KEYNOTE IV: GUILLAUME LACHENAL
Crisis upon crisis. Ruderal landscapes, traces and the history of medicine
What happens to the history of medicine and health when the world surrounding us experiences crisis upon crisis? What kind of stories, methods and archives should we turn to, as the “pile of debris before us grows skyward” ? My lecture is an attempt to intensify the conversation between the history of medicine, the environmental humanities and the biosciences. Using the history of the HIV-Aids pandemic as an example, I will explore what we can gain by engaging, as historians of medicine, with ruderality – the shared condition of living among the rubble – and landscapes – understood as sets of multi-specific ecological relations, as multi-layered spaces shaped by the sedimentation of time, history and crises, but also as repositories of signs, traces and meanings left, perceived and interpreted by multiple beings, including other-than-humans. Such perspective enables to “place” and to “environmentalize” our histories of medicine and health, of course – to “bring them down to earth”, as Bruno Latour said. But it can do more than this. Noticing, unearthing and following the traces that form the landscape can help us imagine “unimagined histories”. Drawing from my research in East Cameroon and North Paris, I will show how, for example, the genetic sequences of pathogens, as well as archeological, architectural and urban traces, can help us research and write unimagined histories – that are open-ended, not pre-packaged in archival boxes, and shaped by the agencies and interpretations of other-than-us. They start from and lead to the ruderal landscapes of now, shaped by crisis upon crisis, by medicine itself and by life among their debris.
BIO
Guillaume Lachenal is Professor in History of Science at médialab, Sciences Po, Paris. His research explores the interface of medical history with anthropology, planetary health and biology, focusing especially on the utopias and disasters woven into the history of colonial medicine, epidemics and decolonization in Africa. His first book, The Lomidine Files. The untold story of a medical disaster in colonial Africa (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017, Rosen Prize 2019), retraced the biography of a colonial wonder-drug, pentamidine, which caused several large-scale accidents during campaigns against sleeping sickness. His second book, The Doctor who Would Be King (Duke University Press, 2022), tells the extraordinary story of Dr David, a French colonial army doctor who governed an entire region of the French colony of Cameroon and the whole Pacific island of Wallis on his own, realizing the fantasy of medical government.
In collaboration with ethnographers and biologists, he has developed several collective projects exploring the memories, traces and landscapes of colonial biomedicine, including the visual book Traces of the future. An archaeology of medical research in Africa (edited with Wenzel Geissler, John Manton and Noemi Tousignant) and his current project An archaeology of HIV in Paris. Spaces, memories and genetic sequences around the former Claude Bernard Hospital.