The Outbreak Report as Paper Technology: Epidemiological Reasoning in the Early 20th Century

The paper will introduce the outbreak report as an epidemiological paper technology. Since the late nineteenth century, epidemiology has not only developed statistical instruments and stochastic models, but the formalisation of the budding discipline included also the consolidation of a consistent narrative practice. As example for this paper serves a series of outbreak reports from the third plague pandemic from 1894 to 1952. The period coincides with the formative decades of formal epidemiology as an academic discipline. Outbreak reports were a genre of communication for and between epidemiologists. Each report aimed to cover the range of complex local characteristics, which have turned a series of cases into an epidemic event. The reports collected general observations, individual case reports, mortality and morbidity statistics, brief descriptions of bacteriology, of treatment and prevention practices as well as of living conditions. They worked as places of explanation and cohesion for quantifiable data, such as case numbers, climate details or chronologies. But beyond their explanatory purpose, the reports did also reinstate and safeguard epidemiological practice as an empirical art, dedicated to fine-grained, systematic and inductive observation. The reports give deep insight into the historical formation of modern epidemiology as a broad interdisciplinary project, suspended between historical, anthropological, sociological, statistical, and medical approaches to disease. Furthermore, my paper will show that the narrative structure of the reports also sustained epidemiological reasoning as an inductive practice, based on the correlation of an open-ended range of data and perspectives, and often indifferent to questions of causation.