French medicine recast colonized Africans as biological threats to the white race

Evidence

Modern medicine in particular saw the colonized less as potential disciples than as hosts to dangerous parasites that physically threatened the white race. To the intimacy of the great republican family in which Africans and French easily mixed-albeit as unequals-science juxtaposed the image of two fundamentally incompatible and different races whose trajectories could never hope to converge. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 489

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to arguments that republican universalism coexisted with developing biological racism; echoes the reader’s existing material on moral panics and ideologies masking race.