Bacteriology as a field emerged to conquer tropical diseases and justify colonial medicine

Evidence

One noticeable change was the emergence of a new kind of scientist-physician in France (and elsewhere)-the bacteriologist-whose new scientific method was based on field and laboratory research. This new community dedicated itself to identifying, reproducing for experimental purposes, and eradicating the germs and parasites responsible for the major infectious diseases throughout the industrialized and colonial worlds. Their preferred means of disease control were preventive vaccinations and curative serums or the disruption of breeding grounds. Success came quickly as researchers internationally took up Koch’s and Pasteur’s methods. Thanks to the combined efforts of American and European researchers, the etiology of certain killing diseases in the West-typhoid and cholera-began to be unraveled in the 189o’s. Attention then turned to the tropical climates, where the greatest challenges in this direction still lay. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 210

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the bacteriologist as a distinct new scientist-physician and the field’s field-and-laboratory method.
• XREF: Connects to how ‘tropical medicine’ supplied a scientific rationale for the French civilizing mission in West Africa that the reader is tracing.