Bacteriology in British India: Laboratory Medicine and the Tropics by Pratik Chakrabarti (review)

Medical bacteriology has long been regarded as the most practical among those basic medical sciences that contributed to the laboratory revolution in medicine. Where physiologists’ authority rested on laboratories, bacteriologists impressed with being able to make laboratory science work outside of such places—be it as microbiological diagnosis, inspecting sewage, or fighting tropical diseases. In particular the analysis of campaigns for the control of tropical infections has resulted in a historiography that dwells on the image of bacteriology as a technological resource of colonialism. More recently, tropical medicine has been approached in a different dimension, as facilitating colonial laboratories, places which through their social, cultural, and biological specificity furthered the development of science in the colonizing countries.

Pratik Chakrabarti takes yet another step and inquires less into the implementation of bacteriology in India but into its apprehension by Indians. Existing notions of tropicality got transformed through the application of bacteriology by local scientist into a “a mode of knowledge that combined causation and cure within a single paradigm to provide a new moral force in resolving the myriad of realities of what were known as colonial pathologies” (p. 23). This approach echoes Bruno Latour’s The Pasteurization of France, yet in an openly critical way. The lack of complexity that Latour’s account of European microbiology has been criticized for has, as Chakrabarti maintains, even graver consequences in a colonial setting. Still, Chakrabarti buys into the same basic framework of studying science and society as being connected in a moral regime. The book is so to say Pasteurian in yet another way. It centers on activities of the Indian branches of the Pasteur Institute’s international network. These are followed from the late nineteenth into the mid-twentieth century. This is done in a series of investigations into different activities rather than by employing chronology.

The first chapter explores the moral charging of bacteriology as a civilizing force in a colonial setting. It turned out to be more distinct as in Great Britain that is used as a case for comparison. The second chapter takes another step and investigates how a French science became embedded into India. It did so by reinterpreting tropicality. The tropics became somewhat less tropical while bacteriology was charged with the notion of a civilizing force that India needed. The third chapter is devoted to the adaption of a method, animal experimentation. Being a morally contested practice in Europe, it turned out to be less so in a colonial context. Methods traveled, their critics did not. Instead the segregated character of colonial society “sanitized” moral criticism. While some animals became the object of widespread devotion, the use of others in the pursuit of building colonial institutions went unchecked. The following chapter on snake venoms and antitoxins takes up the example of a prominent health issue well suited to market the Pasteurians’ toolbox and antiserum in particular. The fifth chapter explores how India became the stage for a complicated alignment of British and French traditions in vaccinology. The French tradition—favoring live vaccines based on attenuated strains—collided with the British tradition, which relied on anti-infective qualities of blood and killed vaccines. This was further complicated by ideas of stronger immunizing powers of European blood as compared to that of Indians and of tropical nature elevating the dangerousness of germs. The last chapter takes up two interconnected issues: the conception of India as the home of cholera and the strange unpopularity of the very scientific methodology that had defined it as a bacterial infection. It was the Bay of Bengal as the assumed home of cholera that had made India an object of curiosity for European hygiene. Still, Robert Koch’s medical bacteriology, and more specifically the abstract description of diseases that it entailed, turned out to be difficult to align with Indian science and society. It favored a framing of diseases through local conditions rather than through...