4 - “A Land Full of Wild Animals”: Snakes, Venoms, and Imperial Antidotes

Summary

As the Pasteur institutes and bacteriological laboratories were established in India, rabies became an important concern for British physicians and residents. This was common in the French colonies as well, where the colonial Pasteur institutes often “actively sought” cases of rabies to popularize the antirabic vaccine. As referred to earlier, in India rabies and the pariah street dogs captured increasing medical attention beginning in the 1890s. This was a relatively recent preoccupation and it overshadowed another and different British tradition in India beginning in the eighteenth century of studying injury and death caused by the bites of animals. Historically, the focus was on snakebites, which was a much greater problem in India; many more people died from snakebites than from hydrophobia throughout the nineteenth century. Consequently, British naturalists from the eighteenth century engaged in the extensive collection and study of Indian snakes and venoms and in experimentation with indigenous treatments for them. This was part of an Orientalist and romantic interest in tropical nature and fauna, which developed alongside the colonial policies of wildlife destruction and forest clearing to increase agricultural revenue. By the middle of the nineteenth century, a third development took place in pharmacological research on Indian snake venoms.

This tradition was overshadowed by the preoccupation with rabies in the late nineteenth century. Then by the early twentieth century, the advent of the Pasteurian antivenene marginalized the British engagement with Indian snakes and venoms in colonial India.