Bacteriology in British India: Laboratory Medicine and the Tropics by Pratik Chakrabarti

Abstract

122 BOOK REVIEWS Pratik Chakrabarti, Bacteriology in British India: Laboratory Medicine and the Tropics (Rochester, New York: University of Rochester Press, 2012). ISBN 978-1-58046-408-6 (HC). x + 304 pp. This detailed critical study exemplifies contemporary historical writing about medical practice. Its scope and sources are broad, its engagement with technical material is rigorous, and its arguments are consistent and largely convincing. Although focused on intersections between British India and bacteriology—primarily in its post-1890 iterations—scholars of Australasian medicine will find many points of contrast and connection with Pratik Chakrabarti’s fine text. The author’s central tenet is that the universalist claims of Pasteurian and Kochian bacteriology were patently contradicted when imported into post-1857 India. The study of microbes in the tropics was never a discrete technological and epistemological revolution. Rather, it intersected with prevailing prejudices to animate dialectic between germs and climate. In imperial thought, cultures—in both bacteriological and anthropological senses—‘behaved differently in hot climates’ (p. 10). The unifying position driving Chakrabarti’s analysis is the moral stance enabled by bacteriological research and praxis under the Raj. Germs, he insists, ‘were inescapably entwined in a moral imperial narrative of disease, filth, and putrefaction’ (p. 3). They therefore justified a paternalistic rationale for controlling India, and Indians, to render the tropical environment safer and more humane—at least in British eyes. Successive chapters overlap and occasionally leapfrog each other, addressing the promises and failings of the Pasteurian paradigm in India; implications for the geographical location of laboratories; colonial appropriation and experimentation upon local animals; wild beasts, snake venoms, and antidotes; rabies and vaccine research; and the construct of India as the natural ‘home’ for cholera. The possibility that a panacea might emerge from bacteriology— especially via vaccination and serum therapies—appealed to many Britons and Indians alike. This potential engendered an almost evangelical zeal in some officers within the predominantly white Indian Medical Service (IMS). Their conviction of doing ‘right’, both in scientific and societal terms, excused the suppression of competing claims for moral consideration among indigenous denizens of India— human or otherwise. If such imperatives helped to keep Indians Health & History ● 16/1 ● 2014 123 out of responsible medical roles until the 1930s, in the context of vivisection, ‘the notion of care for animals was concomitant with the idiom of rule’ (p. 96). Despite Chakrabarti’s frequent invocation of ‘morality’, however, I often found his usage a little vague. Nowhere in the text was his own moral frame of reference located within a wider historical, philosophical, or bioethical context (as has been done for French colonial medicine in Algeria, for instance). Readers will acknowledge that side-lining research undertaken by Indians was an undesirable feature of IMS hegemony. Yet Chakrabarti himself is ambivalent about Ram Nath Chopra’s 1930s efforts to integrate biomedical and traditional approaches to snakebite. Likewise, it is implicit in Chakrabarti’s rendering that climate does not affect the biological or pathological characteristics of microorganisms. Surely, therefore, his position should be stated explicitly when contending that ‘the close link created by the British between cholera and the tropics … internalized a fatalism in colonial medical thinking about the possibilities of the eradication of cholera from India’ (p. 198). In light of my own studies on snakes in colonial Australia, I noted that the one chapter in which ‘morality’is conspicuously absent is the one focused on serpents. Indeed, I take issue with the author’s claim that Indian snakebite research ‘reflected the characteristics of colonial science defined by the metropolis and the periphery’(p. 124). From 1865 to 1910, medical references to snakes and their venoms—and to antidotes and their innovators—provoked a rich intercolonial dialogue between India and Australia, with nary a nod to British ‘expertise’. At a conceptual level the author sets up Bacteriology in British India to challenge the agency afforded to non-human actors by Bruno Latour’s oeuvre. Much, however, is in the telling. One could readily reassemble the historical elements arrayed by Chakrabarti to fashion a tale in which germs, landscape, devices and animals—especially flies, which barely rate a mention—could prove just as active in constructing ‘tropical’ diseases as did...