Salmonella Infections, Networks of Knowledge, and Public Health in Britain, 1890–1975 by Anne Hardy (review)

With Salmonella Infections, Anne Hardy has served up a comprehensive, clear, and fascinating history about a group of bacteria that has attracted a level of historical attention that is in inverse proportion to the large amount of popular and scientific interest it seems to generate today. In rectifying this shortfall, Hardy successfully draws together medical, scientific, and social history, and the book deserves to be widely read in all of these disciplines.

The book is organized into three parts. The first, “Pathways in Nature,” traces the ways in which Salmonella infections insinuated themselves into the food chain and the many attempts to thwart them from doing so. Chapters in this part focus mainly on the interactions of the bacteria with humans and nonhuman animals (oysters, flies, and the products of domestic livestock keeping—meat and milk) in environmental settings. The laboratory is the main arena of the second part of the book. One chapter concentrates on investigations; first, into taxonomy and second, into revealing the trajectories of source–host–cause of infection. Many of these investigations were carried out in laboratories funded by the taxpayer.

Hardy then illuminates how the closed space of the laboratory in fact acted as a veritable petri dish for the proliferation of British and international networks and collaborations in what might well be called “Salmoknowledge.” Post-1930, these networks were driven predominantly, but by no means exclusively, by a common interest in serology that was pursued at the Lister Institute in London and the Danish State Serum Institute in Copenhagen (though the scientists themselves were not necessarily British and Danish). Also in this part of the book, Hardy cleverly traces how laboratory work was intimately associated with the spatialized production of knowledge through a process of naming Salmonellas with their supposed place of origin. This naming process itself was connected in complex ways to phage-typing, ecological niches, and the international exchange of—among other things—spray-dried eggs, diced coconut, and fish meal.

Part 3, “Sites of Infection,” considers how research interests after World War II concentrated on spaces that were deemed vulnerable to high levels of transmission. Salmonellosis became an issue of farm management through the economic costs caused by animal diseases, the interest of the Public Health Laboratory Service in animal diseases, the identification of bacterial reservoirs in cattle, and structural changes in the agricultural system prompted by the outbreak of war. Cows, pigs, poultry, feeds, and fertilizers were all cause for concern, and some concerns were more easily surmountable than others. It proved impossible to monitor the contamination levels of all feedstuffs, for example. Nor was it plausible to solve the problem of reservoirs. Alternatively, as the final substantive chapter demonstrates, slaughterhouse regulation and food preparation guidelines offered opportunities for breaking the chain that linked contamination and human disease: killing, handling, and packing dead (and nearly dead) meat was subject to increased monitoring by public health authorities.

For me, this was the least commanding chapter in the book. Hardy is on sure footing in earlier chapters covering the pre-war period and when focused on the laboratory and the broader environment. And it isn’t that the chapter on food preparation lacks insight or sound judgment; but the shift into these spaces lacks a spark of vitality. Practices and regulatory activities in slaughterhouses, packing plants, restaurants, and household kitchens across Britain, are interpreted almost entirely through government reports and professional scientific journals. Industry voices are muted; public opinion is silent; popular culture is read narrowly through official statistics on the consumption of meats, for example. Here, then, lies an opportunity to bring this area of research into the ambit of work being done on, say, the histories of alcohol, tobacco, health education, and consumerism in the second half of the twentieth century. It is only then, I think, that we will approach a satisfying explanation for the curious dilemma that emerges...