Lukas Engelmann
Biographic Data
| ID | 511655 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lukas Engelmann |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lukas |
| FAMILY NAME | Engelmann |
| SIGNATURE | ENGELMANN L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Edinburgh |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2175-0156 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 50 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Epistemic preparedness
Preparedness strategies for emergent infectious diseases have focused on microbial surveillance, medical stockpiling and healthcare infrastructure resilience. But what does it mean to be epistemically or cognitively prepared for the next disease outbreak? Taking stock of lessons for data practices and statistical modelling in the wake of COVID-19, we propose a reconceptualising of preparedness in global health, focusing on ecological and sociolog…
Making contagion social
The beginnings of formal epidemiology are conventionally marked by the introduction of mathematical modelling in the early 20th century. However, Ronald Ross, colonial medical officer and 1902 Nobel laureate for his proof of the insect vector of malaria, envisioned the future of mathematical epidemiology as a much more expansive project, one that would eventually exceed the remit of a medical science. This article introduces and analyses Ross’ th…
Circulation as a Visual Practice
This special issue looks at some of the ways that images are adopted, co‐opted, and adapted in the life sciences and beyond. It brings together papers that investigate the role of visualization in scientific knowledge‐production with contributions that focus on the distribution and dissemination of knowledge to a broader audience. A commentary provides a critical perspective. In this editorial we introduce circulation as a practice to better unde…
Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb. Epidemic Empire
Over recent decades, many social inconveniences have become known as epidemics. But when, where, and how does something become framed as epidemic, and what does it mean for the spread of ideas, of violence, of fashion trends, or of diseases to become objects of epidemiological concern? Important reflective work on the meaning of epidemic has been carried out beyond the narrow disciplinary bounds of formal epidemiology. Charles Rosenberg’s seminal…
A Short Introduction into the English-Language Historiography of Epidemiology
This very short introduction into the bibliography of modern epidemiology in English-language literature aims to achieve two modest goals. First, the works presented will be separated into two bodies of historical scholarship, to distinguish the history of the field as told by epidemiological practitioners from the work developed in the history of science, medicine, and public health. Second, this essay focuses on a modern history of epidemiology…
Coinfection, Comorbidity, and Syndemics
This bibliographic essay introduces three concepts to the historiography of epidemics and pandemics: coinfection, comorbidity, and syndemics. All three of these concepts have seen considerable popularity in the social sciences—and to some extent in epidemiology—but have not been used much in historical scholarship. The essay attributes this to the continued prevalence of disease specificity and its accompanying historical genre, the disease biogr…
Narrative Science
Narrative Science examines the use of narrative in scientific research over the last two centuries. It brings together an international group of scholars who have engaged in intense collaboration to find and develop crucial cases of narrative in science. Motivated and coordinated by the Narrative Science project, funded by the European Research Council, this volume offers integrated and insightful essays examining cases that run the gamut from ge…
Domesticating models
Our article traces the representation of pandemic modelling in UK print media from the emergence of Covid-19 to the early stages of implementing the first UK-wide lockdown in late March 2020. Covid modelling, it is widely assumed, has shaped policy decisions and public responses to the pandemic in unprecedented ways. We analyse how the UK print media has configured modelling as a significant evidence tool in the representation of the pandemic. In…
Jacob Steere-Williams, The Filth Disease
Digital epidemiology, deep phenotyping and the enduring fantasy of pathological omniscience
Epidemiology is a field torn between practices of surveillance and methods of analysis. Since the onset of COVID-19, epidemiological expertise has been mostly identified with the first, as dashboards of case and mortality rates took centre stage. However, since its establishment as an academic field in the early 20th century, epidemiology's methods have always impacted on how diseases are classified, how knowledge is collected, and what kind of k…
Charles Allen McCoy, Diseased States
The question of why states react differently to epidemics could hardly be more timely. Many of the registers historians used to explain different national approaches to epidemic control could not be confirmed in this ongoing pandemic. Neither the dichotomy between authoritarianism and liberal democracy nor the standard reference to equity in the North–South topography of global health aligns with the geography of Covid-19 case and mortality rates…
A box, a trough and marbles
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 …
An Epidemic for Sale
This essay tells the story of the "Danysz virus," a bacterial culture that was designed and deployed to cause epidemics among rodents and was sold globally by the Institut Pasteur from 1900. Jean Danysz (1860-1928) initially identified the culture during his studies of epidemics in population cycles of common voles. His experiments turned to the ambitious goal of increasing the bacteria's virulence by emulating the rodent's animal economy in the …
Sulphuric Utopias
How early twentieth century fumigation technologies transformed maritime quarantine practices and inspired utopian visions of disease-free global trade. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fumigation technologies transformed global practices of maritime quarantine through chemical and engineering innovation. One of these technologies, the widely used Clayton machine, blasted sulphuric acid gas through a docked ship in an effort …
Configurations of Plague
Diagrams are found at the heart of the modern history of epidemiology. Epidemiologists used spatial diagrams to visualize concepts of epidemics as arrangements of biological, environmental, historical, as well as social factors and to analyze epidemics as configurations. Often, they provided a representation of the networks of relationships implied by epidemics, rather than to offer conclusions about origin and causation. This article will look a…
Afterword
Philip Steadman’s epilogue suggests that the copying of drawings (and its study) by anthropologists, psychologists, architectural students, and Surrealists is revealing not only of processes of diagrammatization but also of the fact that there is something ‘diagrammatic’ about the way in which designs are represented mentally, which affects how they are seen and altered when they are reproduced. The work of diagrams, not only as visual objects bu…
Picturing the Unusual
The article explores and expands the historiography of medical photography. First, it revisits historical scholarship on medical photography to demonstrate the absence of a consensus as to what counts as medical photography and what does not. Secondly, the article illustrates the shortcomings of current analytical perspectives with two examples. The first picture was taken by the board of health in Honolulu in 1900 to visualise bubonic plague but…
Algorithms as folding
This article proposes an analytical approach to algorithms that stresses operations of folding. The aim of this approach is to broaden the common analytical focus on algorithms as biased and opaque black boxes, and to instead highlight the many relations that algorithms are interwoven with. Our proposed approach thus highlights how algorithms fold heterogeneous things: data, methods and objects with multiple ethical and political effects. We exem…
A Plague of Kinyounism
The arrival of bubonic plague in San Francisco in 1900 has become a pivotal case study in the history of American public health. The presence of plague remained contested for months as the evidence provided by the federal bacteriologist Joseph Kinyoun of the Marine Hospital Service was rejected, his laboratory methods disputed and his person ridiculed. Before the disease diagnosis became widely accepted, Kinyoun had been subjected to public caric…
Is there a duty to participate in digital epidemiology
This paper poses the question of whether people have a duty to participate in digital epidemiology. While an implied duty to participate has been argued for in relation to biomedical research in general, digital epidemiology involves processing of non-medical, granular and proprietary data types that pose different risks to participants. We first describe traditional justifications for epidemiology that imply a duty to participate for the general…
Guenter B. Risse, Driven by Fear
Driven by Fear is the most recent monograph by the eminent medical historian of San Francisco, Gunther Risse. His new contribution to the epidemics of America’s west coast ‘Paris’ focuses on the rich history of the city’s pesthouse. Risse presents this institution as both a place and a parable in which multiple disease biographies converge with the racially-motivated abolition of individual rights for the sake of public interest. Risse explores h…
The Past and Present of Contested Medical Authority
Medical knowledge is liminal. It oscillates between science and art, empirical reason and artisanal craft, theory and practice. Once, it was predominantly bound to the voice of the doctor, who spok
Photographing 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 people with AIDS usually remains overlooked. This article addresses photographs as a "way of seeing" AIDS that contributed crucial…
Double trouble
Tuberculosis and HIV co-infection came to figure as one of the major global health problems at the beginning of the twenty-first century, with multiple attempts to tackle this intricate issue on epidemiological, clinical, and public health levels. In this article, we propose thinking beyond the practical problems caused by co-infections in order to explore medicine's epistemological attachment to the idea of single diseases, using TB/HIV as an an…
Das Bild als Phänomen Visuelle Argumentationsweisen und ihre Logiken am Beispiel von Sichtbarmachungen des ‚Aids-Virus’ und der funktionellen MRT
Sulphuric Utopias
How early twentieth century fumigation technologies transformed maritime quarantine practices and inspired utopian visions of disease-free global trade. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fumigation technologies transformed global practices of maritime quarantine through chemical and engineering innovation. One of these technologies, the widely used Clayton machine, blasted sulphuric acid gas through a docked ship in an effort …
Algorithms as folding
This article proposes an analytical approach to algorithms that stresses operations of folding. The aim of this approach is to broaden the common analytical focus on algorithms as biased and opaque black boxes, and to instead highlight the many relations that algorithms are interwoven with. Our proposed approach thus highlights how algorithms fold heterogeneous things: data, methods and objects with multiple ethical and political effects. We exem…
A box, a trough and marbles
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 …
Domesticating models
Our article traces the representation of pandemic modelling in UK print media from the emergence of Covid-19 to the early stages of implementing the first UK-wide lockdown in late March 2020. Covid modelling, it is widely assumed, has shaped policy decisions and public responses to the pandemic in unprecedented ways. We analyse how the UK print media has configured modelling as a significant evidence tool in the representation of the pandemic. In…
Digital epidemiology, deep phenotyping and the enduring fantasy of pathological omniscience
Epidemiology is a field torn between practices of surveillance and methods of analysis. Since the onset of COVID-19, epidemiological expertise has been mostly identified with the first, as dashboards of case and mortality rates took centre stage. However, since its establishment as an academic field in the early 20th century, epidemiology's methods have always impacted on how diseases are classified, how knowledge is collected, and what kind of k…
An Epidemic for Sale
This essay tells the story of the "Danysz virus," a bacterial culture that was designed and deployed to cause epidemics among rodents and was sold globally by the Institut Pasteur from 1900. Jean Danysz (1860-1928) initially identified the culture during his studies of epidemics in population cycles of common voles. His experiments turned to the ambitious goal of increasing the bacteria's virulence by emulating the rodent's animal economy in the …
Double trouble
Tuberculosis and HIV co-infection came to figure as one of the major global health problems at the beginning of the twenty-first century, with multiple attempts to tackle this intricate issue on epidemiological, clinical, and public health levels. In this article, we propose thinking beyond the practical problems caused by co-infections in order to explore medicine's epistemological attachment to the idea of single diseases, using TB/HIV as an an…
Making contagion social
The beginnings of formal epidemiology are conventionally marked by the introduction of mathematical modelling in the early 20th century. However, Ronald Ross, colonial medical officer and 1902 Nobel laureate for his proof of the insect vector of malaria, envisioned the future of mathematical epidemiology as a much more expansive project, one that would eventually exceed the remit of a medical science. This article introduces and analyses Ross’ th…
A Plague of Kinyounism
The arrival of bubonic plague in San Francisco in 1900 has become a pivotal case study in the history of American public health. The presence of plague remained contested for months as the evidence provided by the federal bacteriologist Joseph Kinyoun of the Marine Hospital Service was rejected, his laboratory methods disputed and his person ridiculed. Before the disease diagnosis became widely accepted, Kinyoun had been subjected to public caric…
Is there a duty to participate in digital epidemiology
This paper poses the question of whether people have a duty to participate in digital epidemiology. While an implied duty to participate has been argued for in relation to biomedical research in general, digital epidemiology involves processing of non-medical, granular and proprietary data types that pose different risks to participants. We first describe traditional justifications for epidemiology that imply a duty to participate for the general…
Perspektiven auf aktuelle und historische Fundamentalismen
Ein queeres Bild von Aids. HIV-Visualisierungen und queere Politiken des Vergessens
Den Begriff der Ikone verwende ich hier in Anlehnung an die Zeichentheorie von Pierce als Abgrenzung zu Indexzeichen
Eine analytische Bildpraxis. Die pathologisch‐anatomischen Zeichnungen Jean Cruveilhiers in ihrem Verhältnis zu klinischen Beobachtungen
An Analytical Visualization Practice. The Pathological‐anatomical Illustrations of Jean Cruveilhier in Relation to Clinical Observations. The article examines the meaning and function of medical illustrations in the famous Atlas Anatomie pathologique , published by the French surgeon Jean Cruveilhier (1791–1874). By tracing the complex representation of pathological entities both back to the visual tradition of anatomy and the semiotic tradition …
Das Bild als Phänomen Visuelle Argumentationsweisen und ihre Logiken am Beispiel von Sichtbarmachungen des ‚Aids-Virus’ und der funktionellen MRT
Double trouble
Tuberculosis and HIV co-infection came to figure as one of the major global health problems at the beginning of the twenty-first century, with multiple attempts to tackle this intricate issue on epidemiological, clinical, and public health levels. In this article, we propose thinking beyond the practical problems caused by co-infections in order to explore medicine's epistemological attachment to the idea of single diseases, using TB/HIV as an an…
Photographing 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 people with AIDS usually remains overlooked. This article addresses photographs as a "way of seeing" AIDS that contributed crucial…
Guenter B. Risse, Driven by Fear
Driven by Fear is the most recent monograph by the eminent medical historian of San Francisco, Gunther Risse. His new contribution to the epidemics of America’s west coast ‘Paris’ focuses on the rich history of the city’s pesthouse. Risse presents this institution as both a place and a parable in which multiple disease biographies converge with the racially-motivated abolition of individual rights for the sake of public interest. Risse explores h…
The Past and Present of Contested Medical Authority
Medical knowledge is liminal. It oscillates between science and art, empirical reason and artisanal craft, theory and practice. Once, it was predominantly bound to the voice of the doctor, who spok
A Plague of Kinyounism
The arrival of bubonic plague in San Francisco in 1900 has become a pivotal case study in the history of American public health. The presence of plague remained contested for months as the evidence provided by the federal bacteriologist Joseph Kinyoun of the Marine Hospital Service was rejected, his laboratory methods disputed and his person ridiculed. Before the disease diagnosis became widely accepted, Kinyoun had been subjected to public caric…
Is there a duty to participate in digital epidemiology
This paper poses the question of whether people have a duty to participate in digital epidemiology. While an implied duty to participate has been argued for in relation to biomedical research in general, digital epidemiology involves processing of non-medical, granular and proprietary data types that pose different risks to participants. We first describe traditional justifications for epidemiology that imply a duty to participate for the general…
Configurations of Plague
Diagrams are found at the heart of the modern history of epidemiology. Epidemiologists used spatial diagrams to visualize concepts of epidemics as arrangements of biological, environmental, historical, as well as social factors and to analyze epidemics as configurations. Often, they provided a representation of the networks of relationships implied by epidemics, rather than to offer conclusions about origin and causation. This article will look a…
Afterword
Philip Steadman’s epilogue suggests that the copying of drawings (and its study) by anthropologists, psychologists, architectural students, and Surrealists is revealing not only of processes of diagrammatization but also of the fact that there is something ‘diagrammatic’ about the way in which designs are represented mentally, which affects how they are seen and altered when they are reproduced. The work of diagrams, not only as visual objects bu…
Picturing the Unusual
The article explores and expands the historiography of medical photography. First, it revisits historical scholarship on medical photography to demonstrate the absence of a consensus as to what counts as medical photography and what does not. Secondly, the article illustrates the shortcomings of current analytical perspectives with two examples. The first picture was taken by the board of health in Honolulu in 1900 to visualise bubonic plague but…
Algorithms as folding
This article proposes an analytical approach to algorithms that stresses operations of folding. The aim of this approach is to broaden the common analytical focus on algorithms as biased and opaque black boxes, and to instead highlight the many relations that algorithms are interwoven with. Our proposed approach thus highlights how algorithms fold heterogeneous things: data, methods and objects with multiple ethical and political effects. We exem…
Sulphuric Utopias
How early twentieth century fumigation technologies transformed maritime quarantine practices and inspired utopian visions of disease-free global trade. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fumigation technologies transformed global practices of maritime quarantine through chemical and engineering innovation. One of these technologies, the widely used Clayton machine, blasted sulphuric acid gas through a docked ship in an effort …
Charles Allen McCoy, Diseased States
The question of why states react differently to epidemics could hardly be more timely. Many of the registers historians used to explain different national approaches to epidemic control could not be confirmed in this ongoing pandemic. Neither the dichotomy between authoritarianism and liberal democracy nor the standard reference to equity in the North–South topography of global health aligns with the geography of Covid-19 case and mortality rates…
A box, a trough and marbles
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 …
An Epidemic for Sale
This essay tells the story of the "Danysz virus," a bacterial culture that was designed and deployed to cause epidemics among rodents and was sold globally by the Institut Pasteur from 1900. Jean Danysz (1860-1928) initially identified the culture during his studies of epidemics in population cycles of common voles. His experiments turned to the ambitious goal of increasing the bacteria's virulence by emulating the rodent's animal economy in the …
Narrative Science
Narrative Science examines the use of narrative in scientific research over the last two centuries. It brings together an international group of scholars who have engaged in intense collaboration to find and develop crucial cases of narrative in science. Motivated and coordinated by the Narrative Science project, funded by the European Research Council, this volume offers integrated and insightful essays examining cases that run the gamut from ge…
Domesticating models
Our article traces the representation of pandemic modelling in UK print media from the emergence of Covid-19 to the early stages of implementing the first UK-wide lockdown in late March 2020. Covid modelling, it is widely assumed, has shaped policy decisions and public responses to the pandemic in unprecedented ways. We analyse how the UK print media has configured modelling as a significant evidence tool in the representation of the pandemic. In…
Jacob Steere-Williams, The Filth Disease
Digital epidemiology, deep phenotyping and the enduring fantasy of pathological omniscience
Epidemiology is a field torn between practices of surveillance and methods of analysis. Since the onset of COVID-19, epidemiological expertise has been mostly identified with the first, as dashboards of case and mortality rates took centre stage. However, since its establishment as an academic field in the early 20th century, epidemiology's methods have always impacted on how diseases are classified, how knowledge is collected, and what kind of k…
Circulation as a Visual Practice
This special issue looks at some of the ways that images are adopted, co‐opted, and adapted in the life sciences and beyond. It brings together papers that investigate the role of visualization in scientific knowledge‐production with contributions that focus on the distribution and dissemination of knowledge to a broader audience. A commentary provides a critical perspective. In this editorial we introduce circulation as a practice to better unde…
Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb. Epidemic Empire
Over recent decades, many social inconveniences have become known as epidemics. But when, where, and how does something become framed as epidemic, and what does it mean for the spread of ideas, of violence, of fashion trends, or of diseases to become objects of epidemiological concern? Important reflective work on the meaning of epidemic has been carried out beyond the narrow disciplinary bounds of formal epidemiology. Charles Rosenberg’s seminal…
A Short Introduction into the English-Language Historiography of Epidemiology
This very short introduction into the bibliography of modern epidemiology in English-language literature aims to achieve two modest goals. First, the works presented will be separated into two bodies of historical scholarship, to distinguish the history of the field as told by epidemiological practitioners from the work developed in the history of science, medicine, and public health. Second, this essay focuses on a modern history of epidemiology…
Sociology (17 works) · Epistemology (15 works) · Political science (15 works) · Medicine (14 works) · History (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · History (8 works) · Pathology (8 works) · History of Science and Medicine (7 works)