Visual Plague by Christos Lynteris

Author:Christos Lynteris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press

Figure 3.6

Runchore Segregation Camp, Karachi. Courtesy of Wellcome Collection.

Embedded in what Mark Harrison has identified as the mutual metaphorical function between war and medicine in the context of Empire (militarized medicine, medicalized war), the main focus of plague camp photographs was on disinfecting native subjects.94 As we saw in the previous chapter, disinfection played a key role as an epidemic control technology at the time, and its photographic framing was of key importance for the configuration of the pandemic. Here I will focus on the synergy between quarantine and disinfection as applied to humans inside plague camps through further examination of the Karachi Plague Committee’s 1897 album.95

One of the most striking and perhaps best known images of the Karachi Plague Committee album (figure 3.7), captioned “In the Disinfecting Tub,” depicts a scene in an unidentified plague camp around Karachi between January and June 1897. Two British soldiers are holding an elderly Indian man in a wooden tub; a colonial officer, cane in hand, supervises the disinfection process while another officer stands guard. Behind these central figures of the image, we see a line of other washing tubs as well as a fourth colonial officer and several Indian men, one of whom seems to be getting ready to undergo disinfection. The entire scene takes place in the open, and we can see the clothes of previously disinfected individuals thrown to the ground, which has been turned into thick mud by the liquid contained in the tubs and carried in tin boxes lying nearby. The man undergoing disinfection is clothed from the waist down and is looking at the camera as are the soldiers who are holding him by the arms inside the tub while trying to maintain their balance on the slippery, muddy ground.

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