Bacteria, Surfaces, and Biomaterials

• In Event: New Social Forms of the Post-Antibiotic Era: More-than-Human Hybrids, Governance and Knowledge of Human-Microbe Relations - I

Abstract

Since the largescale introduction of invasive diagnostics and treatment from the 1950s,
surface contamination of catheters, implants and so forth has been a continuous source of hospital infections (Avliffe et al 2003, Wenzel 2005). The introduction of advanced medicine, like aggressive chemotherapies,transplantation medicine etc., with a concomitant aging population fundamentally altered the hospital population, and intensive care units became filled with immunocompromised patients, susceptible to infection (Gradmann 2018). From the 1970s, the rapidly expanding use of biomaterials in diagnostics and treatment changed the microbial environment in hospitals. In response to the increasing technoscientifization of medicine and its concomitant change of both materials used and the microbial environment, the discipline of hygiene became inspired by dynamics of environmental change, and increasingly relied on theories from the new field of microbial ecology, developing from the 1970s (Sangodeyi 2014).Inspired by Hannah Landeckers call for a history of matter (Landecker 2016), this paper will explore the history of the biomaterial-microbial interface, focusing on the relationship between human, industrial and biological activity and processes in the 1970s and 80s. On the one hand, it will show how knowledge and theories have developed in response to these changing biological processes. On the other, it will show how historical events and processes have materialized as biological events, processes, and ecologies. In so doing, it will focus on the transformations of bacteria and bacterial ecologies as social, temporal and spatial events.

Author

• Anne Lie, University of Oslo