Colonial doctors embraced Pasteurian bacteriology more readily than French metropolitan physicians

Evidence

In France, academic physicians accepted Pasteur’s results but failed to promote the laboratory-based research he had pioneered. Microbiology did not become part of the medical curriculum before World War I, and the Institut Pasteur remained the only metropolitan center for medical research until World War II. In the colonies, however, military doctors, surgeons, and veterinarians embraced Pasteurian doctrines almost immediately. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 212

Categorization

• XREF: Surprising inversion of the metropole-colony hierarchy; relevant to the reader’s theme of how empire paradoxically advanced scientific modernization beyond France itself.
• QUESTION: Why did metropolitan academic physicians resist laboratory research despite accepting Pasteur’s results? Would be worth chasing the institutional reasons.