MAX-PLANCK-INSTITUT FÜR WISSENSCHAFTSGESCHICHTE Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

Event

Jan 22, 2025
How the Plague Became Globally Visible – Mapping as a Method in Modern Western Medicine

Each participant on this panel will present their perspective on the question of how plague became globally visible during the Third Plague Pandemic (1855–1959).

The earliest global plague maps published in the 1880s (French) and 1890s (German) focused on circumscribing specific regions with corresponding risk of plague not on tracking its spread across these regions. After the 1894 plague outbreak in Hong Kong, however, medical researchers started to reconceptualise plague from “plague foyers” bounded by geographic factors to being transmittable across the globe via trains and ships. New sites of surveillance thus emerged wherever close contact among humans, rats, and fleas could be sustained. From 1894 on, an increasingly wider range of visual materials also made plague newly visible in cities across the globe. This new visualization of the Third Plague Pandemic contributed to worldwide maps of plague from about 1900 on. No longer depicted as geographically circumscribed foyers distributed across the globe, plague became visualized as a globally spread pandemic.

Address
Jägerstraße 22/23, 10117 Berlin, Germany
Room
Leibniz-Saal
Contact and Registration

Registration is required, for more information click here.
For further information contact: Franziska Urban franziska.urban@bbaw.de
Visit the Einstein Center Chronoi here.

About This Series

Maps belong to the oldest forms of human communication and thus represent an important historical record of space. Yet, maps are much more than just a visual presentation of a territory during a certain period of time, but a reflection on historical, political, religious and cultural contexts in which they were compiled.

This series of lectures invites a critical and fresh view on mapping, its role in the global circulation of knowledge, influence on state sovereignty and royal authority, colonialism, imperialism, national identities throughout history.

Berlin is an apt place for this topic. It has historically been a meeting point of mapping practices from all over the world. The city played a key role in the genesis of the history of cartography as a distinct branch of the history of science. It hosts a huge variety of the material culture of mapping across many institutions that illustrate how a map is strongly conditioned by space and time in which it was created (historical context), by people who created it (mapmakers), and by the audience and purpose for which it was intended (users). Map is, therefore, understood as a complex social construct representing a power of knowledge.

Germany is now a major repository of mapping efforts through history, making Berlin a perfect setting for this lecture series.

The lecture series is jointly organised by Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte.

 

 

 

2025-01-22T18:00:00SAVE IN I-CAL 2025-01-22 18:00:00 2025-01-22 21:00:00 How the Plague Became Globally Visible – Mapping as a Method in Modern Western Medicine Each participant on this panel will present their perspective on the question of how plague became globally visible during the Third Plague Pandemic (1855–1959). The earliest global plague maps published in the 1880s (French) and 1890s (German) focused on circumscribing specific regions with corresponding risk of plague not on tracking its spread across these regions. After the 1894 plague outbreak in Hong Kong, however, medical researchers started to reconceptualise plague from “plague foyers” bounded by geographic factors to being transmittable across the globe via trains and ships. New sites of surveillance thus emerged wherever close contact among humans, rats, and fleas could be sustained. From 1894 on, an increasingly wider range of visual materials also made plague newly visible in cities across the globe. This new visualization of the Third Plague Pandemic contributed to worldwide maps of plague from about 1900 on. No longer depicted as geographically circumscribed foyers distributed across the globe, plague became visualized as a globally spread pandemic. Jägerstraße 22/23, 10117 Berlin, Germany Leibniz-Saal Europe/Berlin public

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