Cette année au Congrès quadriennal international de l'histoire des sciences et des techniques (ICHST) autour de la thématique "Technology and Medicine between the Global and the Local", plusieurs membres du DHVS présentent leurs recherches.
Le site du congrès ICI.
Anne Rasmussen
"A sanitary technology from crisis to routine: Antityphoid inoculation in French Army, 1918-1930s"
Since the 19th century, typhoid fever caused numerous epidemics in military populations in wartime and in peacetime. Prophylactic control of these epidemics was a major challenge for military health services : it concerned preservation of operational troops and sanitary interactions between civil and military populations. European military health services (in Britain, Germany, France) chose a sanitary technology - antityphoid inoculation – among several prophylactic strategies. They made mass experiments in the conflicts of the beginnings of the century (Boer war, colonial conflicts, World War I). In France, antityphoid inoculation, which was only compulsory for soldiers, was at the core of acute controversies during World War I, related to vaccination technology. What was at stake was ways of producing, circulating, prescripting, administering vaccine and development of bacteriological, clinical and statistical norms. Efficacy and safety of inoculation were very controversial because of important adverse events linked to inoculation, graduated from side effects to fatal accidents.
This paper will explore what became antityphoid inoculation in French Army after World War I. Based on sanitary archives of Historical Defense Archives, it will focus on the routinisation of a sanitary technology conceived in wartime. Ways of qualifying and regulating adverse effects and accidents of inoculation will be studied, as a means of testing mass medicine.
Epidemics Public Health Inoculation Sanitary technology World War I
Marion Thomas
"Monkey Business: The construction and internationalization of primate research at the Pasteur Institute in French Guinea (1922-1941)"
In the early 1920s, at the height of French colonialism, the Pastorian Albert Calmette, a staunch Darwinian, launched the creation of an overseas Pasteur Institute in Guinea, which used apes as its central research model. A scarce and expensive resource in the Metropolis, apes were abundant and accessible in France’s African colonies, and as such reinforced the attractiveness of the French Empire by serving as a new raw material to be exploited. I will show how the founders of Pastoria, as the Institute was called, aimed to make it the hub of ape studies whether biomedical, physiological, psychological or ethological. Thus, apes embodied an experimental model that not only crossed disciplinary boundaries but also bridged the lab-field divide and went on to intersect with issues of race, gender, and colonialism. I will then explore the ways in which Western knowledge appropriated local knowledge, and expose the forms of power and recognition at stake. Indeed, colonial as well as foreign scientists who visited Pastoria consistently relied on indigenous peoples as carers, nurses, and laboratory assistants at the chimpanzee facility, as well as porters and guides for those who ventured out into the wild. However, these scientists hardly ever credited the contributions of these indigenous people to simian knowledge and upheld their beliefs in white intellectual superiority. They also took care to distinguish their newly certified expertise from other forms of knowledge deemed inferior. Finally, I show how apes, whether subjected to biomedical or psychological experiments, were not only enrolled in the French colonial ideology of the “civilizing mission”, but were sometimes also used as a means to belittle the native population.
Primatology, Overseas Pasteur Institute, French Colonialism
Laure Hoenen
“From Rhesus Monkeys to Cynomolgus Monkeys: When Local Political Decisions Influence Universal Scientific Practices”
December 2nd 1977, the Indian government decided to ban export of native monkeys, stopping the supply of rhesus monkey (Macaca mulatta) of research laboratories worldwide. Indian Prime Minister Morarji Desa's decision resulted from revelations made by the International Primate Protection League (IPPL). After unsuccessfully trying to raise U.S. government awareness about American military researches on neutron irradiations involving rhesus monkeys, IPPL called upon the Indian government, on the basis of that the US-Indian agreement limited the use of monkeys for vaccine testing and medical research. The decision was effective from March 31st 1978 and set the cat among the pigeons. It appears that soon after, the rhesus monkey had been replaced by the cynomolgus monkey (Macaca fascicularis) as primates models in biomedical research.
By going into this episode in depth, the paper aims on one hand to question the choice of a particular species as a model in the biomedical field and to see the impact of a local political decision on universal scientific choices that will lead to a new standardization.
History of Biology; 20th century; Primates; Biomedical Research
Nils Kessel, avec Anne Kveim Lie, University of Oslo
"Consumer society’s epidemics: Pharmaceutical technologies, epidemiological knowledge and the reframing of rising drug consumption"
Today as well as fifty years ago, whoever looks at political, medical and media discourses on the use of medicines will be confronted with the frequent use of bacteriological and epidemiological terms used for describing the social phenomenon of rising (legal) drug consumption: an “epidemic outbreak” “affecting” (sometimes even “infecting”) broader populations, threatening societal “bodies”. “Data” of “types” are needed for clarifying the dimension of the phenomena.
Yet, what is at stake is neither a bacteria nor a virus but different modes of use of pharmaceutical technologies. From a history of technology perspective, medicines can be considered as pharmaceutical technologies. As such their use is inscribed in discourses on benefits and risks of technological change. Some see widespread use of pharmaceuticals as a threat for public health, as a risk itself.
This paper reinterprets the relationship of epidemiology and technology beyond the metaphor paradigm: By translating the use of technologies into a medical problem that can be researched, analyzed, and – ultimately – solved through epidemiological methods, physicians have both contributed to implementing quantification as a universal tool for the resolution of primarily social problems but also extended their own field of expertise. As quantitative epidemiological knowledge about the use and abuse of drugs is almost useless as long as it cannot be linked either to actual morbidity data or other – lower, high or equal consumption rates in other countries, comparison on an international level became vital for knowledge production. The paper’s arguments are based on the historical study of market research data, medical and social science literature. Focusing on the WHO level, Norway and West Germany, it retraces how technology use became reframed as an epidemiological object.
Consumption; Medicine; Drugs; Quantification; Pharmaceutical markets
