Recent work on the League of Nations Health Organization has examined how the LNHO organized the collection and distribution of global epidemiological intelligence on an unprecedented scale and shown how that effort fostered connections across national and imperial boundaries. This paper contributes to that ongoing effort by demonstrating how the LNHO aided the expansion of scientific understanding of typhus in the interwar period. LNHO epidemiological intelligence, study tours, conferences, and more, provided researchers the global perspective they needed to realize that what they thought was one disease was actually two separate ones—epidemic and murine typhus—with close ties to scrub typhus and a growing number of spotted fevers endemic all over the world. This new knowledge would prove critical during World War II as Allied officials planned their defenses against typhus. Interwar international epidemiological intelligence laid the foundations of wartime military medical intelligence.
Coffee will be served at 3:30pm. The event will start at 3:45pm.
Amanda McVety - Professor, Department of History
Miami University
Amanda McVety's interests lie at the intersection of international relations, science, and the environment. Her first book, Enlightened Aid: U.S. Development as Foreign Policy in Ethiopia (Oxford, 2012), explored US foreign aid in the Horn of Africa. Her second book, The Rinderpest Campaigns: A Virus, Its Vaccines, and Global Development in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2018), examined the history of the ultimately successful international effort to eradicate rinderpest (cattle plague). She is currently researching the history of typhus and the history of U.S. medical intelligence during World War II.
About the International History Seminar
If you are interested in attending this semester’s events and joining the International History Seminar, please send an email confirming your interest to the Hayes Chair Graduate Research Associate at hayeschairgra@osu.edu, and you will be included on the mailing list going forward. Materials will only be pre-circulated to people on the mailing list.
