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  • Imperial Medicine: Patrick Manson and the Conquest of Tropical Disease
  • Sarah Hodges
Douglas M. Haynes, Imperial Medicine: Patrick Manson and the Conquest of Tropical Disease. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001)

What is imperial medicine? For many years in their memoirs and biographies, imperial doctors described their work as a combination of conducting research on exotic diseases, ministering to merchant seamen, and telling anecdotes about removing leeches from the occasional American naturalist’s nose. 1 Haynes’ book is a welcome departure from this heroic tale, and joins the growing field of critical historical studies of medicine and empire. Using key episodes in the career of British doctor and medical researcher Patrick Manson (1844–1922), a man popularly described as the “Father of Tropical Medicine,” Haynes redirects our attention away from tale of solitary research in torpid conditions and instead illuminates a set of individual and institutional relationships and knowledges particular to “imperial medicine.”

Imperial Medicine is about the history of the Victorian medical profession and the conditions for medical research in an age of empire. Distinguishing himself from the growing literature on imperialism and science, technology and medicine (STM), Haynes’ use of the term “imperial” is not driven by an analysis of the relations between ruler and ruled as they were mediated and rearticulated via medical knowledge and practice. 2 Rather, Haynes uses the term “imperial medicine” to describe the global network of research alliances formed by a cohort of Victorian-trained doctors. This position is consistent with what Haynes has argued elsewhere: that to read the history of tropical medicine as an epi-phenomenon of imperialism is reductionist at best. Instead, Haynes aims to situate tropical medicine “not only on the context of imperialism and colonialism; but also in terms of the social history of medicine and science and British society more generally.” 3

Haynes uses Manson’s medical education and early career (Chapter 1) to demonstrate how empire created opportunities for doctors with less-prestigious Scottish or Irish medical degrees, and thereby how empire served as an outlet for the perceived crisis of professional “overpopulation” in Victorian Britain. Manson received his medical degree from Aberdeen in 1865 and began his medical career in China in 1866 where he was to remain for the next twenty-three years. However, as Haynes shows, to be a doctor in empire was generally seen as a second-rate option, in terms of both prestige and money. Why then should imperial doctors, like Manson and others, have conducted research at all? Medical research was not a significant part of or supported robustly in nineteenth-century colonial policy. 4 Yet Manson rose to global fame through his research on the nature of the transmission of parasite-borne infections, such as filariasis and malaria. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 chronicle in great detail the twists and turns of Manson’s medical research and collaborations (those unfamiliar with the specifics of biology may find some of the more technical descriptions in these chapters heavy-going). Haynes argues “for Manson as for other imperial doctors, research provided a cultural vehicle to transcend the geographical marginality of the periphery by participating in a far-flung community of investigators engaged in producing knowledge about the empire” (p. 48). Further, Haynes argues, the research of imperial doctors was not simply a “rudimentary collection of information as directed from the metropole. Rather, they participated as active agents in the constitution of British medicine as imperial medicine” (p. 49). Haynes uses Manson’s career and his research correspondences with doctors in India, Cape Town, Samoa, Ceylon, Burma, Nigeria, Morocco, New Guinea, Demerara and the West Indies, to argue that the conversations among imperial doctors, while certainly mediated by their experience of metropole, were conducted despite the metropole rather than facilitated by it. Haynes’s book can thus be read as an attempt to break away from the core-periphery model of scientific “exchange” or “diffusion” that has heretofore dogged analyses of imperialism and STM.

The final two chapters (5 and 6) discuss Manson’s career after leaving China and relocating to London in 1889, and in particular, his role in establishing the London School of Tropical Medicine. Haynes does not...

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