The Making of the Microbial Body, 1900s-2012

Abstract

This dissertation examines how the relationship between microbes and the human body has been reconfigured over the course of the twentieth century and into the first decades of the twenty-first century. It presents a counter-narrative to the ways in which we have tended to view microbe-human relations to make sense of the emergence of twenty-first century microbial selves by focusing on the normal microbiota.