Disinfection Trains Fighting Lice on Polish Railways, 1918–1920

Łukasz Mieszkowski focuses on the use bathing and disinfection trains as biopolitical technologies in the context of the (re)emergence of the Polish state during and after the First World War. These trains were used by European armies to combat bacteriological diseases that were spreading throughout European warzones. The case of the Polish disinfection trains shows how these sanitary measures, on the one hand, reflected not just a tactical tool against typhus but a political premise to cleanse the Polish army and the collective body from lice, dirt and other impurities. On the other hand, Mieszkowski shows how this premise had impractical, if not devastating, effects on the soldiers' hygiene and health. The coercive use of bathing and disinfection trains was not only a sanitary advancement, but both an epidemiological means of defining the collective body and a tool for its control.