The epidemiological and epistemic emergence of “rural plague” in Argentina

Best known for its development and impact on city-ports such as Buenos Aires and Rosario, the spread of the third plague pandemic in Argentina led to the establishment of foci in the Argentine hinterland, resulting in frequent outbreaks of the disease over the first half of the twentieth century. This chapter examines how these outbreaks led to the development of a new framework of the disease in the country under the term “rural plague”. What began as a heuristic description of plague in agrarian contexts developed by the mid 1930s into a contested framework of the disease in dialogue with international framings of sylvatic plague. Determining what animals maintain “rural plague” and how the disease spread from them to humans involved much more than simply bacteriological testing, with ethnographic, zoological, ecological and cartographic methods employed to support rival hypotheses. Key to the debate was whether rats were involved in the ecology of this rural form of the disease. The chapter examines the emergence, development and contestation of “rural plague” in Argentina as an epistemologically liminal notion that attempted to render intelligible and actionable an epidemiological reality, which remained at the margins of political and public health interest in the country while at the same time offering itself for the development of both national and international scientific careers.