Tyfus, wszy, klatki, karmiciele i II wojna światowa

Abstract

This is a story of typhus, lice, cages, feeders in the scenery of Lviv (present in western Ukraine) during WWII. Herein I take into consideration Bruno Latour guideline, that one of the most important methodological principle of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is following the actors, both human and non-human. However, we should be conscious that such a story is usually focused on the role of Rudolf Weigl (called Polish Oskar Schindler), a biologist and inventor of the vaccine for epidemic typhus, who leads institute in Lviv in that time, and saved a great number of intellectuals, Jews, Polish resistance soldiers, etc., against Nazi Germans and Soviet Russians (among the others, we should mentioned Ludwik Fleck, Zbigniew Herbert, Stefan Banach, etc.). Hence, in this detailed description I am trying to follow all actors of that story, especially in the Weigl’s laboratory. As a conclusion of the text, it should be underlined, that in perspective presented here ANT is only a complementation of humanistic perspective, not totally different field of interests. That is why this article could not be treated as an “orthodox” Latourian approach, but rather one of the voices in the discussion about non-anthropocentric knowledge (I would rather say: not-only-anthropocentric knowledge).