This paper explores how biological interactions between species shape human knowledge. Between 1919 and 1936 the Rockefeller-funded Jamaica Hookworm Commission toured Jamaica, attempting to tackle hookworm disease. Their aims, campaign head Benjamin Washburn always said, were ‘educational as well as curative’: they aimed to use hookworm as an educational tool to spread knowledge about ‘living well’ and create sanitary citizens out of the Jamaican labouring classes. Most Jamaicans did not know about hookworm (Ancylostoma & Necator spp.), but they were familiar with what they called the ‘greedy worm’ (roundworm, Ascaris lumbricoides), which they treated with wormweed (Chenopodium ambrisoides). This paper discusses how folk medical knowledge of one parasitic worm helped a biomedical disease control programme construct knowledge of a different parasite, and how this was underpinned by the biological relationships between the two worms.

Jonathan David Roberts is a historian and biologist. Following an undergraduate degree in Combined Honours Biological Sciences and History at the University of Leeds and an MSc in the History of Science, Medicine and Technology at the University of Oxford, he has recently completed a PhD at the University of Leeds. His PhD drew together biological and historical methods to explore the interactions of people, parasites and environments through comparative studies of hookworm in Jamaica, the Windward Islands and Cornwall between 1900 and 1936. He has also published on guinea worm, and particularly the guinea worm eradication programme of 1986-present.