2 - Moral Geographies of Tropical Bacteriology

Summary

Bacteriological laboratories in India emerged out of a particular confluence of British and French medical and imperial discourses. While the intersection of two diverse medical traditions promised new breakthroughs in imperial medicine, it was also entrenched in existing modes of imperial medical form and praxis. It is through this process of assimilation that germ theory and Pasteur institutes acquired a unique specificity in the tropics. Imperial attitudes toward the tropics and a Victorian moralistic distaste of tropical pathogens shaped the Pasteur institutes and bacteriological practices in India. In the process, tropical bacteriology came to function within a “moral geography.” David N. Livingstone has referred to “moral climatology” to show that late nineteenth-century scientific and medical discourse defined climate in the tropics in moralistic idioms. There was a “pathologization of space” under medical men like Manson and Sambon, who closely linked the existence of parasites in tropical countries to the older, previously held categories of tropicality. The consequence of this connection was a regime of “moral prophylaxis.”1 Here I use the word “geography” instead of “climate” to refer to the negative characterization of the tropics through wider medical, moral, cultural, and racial categories, within which medical and administrative officials conceived and established colonial bacteriology.

This chapter narrates the story of the conflicts and convergences that took place when the established traditions of tropical medicine met with Pasteurism in India.