Imperial Medicine: Patrick Manson and the Conquest of Tropical Disease (review)

Douglas M. Haynes. Imperial Medicine: Patrick Manson and the Conquest of Tropical Disease. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. 229 pp. Ill. $37.50, £26.50 (0-8122-3598-3).

It is a brave man these days who uses the word "conquest" in the title of a book about imperial medicine. No sharp intake of breath is needed, though: in Douglas Haynes's highly readable biographical study of Patrick Manson, "conquest" refers not to bodies or localities in the tropics but to the metropolitan discipline that Manson did much to shape, along the way earning himself the epithet "father of tropical medicine." Haynes gently deconstructs the previous heroic accounts, concentrating instead on what Manson's career tells us about medicine and its practitioners in Victorian England, as reflected in and molded by events on the periphery.

Haynes begins with Manson's early career in the Far East. Manson's official duties for the Imperial Chinese Customs Service and the presence of Christian medical missionaries are invoked to explain how the canny Scot established a lucrative medical practice and ultimately a research-oriented career. His interest in the worm Filaria sanguinis hominis started with a new method for successfully removing bulky scrotal tumors caused by this parasite. The procedure was noteworthy, but Manson was curious and ambitious. Forced to wait for furlough in England to consult medical journals and textbooks in the library of the British Museum, he returned to China and demonstrated that the mosquito served as the filaria's second host. Haynes argues that Manson pitched his new information into an ongoing priority dispute between T. R. Lewis (working in India) and T. S. Cobbold (Britain's foremost helminthologist), anticipating that his request for their independent verification of his results would appear in the home medical press and thereby gain attention where it mattered, in Britain. His ploy paid off: Cobbold supported Manson, and Lewis urged caution over the results, which Cobbold rewrote to further bolster his and Manson's line. Haynes's careful exposition of Lewis v. Cobbold both pre- and post-Manson demonstrates the capture of peripheral knowledge and its reshaping and revaluing in the metropole. As he goes on to show, the episode also provided Manson with a model for scientific collaboration across the miles.

After several successful years in Hong Kong, Manson and his family returned home, intending to live off their capital; the devaluation of Chinese silver scuppered Manson's retirement, however, and he was forced to set up in London as a consultant in tropical diseases. Once established in private practice, with several lectureships and a consultancy at the Seaman's Hospital Society hospital, he turned his attention to the transmission of malaria. He wondered if the mosquito ingested the malaria parasite in a manner analogous to the filarial worm. Lacking the requisite research material in London, he was delighted when Ronald Ross of the Indian Medical Service came calling during home leave. Haynes quickly retells the familiar tale of Manson teaching Ross to find plasmodia in blood slides, but dwells in interesting detail on the means Manson used to promote Ross's research among the home medical establishment. While mail delivery sometimes went awry and Manson did not receive experimental proof—microscope slides—in time, his own growing reputation bolstered the unknown Ross's results.

Ross's eventual success brought him the Nobel Prize. But Manson, too, did well out of his and his protégé's efforts, says Haynes: his appointment as medical advisor at the Colonial Office, and his key role in the formation of the London School of Tropical Medicine and the Tropical Diseases Research Fund, testify to the increasing respect accorded to him. In discussing the School and the Fund, Haynes shifts from the specifics of disease research to the more general development of the specialty and the prestige of its practitioners, but he sees these...