A box, a trough, and marbles:How the Reed-Frost epidemic theory shaped epidemiological reasoning in the 20th century

The article takes the renewed popularity and interest in epidemiological modelling for Covid-19 as a point of departure to ask how modelling has historically shaped epidemiological reasoning. The focus lies on a particular model, developed in the late 1920s through a collaboration of the former field-epidemiologists and medical officer, Wade Hampton Frost, and the biostatistician and population ecologist Lowell Reed. Other than former approaches to epidemic theory in mathematical formula, the Reed-Frost epidemic theory was materialised in a simple mechanical analogue: a box with coloured marbles and a wooden trough. The article reconstructs how the introduction of this mechanical model has reshaped epidemiological reasoning by shifting the field from purely descriptive to analytical practices. It was not incidental that the history of this model coincided with the foundation of epidemiology as an academic discipline, as it valorised and institutionalised new theoretical contributions to the field. Through its versatility, the model shifted the field’s focus from mono-causal explanations informed by bacteriology, eugenics or sanitary perspectives towards the systematic consideration of epidemics as a set of interdependent and dynamic variables

Photographing AIDS. On Capturing a Disease in Pictures of People with AIDS

The photography of people with AIDS has been subject to numerous critiques in the 1980s and has become a controversial way of visualizing the AIDS epidemic. While most of the scholarly work on AIDS photography is based in cultural studies and concerned with popular representations, the clinical value of photographs of PWA usually remains overlooked. This article addresses photographs as a ‘way of seeing’ AIDS that contributed crucially to the making of the disease entity AIDS within the history of medicine. Cultural studies methods will be applied to analyze clinical photography in the case of AIDS, thus contributing to the medical history of AIDS through the lens of photography. The article will reveal the conflation of disease morphology and patient identity as a characteristic feature of both clinical photography and a now historical nature of AIDS.This is the accepted version of the article. The final version is available from The Johns Hopkins University Press via https://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/bulletin_of_the_history_of_medicine/future_publications/pre_print_content/Engelmann.pdf