Crisis upon Crisis: Ruderal Landscapes, Traces and the History of Medicine

What happens to the history of medicine and health when the world surrounding us experiences crisis upon crisis? What kind of stories, methods and archives should we turn to? This article attempts to intensify the conversation between the history of medicine, the environmental humanities and the biosciences. I explore what we can gain, as historians of medicine, by engaging with landscapes – understood ecologically, historically and aesthetically. Such perspectives enable us to bring our histories of medicine and health “down to earth,” in the words of Bruno Latour. Noticing, unearthing and following the traces that form the landscape can also help us imagine unimagined histories, that are open-ended, and shaped in unexpected ways by non-human agencies and interpretations. Drawing from my research in East Cameroon, I examine how the genetic sequences of pathogens ( hiv and the hepatitis C virus), as well as botanical, archeological and architectural traces, can help us locate histories of medicine within a broader consideration of ruderality – the shared condition of living among the rubble. Using molecular phylogeny and ethnography as arts of tracing, I explore how we can write a history of hiv -Aids and of other mid–twentieth century disease emergences and bioinvasions by starting with the ruderal landscapes of Central Africa, shaped by crisis upon crisis and by medicine itself.