How's the Empire? An Essay Review

Douglas M. Haynes. Imperial Medicine: Patrick Manson and the Conquest of Tropical Disease. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. vii, 231 pp.

Alan Bewell. Romanticism and Colonial Disease. Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. xv, 373 pp.

E. M. Collingham. Imperial Bodies: The Physical Existence of the Raj, c. 1800–1947. Cambridge, Polity Press, 2001. xiii, 273 pp.

IN his novel Tancred (1847), Benjamin Disraeli observed that: "the East is a career." According to the three books under review, the East would give many Britons not only their career, but also their literature and sense of embodiment. Each of these books examines different aspects of the impact of empire on British culture and institutions; each describes the imperial production of Britain and Britishness during the nineteenth century. But they have little to say about India and other parts of the empire.

Reading these books led me to reflect again on notions of center and periphery in the history of medicine and science. If a sort of imperial imagination was at the heart of Britishness in the nineteenth century, then how could medicine and science in the empire, even at its most distant outposts, have been "peripheral" to Britain? And if these distant engagements were so crucial to national identity, then to what extent can the history of colonial medicine be reinterpreted as a story of the fabrication of race, of whiteness—both at "home" and abroad?

I

In the logic of Patrick Manson's career, Britain was closely bracketed with the Far East. After graduating from Aberdeen University in 1866, Manson joined the Imperial Chinese Customs Service, and spent the next twenty-two years working as a port surgeon. Like so many canny and ambitious Scotsmen, he found himself at home in the empire. In Amoy, he passed the time speculating on the means of spread of filaria, the minute worms recently identified as the cause of elephantiasis. His description of the role of mosquitoes in their transmission provided a model of the insect vector–parasite relationship, one that would later influence Ronald Ross's investigations of malaria. Back in Britain, Manson excelled as a self-promoter and entrepreneur, using the medical press to create an audience for the new tropical medicine, and founding the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. As Douglas M. Haynes suggests, the career of the father of tropical medicine "reveals a vastly more dynamic, dialectical relationship between the imperial metropole and the periphery than has heretofore been recognized by historians of medicine" (p. 6). In reconstructing Manson's intellectual biography, Haynes demonstrates how he "participated in the dense circulation of people between the imperial periphery and the metropole" (p. 30). Although Manson's research interests and political influence were exceptional, thousands of colonial officials, physicians, and scientists shared his excursive career path, his experience of global wayfaring. And yet, this colonial nomadism has rarely been acknowledged in histories of medicine and science.

More than fifteen years ago, Roy MacLeod urged historians of colonial science and medicine to abandon old assumptions about center and periphery, and instead recognize the "moving metropolis," the dynamic and scattered assembling and dismantling of imperial projects. ¹ In the early 1990s, Paolo Palladino and Michael Worboys surveyed the history of colonial science and pointed out that imperialism had been a great shaper of "metropolitan" scientific institutions and practices. What then was "center," and what "periphery"? ² More recently, MacLeod has again proposed a study of the traffic of scientific ideas, practices, and careers, recognizing that reciprocity is more common than diffusion, and that it is time we considered the complexity of interaction in the many contact zones of empire. ³ Similarly, Ann Laura Stoler asks us to "pursue the overlapping and cross-cutting circuits of persons and policies that make their way from metropole to colony and the other way around...as well as those that connected metropolitan centers...