Bubonic Plague comes to Sydney in 1900
From Faculty of Medicine Online Museum and Archive
In contrast, Echenberg has considerable praise for the way that the epidemic was handled in Sydney. There, doctors J. Ashburton Thompson, Frank Tidswell and William Armstrong helped to develop twentieth-century understandings of plague, including acting on what was still a new and contested idea: that Yersinia pestis was spread to humans by fleas, whose more usual hosts were rats. Further, the specific flea, Xenopsylla cheopis, which much preferred Sydney to Melbourne and did not like Tasmania at all, was the main vector.