Tropical Medicine: Justification for Imperialism

Paul’s lecture on Victorian-era tropical medicine and its connection to imperialism was really interesting to me. I find it fascinating that tropical medicine was both formed out of necessity because of imperialism, and came to be a justification for the very existence of the empire as the field was developed.

Life for British imperialists living in colonies was very difficult. Acclimatization was slow for most and impossible for some; colonies came to be known as “the white man’s grave” because of the vast numbers of people dropping dead from tropical diseases. Living in an imperial colony was a risky venture, and there was a generally accepted high mortality rate among colonists. Malaria, in particular, was responsible for many of the deaths, and two British scientists, Patrick Manson and Ronald Ross, began studying the unforgiving disease. According to Paul’s lecture, Manson’s approach was laboratory research-based; he founded the London School of Tropical Medicine in 1898, and focused his efforts on labs in the UK. Ross, however, took more of a hands-on approach, preferring to do his work “on the ground,” with labor-intensive measures to eliminate malaria in India. Paul noted that this marked the beginning of the divide between medicine and public health, with Mason’s approach representing medicine, and Ross’s representing public health.

The use of tropical medicine specifically, and science in general, as a justification or explanation for imperialism is really quite interesting, and parallels can be drawn with more modern movements of imperialism that have taken place in the name of democratization. English natural philosophers felt that it was their duty to spread scientific enlightenment to the third world; Christianity, which had once been the main excuse for imperialism, was largely replaced by the seemingly more legitimate excuses of scientific knowledge, medicine, and modernization.