Viral Imagery of Dengue Fever in the Age of Bacteriology

Abstract

Since the late nineteenth century, the image of the pathogen has embodied the disease it causes—its discovery equated with the discovery of the disease itself. Visualizing a disease-causing organism became key to constructing a distinct, biomedical disease identity. But what of the diseases whose pathogens would not “reveal themselves” to the microscopist? Denied this “ontological” representation, would they not attain this framing? This essay further problematizes the supposed dominance of the laboratory and the microscope in normalizing disease at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by examining scientific images produced in the study of dengue fever in Asia. Surveying a range of medical techniques and technologies and their attendant visual productions through the lens of dengue, this essay argues for the importance of alternative scientific imagery in articulating its disease identity about 1900.