Salmonella Infections, Networks of Knowledge, and Public Health in Britain 1880–1975 by Anne Hardy (review)

The exponential rise of food poisoning during the past century has received less attention from historians than have bigger killers like cancer or heart disease. In Salmonella Infections, Networks of Knowledge, and Public Health in Britain, Hardy helps to rectify this lacuna in public-health history via a journey through many of the grubbier facets of British life—filthy knackers’ yards, poultry-packing plants, and greasy canteens. As a pathogen, salmonella was a product of increasingly complicated, globalized networks of food production, preparation, and consumption. As a concept, salmonella, and its many serotypes, was a product of equally complex scientific networks.

Hardy’s study is broken into three sections. The first one explores the ways in which the pathways of salmonella transmission were unraveled between around 1880 and 1940. Faced with an increasing incidence of the disease, public-health officials began the painstaking exploration of the spaces and highways along which the pathogen proliferated and circulated—oyster beds, egg farms, and slaughterhouses. The second section reveals how immunology and phage-typing gradually produced a stable classification of the many serotypes of salmonella. The final section examines attempts to control the spread of the pathogen after 1940.

Understanding salmonella clearly involves attention not merely to epidemiology but also to scientific networks, ecologies, human—animal interactions, technologies, globalization, and bodily hygiene—all of which Hardy explores in her richly nuanced and empirically satisfying study. Salmonella arose at a historical moment when the production of milk, eggs, and meat was industrializing and globalizing, providing new opportunities for pathogens to leap from animal to human ecologies. The development of mass catering and processed convenience food transformed the material nature of British food as well as its conditions of consumption. These transformations then combined with erratic hygiene to produce an avalanche of food poisoning. The persistently blasé British attitude toward basic hygiene is one of the subtexts of this book: Edwin Chadwick, a nineteenth-century champion of British sanitation—would turn in his grave if forced to read Salmonella Infections. The rise of food poisoning, as Hardy chronicles it, suggests that any teleological conception of the civilizing process requires serious rethinking.

Hardy also mobilizes techniques drawn from the history of science. Unraveling the ontology and epidemiology of this complex (and evolving) pathogen is no mean feat. Ecologies mattered, but so did pathogens. This complicated, nonlinear history has many actors and many dead ends. Hardy recounts the vital, unspectacular laboratory work of such unsung scientists as Frederick Griffith and William M. Scott while recreating the slow, uneasy process that eventually resulted in a global network of salmonella centers, punctuated by squabbles about exact classifications and strained friendships.

Salmonella Infections is an elegant book retelling a remarkably messy and jumbled history. By staying close to her historical actors, with their lo-tech laboratories and tenuous networks, Hardy reveals the laborious way in which stable scientific knowledge is often produced. Moreover, by revealing the shabby and squalid world of salmonella, she describes not only the ecology of a particularly persistent illness but also diagnoses it as symptomatic of a world that exhibits a profound disconnection between the giant ecotechnologies of food production and the everyday world of food consumption.