Historical Microbiology: Researching Past Bioevents by Integrating Scholarship (Re)Sources with Paleomicrobiology Assets

Abstract

The analysis of past epidemics and pandemics, either spontaneous or of human origin, may revise the physical history of microbiota and create a temporal context in our understanding regarding pathogen attributes like virulence, evolution, transmission and disease dynamics. The data of high-tech scientific methods seem reliable, but their interpretation may still be biased when tackling events of the distant past. Such endeavors should be adjusted to other cognitive resources including historical accounts reporting the events of interest and references in alien medical cultures and terminologies; the latter may contextualize them differently from current practices. Thus ‘historical microbiology’ emerges. Validating such resources requires utmost care, as these may be susceptible to different biases regarding the interpretation of facts and phenomena; biases partly due to methodological limitations.

Plain language summary

Bacteria and viruses have always impacted humankind. They do this directly by causing illness or indirectly by destroying crops and threatening livestock. We can learn a lot by studying disease events of the past – for example, we can see how bacteria and viruses have changed over time and predict how they might change in the future. This knowledge could be important to understanding present disease events and predicting future ones. In this review, we propose the concept of ‘historical microbiology’, which encourages collaboration between scientists, doctors, historians and linguists to provide historical, linguistic and cultural context to our scientific understanding of diseases of the past.

Tweetable abstract

Historical microbiology is meant to conceptualize bioscientific data in transdisciplinary research by fully integrating humanities (re)sources with paleo-/archaeo-microbiology state-of-the-art subdisciplines, such as microbial paleogenomics, so as to comprehend past bioevents and avert or contain future epidemics.

Keywords::

• archaeological chemistry
• biomolecular archaeology
• Black Death
• epidemics
• global catastrophic biological risk/global catastrophic biological event
• historical microbiology
• paleogenomics
• paleomicrobiology
• paleopathology
• Plague of Athens

Author contributions

Conceptualization, investigation, original draft: ME Kambouris. Conceptualization, supervision, review and editing: GP Patrinos. Investigation, original draft: A Velegraki. Investigation, review and editing: Y Manoussopoulos.

Financial & competing interests disclosure

The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending or royalties.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.