Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM)
University of Manchester
Seminar, Tuesday 21 October, 16:00-17:30
Room 2.57, Simon Building, Brunswick Street, Manchester, M13 9PL
https://goo.gl/maps/RTFk4
Karl Friedrich Meyer and the birth of modern ideas of disease ecology
Dr. Mark Honigsbaum (Queen Mary University of London)
The Swiss-born medical researcher Karl Friedrich Meyer (1884-1974) is best known as a ‘microbe hunter’ whose investigations into animal and arthropod-borne diseases in California in the interwar period did much to break down the barriers between veterinary medicine and clinical pathology. In particular, medical historians have singled out Meyer’s influential 1931 Ludwig Hektoen Lecture in which he described the animal kingdom as a ‘reservoir of disease’ and called for parasites to be studied on a ‘strictly comparative basis’ as a forerunner of ‘one medicine’ approaches to emerging infectious diseases.
In so doing, however, I argue historians risk overlooking Meyer’s other intellectual contributions. These contributions, which were developed in a series of papers from the mid-1930s onwards, were ordered around the concept of ‘latent infections’ and increasingly sought to link microbial behavior to broader bio-ecological, environmental, and social factors that impact host-pathogen interactions and the mechanisms of disease control. In this respect Meyer – like the comparative pathologist Theobald Smith and the immunologist Frank Macfarlane Burnet – can be seen as a pioneer of modern ideas of disease ecology. However, while Burnet’s and Smith’s contributions to this scientific field have been widely acknowledged, Meyer’s have been largely ignored.
This paper aims to correct that lacuna while contributing to a reorientation of the historiography of bacteriological epidemiology by presenting a sketch of Meyer’s intellectual development, his professional associations, and his studies of zoonotic diseases – such as brucellosis, psittacosis and plague – that exemplified his changing ideas about latent infections and host-parasite relationships. Drawing on Meyer’s extensive archives and key papers from the 1930s and 1940s, I will show how he used his position at the George Williams Hooper Foundation in San Francisco and UC Berkeley, where he founded the curriculum in public health, to pioneer the integration of ecological and biological perspectives into the laboratory study of microbes while forging close working relationships with key international medical researchers and ecological thinkers. These associations included both Smith and Burnet, with whom Meyer collaborated on investigations of, respectively, brucellosis and psittacosis; and Charles Elton, of the Bureau of Animal Population in Oxford, who advised Meyer in his investigations of sylvatic plague.
All are welcome and please feel free to pass this announcement on to interested colleagues.
Event co-organised by Ray Macauley and Amy Chambers
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