Christos Lynteris, "How Plague Got Rats: Mastering a Zoonotic Pandemic" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2026)

About this episode

Christos Lynteris discusses his book on the historical association between rats and plague, focusing on the Third Plague Pandemic and its implications for zoonotic disease understanding.

Today, rats are nearly synonymous with plague, but this association is surprisingly recent. For centuries, plague devastated populations without being linked to animals. So how did the rat become the symbol of one of history's deadliest diseases? In How Plague Got Rats: Mastering a Zoonotic Pandemic (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026), Professor Christos Lynteris unravels this story by focusing on the Third Plague Pandemic, a global outbreak that began in China in the 1850s and claimed an estimated 15 million lives by the mid-twentieth century. This was the first major pandemic recognized by scientists as zoonotic—spread from animals to humans—and it marked a turning point in both medical science and global health. Through a gripping historical investigation, Professor Lynteris explores how rats entered the medical imagination of the time. He reveals how scientific thinking about disease vectors evolved in tandem with colonial power structures as plague responses unfolded across Asia, Africa, and the Americas. From laboratory discoveries to imperial interventions, the rat became central not just to understanding plague, but to shaping new forms of epidemiological reasoning…

People in this episode

Host: Marshall Poe

Guest: Christos Lynteris

Topics covered

• plague
• zoonotic diseases
• history of medicine
• colonialism
• epidemiology
• public health

Keywords

• plague
• rats
• zoonosis
• Third Plague Pandemic
• colonial power
• epidemiological reasoning
• public health
• history

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Johns Hopkins University Press

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