Do pandemics have lasting consequences for political behavior? The authors address this question by examining the consequences of the deadliest pandemic of the last millennium: the Black Death (1347–1351). They claim that pandemics can influence politics in the long run if the loss of life is high enough to increase the price of labor relative to other factors of production. When this occurs, labor-repressive regimes, such as serfdom, become untenable, which ultimately leads to the development of proto-democratic institutions and associated political cultures that shape modalities of political engagement for generations. The authors test their theory by tracing the consequences of the Black Death in German-speaking Central Europe. They find that areas hit hardest by that pandemic were more likely to adopt inclusive political institutions and equitable land ownership patterns, to exhibit electoral behavior indicating independence from landed elite influence during the transition to mass politics, and to have significantly lower vote shares for Hitler’s National Socialist Party in the Weimar Republic’s fateful 1930 and July 1932 elections.

The 1899/1900 arrival of bubonic plague in Argentina had thrown the model status of Buenos Aires as a hygienic city into crisis. Where the idea of foreign threats and imported epidemics had dominated the thinking of Argentina’s sanitarians at that time, plague renewed concerns about hidden threats within the fabric of the capital’s dense environment; concerns that led to new sanitary measures and unprecedented rat-campaigns supported by the large-scale application of sulphur dioxide. The article tells the story of early twentieth-century urban sanitation in Buenos Aires through the lens of a new industrial disinfection apparatus. The Aparato Marot, also known as Sulfurozador was acquired and integrated in the capital’s sanitary administration by the epidemiologist José Penna in 1906 to materialise two key lessons learned from plague. First, the machine was supposed to translate the successful disinfection practices of global maritime sanitation into urban epidemic control in Argentina. Second, the machine’s design enabled public health authorities to reinvigorate a traditional hygienic concern for the entirety of the city’s terrain. While the Sulfurozador offered effective destruction of rats, it promised also a comprehensive – and utopian – disinfection of the whole city, freeing it from all imaginable pathogens, insects as well as rodents. In 1910, the successful introduction of the Sulfurozador encouraged Argentina’s medico-political elite to introduce a new principle of ‘general prophylaxis’. This article places the apparatus as a technological modernisation of traditional sanitary practices in the bacteriological age, which preserved the urban environment – ‘el terreno’ – as a principal site of intervention. Thus, the Sulfurozador allowed the ‘higienistas’ to sustain a long-standing utopian vision of all-encompassing social, bodily and political hygiene into the twentieth century.

Fleas are vectors of bubonic plague, murine typhus and several other rodent borne diseases. As with other vectors of medical importance there is widespread insecticide resistance among the flea population. In our efforts to find alternative insecticides 20 plants were screened for their pulicidal properties by obtaining extracts from these plants. It was observed that extracts of plants Acorus calamus, Allium sativum, Anona Squamosa, Brassica nigra, Croton tiglium, Ocimum sanctum, Piper nigrum possessed pulicidal activity.