Abstract
In crafting the influenza epicenter hypothesis, Kennedy Short ridge deployed environmental and ecological tropes of disease and pathology, but his experimental system remained bound within a laboratory scale. In many respects, Short ridge’s practice resembles the classical bacteriology of Louis Pasteur, as presented in Bruno Latour’s account of the laboratory as a “center of calculation.”¹ Short ridge, like Pasteur, ventured out to farms and slaughter houses to collect biological material, then brought the material back to his laboratory to be translated by inscription devices, including hemagglutinin inhibition test.² Using the language of phylogene tics, he built a classified and ordered