations of folding. The aim of this approach is to broaden the common analytical focus on algorithms as biased and opaque black boxes, and to instead highlight the many relations that algorithms are interwoven with. Our proposed approach thus highlights how algorithms fold heterogeneous things: data, methods and objects with multiple ethical and political effects. We exemplify the utility of our approach by proposing three specific operations of folding-proximation, universalisation and normalisation. The article develops these three operations through four empirical vignettes, drawn from different settings that deal with algorithms in relation to AIDS, Zika and stock markets. In proposing this analytical approach, we wish to highlight the many different attachments and relations that algorithms enfold. The approach thus aims to produce accounts that highlight how algorithms dynamically combine and reconfigure different social and material heterogeneities as well as the ethical, normative and political consequences of these reconfigurations. ; Funding Agencies|Riksbankens jubileumsfond

On the 5th of May 2020, a group of modellers, epidemiologists and biomedical scientists from the University of Edinburgh proposed a "segmenting and shielding" approach to easing the lockdown in the UK over the coming months. Their proposal, which has been submitted to the government and since been discussed in the media, offers what appears to be a pragmatic solution out of the current lockdown. The approach identifies segments of the population as at-risk groups and outlines ways in which these remain shielded, while 'healthy' segments would be allowed to return to some kind of normality, gradually, over several weeks. This proposal highlights how narrowly conceived scientific responses may result in unintended consequences and repeat harmful public health practices. As an interdisciplinary group of researchers from the humanities and social sciences at the University of Edinburgh, we respond to this proposal and highlight how ethics, history, medical sociology and anthropology - as well as disability studies and decolonial approaches - offer critical engagement with such responses, and call for more creative and inclusive responses to public health crises.