This ambitious history is a pleasure to think with. At its center is the Clayton machine or apparatus, the world’s leading maritime fumigation system in the early 1900s, patented in 1899 by Thomas Adam Clayton, a Scottish cotton farmer living in Louisiana. Inside the machine, a small furnace burned sulfur and blew the resulting sulfur dioxide gas (SO2) through pipes and hoses into enclosed spaces for pressurized fumigation. Clayton’s machine set the standard for fumigating ships until the interwar era. It had three purposes: killing germs, killing animal and insect pests, and removing “infection,” a disease-inducing foulness that clung to material things, such as baggage, clothing, food, goods, and ships.
Cowritten by two medical humanists from Scottish universities, this volume offers a remarkable example of a tightly focused study of specific technology (Clayton’s machine) relevant to multiple scholarly fields. This reader noted three particular fields.
First, the book...