During the nineteenth century, European scinetists and physicians considered the tropics the natural home of pathogens. Hot and miasmic, the tropical world was the locus of diesase, for Euopeans the great enemy of civilization. In the late nineteenth century when bacterilological laboratories and institutions were introduced to British Indaia, they were therefore as much an imperial mission to cleanse and civilize a tropical colony as a medical one to eradicate disease. Bacteriology offered a panacea in colonial India, a way by which the multifarious political, social, environmntal, and medical problems and anxieties, intrinsically linkied to its diseases, could have a single reslolution.
Bacteriology in British India is th first book to provide a social and cultural history of bacteriology in colonial India, situating it within the confluence of advances in germ theory, Pastuerian vaccines, colonial medicine, laboratoroy science, and British imperialism. It recounts the genesis of bacteriology and laboratory medicine in India through a complex history of conflict and alignment between Pasteurism and British imperial medicine. By investigating an array of laboratory notes, medical literature, and literary sources, the volume links colonial medical research with issues of poverty, race, natioanlism, and imperial attitudes toward tropical climate and wildlife, contributing to a wide field of scholarship like the history of science and medicine, sociology ofscience, and cultural history.
Pratik Chakrabarti is senior lecturer in history at the University of Kent, UK.
Reviews
"This is a highly innovative study that explores the intersections of laboratory science, medicine, and colonial imperialism. In it, Pratik Chakrabarti persuasively reveals how a blend of Pasteurian ideology and an older `climatic medicine' produced a new imperial morality in India."--Ilana Löwy, senior research fellow, INSERM, Paris
Details
First Published: 31 Oct 2012
13 Digit ISBN: 9781580464086
Pages: 316
Size: 9 x 6
Binding: Hardback
Imprint: University of Rochester Press
Series:
Rochester Studies in Medical HistorySubject:
History of Science & MedicineBIC Class: MBX
Details updated on 22 May 2013
Contents
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Bacteriology in India: A Moral Paradigm
- 3 Moral Geographies of Tropical Bacteriology
- 4 Imperial Laboratories and Animal Experiments
- 5 "A Land Full of Wild Animals": Snakes, Venoms, andImperial Antidotes
- 6 Pasteurian Paradigm and Vaccine Research in India
- 7 Pathoge ns and Places: Cholera Research in the Tropics
- 8 Conclusion
- 9 Notes
- 10 Bibliography
- 11 Index
