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. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The militarization of Alaska during and after World War II created an extraordinary set of new facilities. But it also reshaped the imaginative role of Alaska as a hostile environment, where an antagonistic form of nature could be defeated with the appropriate combination of technology and training. One of the crucial sites for this reformulation was the Arctic Aeromedical Laboratory, based at Ladd Air Force Base in Fairbanks. In the first two decades of the Cold War, its employees conducted (...) numerous experiments on acclimatization and survival. The laboratory is now best known for an infamous set of tests involving the application of radioactive tracers to indigenous Alaskans—experiments publicized by post–Cold War panels established to evaluate the tragic history of atomic-era human subject research. But little else has been written about the laboratory's relationship with the populations and landscapes that it targeted for study. This essay presents the laboratory as critical to Alaska's history and the history of the Cold War sciences. A consideration of the laboratory's various projects also reveals a consistent fascination with race. Alaskan Natives were enrolled in experiments because their bodies were understood to hold clues to the mysteries of northern nature. A scientific solution would aid American military campaigns not only in Alaska, but in cold climates everywhere. (shrink)

This essay examines the sanitary policies for the protection of overseas communities that Italian fascism employed during the empire. From 1935–1936, the vast scale of the Ethiopian campaign, as well as intensive colonisation programmes, gave new political visibility to the issue of safeguarding Italian settlers from the risks of the tropical climate. In this period, the problem of how Italians could adapt to overseas environments moved beyond the boundaries of scientific discussion to become a major concern of colonial rule. Analysing (...) both the medical literature and archival sources, this essay examines the concepts and practices that underpinned the fascist project for the “reclamation” of the empire: from the intensification of hygienic propaganda, to the redefinition of the medical-geographical boundaries of tropical risk, and to the expansion of social security benefits, which were extended to harms caused by tropical diseases. Finally, it investigates how the notion of acclimatisation was transformed within the context of the regime's imperial ideology, showing how the conception of the tropics as a pathogenic space remained widespread, fuelled by the regime's organicistic vision and its concerns for upholding the racial prestige of Italians in the colony. (shrink)