Tropical medicine in nineteenth-century India.

It is customary to regard 'tropical medicine' as a product of the late nineteenth century, 'its instrument the microscope, its epistemology the germ theory of disease'. The accepted interpretation is that tropical medicine was a European concept: originating in Britain and France and exported to the colonies by pioneering medical scientists. This interpretation is useful inasmuch as 'tropical medicine' as a discipline with its own journals, institutions, qualifications, and an exclusive discourse did not emerge until the last decade of the nineteenth century, and partly in response to metropolitan imperatives. But the European perspective of existing histories of 'tropical medicine' has obscured important developments in the understanding of diseases in the tropics which took place prior to 1890; most of which occurred in the colonies themselves and especially in India. In order to distinguish this body of knowledge from its later, institutional incarnation, it will be referred to here as 'tropical hygiene': the term most commonly used by medical men in India until the 1890s. The first attempt to view tropical medicine in relation to political and social developments was made by Worboys in 1979. Critical of 'Whiggish doctor historians', whose triumphalist accounts of tropical medicine were entirely divorced from their social context, Worboys argued that the formation of the discipline was not simply a function of specialization in medical knowledge, but largely a consequence of the activities of medical men who identified their own objectives with those of commercial and political groupings interested in colonial development. Joseph Chamberlain, who became Colonial Secretary in 1895, saw the conquest of tropical disease as central to his policy of 'constructive imperialism', and was instrumental in setting up the first institutions specializing in