Trachoma is the leading infectious cause of blindness worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. Despite this prevalence, it does not feature prominently in narratives of global health history. It is typically categorized as one of many ‘neglected tropical diseases’, historically not deemed worthy of research, funding, or policymaking by relevant authorities. The project from which this talk is drawn seeks to recover meanings of neglect in the history of global health, including but not limited to neglected diseases. Trachoma became associated with China following its widely publicized prevalence among the Chinese Labour Corps in the First World War; although trachoma was recognized widely as the cause of a public health crisis there, it was not easy for the Republican government, beset by war and poverty, to proactively control a disease that was notoriously difficult to diagnose or cure. After 1949, however, research in Beijing proved transformative. Chinese researchers’ successful isolation of the trachoma pathogen in 1957 served as a catalyst to intensify research on the disease globally, especially at UK Medical Research Council sites in London and the Gambia. Correspondence from the Wellcome Trust archives demonstrates the permeability of the so-called Iron Curtain, South-South connections in medical research, and Cold War competition alongside cooperation in communications relating to trachoma research between Beijing, London, and Fajara in the Gambia. Tracing the story of trachoma’s neglect as a research priority for global health stakeholders thus reveals that it was not actually neglected everywhere around the world.

Mary Augusta Brazelton is Professor of Global Studies of Science, Technology, and Medicine in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, where she is also a Fellow of Jesus College and Research Fellow of the Needham Research Institute. At the Needham Institute, she is principal investigator of the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation funded project ‘Lu Gwei-Djen as Biochemist and Historian of Chinese Science: Recovering a Major Archive’. In 2019, she published Mass Vaccination: Citizens’ Bodies and State Power in Modern China with Cornell University Press; in 2023, she published China in Global Health: Past and Present with Cambridge University Press in its Global China Elements series.