University of Galway History Seminar: Ecologies of Typhoid and Geographies of Knowledge in 19th Century Ireland

Dr Emily Webster 

(Durham University)

Ecologies of Typhoid and  Geographies of Knowledge in 19th Century Ireland

Abstract

In 1880, Charles Cameron, Medical Officer of Health for the City of Dublin, was nearly laughed out of a meeting of the British Medical Association for a paper he read entitled “Typhoid from Oysters.” Despite Cameron’s assertion that he had “no doubt whatever that oysters were very frequently the means of communicating enteric fever,” using his home city of Dublin as a case study, the connection between the two would not be widely accepted by the British medical community until nearly twenty-five years – and several shellfish-borne typhoid outbreaks – later. Cameron’s observation of this trend decades before it was widely accepted in British medical circles was not, I argue, simply a stroke of particular epidemiological genius, but an observation grounded in the unique ecology of typhoid fever in Dublin. Drawing on a combination of public health records, geospatial data, and popular media, this paper will explore parallel epidemics of typhoid fever in Dublin and Belfast at the end of the nineteenth century that, through epidemiological investigation, were traced at least in part to local shellfish populations. It will argue that these epidemics were the result of a confluence of unique factors, including ecological characteristics like topography, rainfall, and river basin ecology; and social and urban environmental characteristics such as housing placement, water systems, sewage systems, class, industry, and local dietary practices. Through this confluence of features, Salmonella enterica typhi found a niche in these major Irish cities.

Registration

This talk will be delivered online, via Zoom. Please register here for the link: https://forms.office.com/r/AqUWfutAzq

The seminar will also be livestreamed in Room 1001, Hardiman Research Building (Bridge Seminar Room).