Ordering Life by Kristin Johnson

Author:Kristin Johnson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2012-11-17T17:00:00+00:00

“SOMETHING AMISS”

This new environment was brought home to Jordan when, in the summer of 1925, in the company of his daughters, Ada and Hilda, and Walter Rothschild, he crossed the English Channel and finally made the journey to Zurich for the Third International Congress of Entomology. The account of the first evening’s meeting described the feelings of the organizing committee as they waited for the congress members to arrive. Jordan, Walther Horn, Anton von Schulthess, and the other Swiss entomologists who had organized the congress stood anxiously in the hall reserved for the opening reception. Would all who had promised to attend actually come? With relief, they watched as the stairs to the hall filled with entomologists from near and far. Old friends reunited, and correspondents met face to face for the first time. The president and his helpers relaxed: “the success of the congress was secure.”

The memory of the war defined the first meetings, as statements of internationalist sentiment took on a whole new meaning. The president of the Swiss Entomological Society, Arnold Pictet, announced with old-fashioned internationalist fervor that the gathering expressed the scientific solidarity of all nations, one of the highest representations of the progress of man’s intelligence and conscience. Firmly aware of recent evidence to the contrary, Schulthess pointedly concluded his welcome with the hope that no allusions within or outside of any of the sessions would disturb friendly agreement and impair the congress’s proceedings.30 Jordan took the opportunity in his paper on fleas to emphasize the “drawbacks of nationalism in science” by noting that the demonstration that fleas transmitted bubonic plague from rats to humans had appeared as early as 1902 in Russian, but the lack of a summary in French or other Western language had prevented this conclusion’s acceptance abroad.31 Jordan and Horn even turned the appeals to applied entomology into a new argument for internationalism. “Entomology is a national economic factor of great importance,” they wrote in their introduction to the Proceedings. While a small number of skillful and awkward leaders had led their peoples to fight against their own species, an infinitely larger army of insects destroyed lives, property, food, and forests with no attention to either national feelings nor a sense of justice.32 Entomologists, they insisted, must follow nature’s example, and abandon national feeling and petty political disputes.

Couched in internationalist rhetoric or no, the new-found interest in entomology as relevant to human health was on full display at the Zurich congress. In his welcome address, Karl Hescheler noted how the world war had shown that many problems of human health were in fact problems of entomology, and as a result, the international congress had become a matter not only of promoting the science of entomology but the well-being of mankind.33 H. S. Fremlin, of Britain’s Ministry of Health, gave a long list of threats posed by insects to human health and agriculture, citing in particular the huge tracts of fertile land in Africa rendered uninhabitable due to the presence of the tsetse fly.

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