Typhoid, Cockles, and Terrorism: The turbulent history of Anglo-Irish typhoid control in revolutionary Dublin

Typhoid, Cockles, and Terrorism uncovers the intimate connection between imperial and revolutionary public health politics in 20th century Dublin. Our project anchors and expands a multi-award winning Anglo-Irish research collaboration on the international history of typhoid and uses digital humanities approaches to:

a) conduct innovative research on the (post)colonial politics of Anglo-Irish public health and typhoid control in Dublin.
b) design a major blended physical/digital exhibition and educational resources on Dublin's enteric past, and
c) create a pioneering open access database of spatially coded historical disease, environmental, and infrastructural data.

Our project explores the impact and limits of imperial sanitary and microbiological interventions in the turbulent context of colonial and revolutionary Ireland. Forthcoming research by our named postdoc, Emily Webster (University of Chicago), indicates that cities like Dublin and Belfast struggled with typhoid fever epidemics well into the twentieth century despite adopting water and sewer systems modelled on the metropolitan design of London and comparable regulations of food and milk supplies.

We will use a mix of historical and digital humanities methods to analyse and digitise historical disease data, medical correspondence, cultural ephemera, infrastructural records, and meteorological data to understand why British bacteriological and sanitary interventions proved impractical in Dublin and how they were perceived by local populations. We will focus specifically on how a London-inspired sewage system inadvertently contaminated Dublin's shellfish banks, which were an important source of sustenance for poorer segments of the population, the effects of limited investment in public health laboratory capacity, and how a local mental asylum was used to test English-developed typhoid vaccines.

Imperial public health politics had long-term consequences. Over time, British authorities' relative neglect of Irish public health became a rallying cry for supporters of Irish independence. Our project explores how Irish revolutionaries argued for better preventive action against typhoid but were also implicated in one of the earliest bioterrorism scares when Sinn Féin was accused of trying to contaminate the milk supply of British troops with typhoid in 1920. Even after independence was achieved, imperial legacies remained in the form of sanitary infrastructures and a pronounced public health focus on Catholic hygiene habits and religious practices - including shellfish consumption at wakes.

Our research will create an important academic legacy in the form of a tailor-made open access database of geospatially coded disease, infrastructural, hydrological, and meteorological data as well as typhoid-related cultural ephemera. We will also design an innovative blended physical-digital exhibition on typhoid in Dublin. The exhibition will be hosted at Dublin City Library and Archive (DCLA) and the Royal College of Physicians in Ireland (RCPI). It will feature documents and objects relating to the city's infectious past. We will draw on the success of our multi-award winning international Typhoidland exhibitions to design cutting-edge animations and virtual tours of typhoid prevalence and sanitary interventions over time as well as educational resources and games on vaccine development and hygiene (Mary Mallon's Cooking Class/ Sir Almost Right's Vaccine Lab). All outputs will be made available open access on our www.typhoidland.org website and will be integrated into our museum partners' well-developed outreach programs for schools and local audiences.

By reconstructing the turbulent history of typhoid control in 20th century Dublin, Typhoid, Cockles, and Terrorism will make significant contributions to research and engage audiences from all age groups on the importance of equitable access to effective sanitary infrastructure and vaccines.