Bacteriology in British India: Laboratory Medicine and the Tropics [22, 1 ed.] 9781580464086, 2012011985

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Bacteriology in British India

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Bacteriology in British India Laboratory Medicine and the Tropics Pratik Chakrabarti

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Copyright © 2012 by Pratik Chakrabarti All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2012 University of Rochester Press 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA www.urpress.com and Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN-13: 978-1-58046-408-6 ISSN: 1526-2715 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chakrabarti, Pratik. Bacteriology in British India : laboratory medicine and the tropics / Pratik Chakrabarti. p. cm. — (Rochester studies in medical history ; ISSN 1526-2715 ; v. 22) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-58046-408-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Medical bacteriology— India—History—19th century. 2. Medical bacteriology—India—History—20th century. 3. Tropical medicine—India—History—19th century. 4. Tropical medicine—India—History—20th century. I. Title. QR46.C43 2012 616.9'2010954--dc23 2012011985 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. This publication is printed on acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America.

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In memory of Dr. Abhijit Mukherjee (Chotomama, 1956–2009)

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Contents List of Illustrations

viii

Acknowledgments

ix

List of Abbreviations

xi

Introduction: Bacteriology in the Tropics

1

1

Bacteriology in India: A Moral Paradigm

25

2

Moral Geographies of Tropical Bacteriology

61

3

Imperial Laboratories and Animal Experiments

86

4

“A Land Full of Wild Animals”: Snakes, Venoms, and Imperial Antidotes

113

5

Pasteurian Paradigm and Vaccine Research in India

142

6

Pathogens and Places: Cholera Research in the Tropics

179

Conclusion

211

Notes

217

Bibliography

257

Index

285

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Illustrations Figures I.1 1.1 2.1 2.2 2.3 3.1 3.2 3.3 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 5.1 5.2 5.3 6.1 6.2 6.3

W. M. Haffkine’s anticholera inoculation in Calcutta Incubating room, plague section Pasteur Institute of India, Kasauli, Indian patients outside the building Pasteur Institute of Southern India in the Nilgiri Hills, Coonoor H. E. Shortt “Sport in India: Fox Hunting at Mustang, Bolan Pass” “Outcastes” in J. L. Kipling, Beast and Man in India A rabbit under anaesthetic, being infected with rabies by injection in the spine Comparative mortality rates of snakebite and hydrophobia Indian cobra (Naja tripudians) Vipera Russelli (Daboia Russelli) “Taking venom from a Russell’s viper” Extracting the venom from a Naia bungarus The snake poison lancet designed by Brunton Worldwide antirabic vaccine paralysis data, Paris Conference (1927) John Cunningham in Brewery Garden Patients treated with antirabic vaccine at the Pasteur Institute of Southern India, Coonoor, between 1907 and 1938 “Madras cholera clock”: cholera mortality, rainfall, temperature, and humidity, 1919 Mapping of cholera endemicity in Bengal, 1934–48 Cholera mortality in British India, 1889–1945

2 52 68 72 76 89 92 110 114 120 121 132 134 136 154 157 172 193 201 204

Tables 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4

Cunningham’s experiments with live vaccines Comparative analysis of Hempt, Alivisatos, and Semple vaccines on humans Comparison of the results of treatment with the various vaccines used for class 4 cases Incidence of paralytic accidents after rabies vaccine

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163 169 170 175

Acknowledgments The research for this book was funded by the Wellcome Trust University Award, which I held at the University of Kent (UK) from 2006 to 2011. I am grateful to the Trust for its generous support for this project. The grant allowed me to conduct my research in archives in different countries. It also enabled me to present my research at different conferences and colloquiums and gain from those experiences. It was in discussions with Mark Harrison that the original ideas of this project developed. Mark has always been very supportive and read my work with care. Over the years I have deeply appreciated his scholarship and truly valued his friendship. This book benefited from discussions with many other people over the five years it took me to write it. They include David Arnold, Brian Caton, Stephen T. Casper, Sabine Clarke, Jill Didur, Sanchari Dutta, Raf Gelders, Christoph Gradmann, Susan D. Jones, Deepak Kumar, Ilana Löwy, Saurabh Mishra, Anne Marie Moulin, Randall M. Packard, Charlotte Sleigh, Crosbie Smith, Martin Willis, and Michael Worboys. I am particularly grateful to Dr. Candice Delisle for kindly translating Albert Calmette’s letters in French to English for me. I also wish to thank my colleagues and the administrative staff at the School of History at Kent for their support. I am grateful to Neeladri Bhattacharya for being a constant source of inspiration and encouragement in my academics. In the last few years I have turned to him for help and advice on several occasions, which he has generously given. I would like to thank Theodore M. Brown (University of Rochester) and Suzanne E. Guiod (University of Rochester Press) for their assistance and patience during the reviewing and rewriting of the manuscript. Special thanks are due to the staff at the Edinburgh University Library, Special Collections, where I spent a frenzied ten days going through piles of John Cunningham’s papers and laboratory notes in the summer of 2007. The library staff generously and patiently helped me to go through those at a critical phase in this project. Anna Smith of the Wellcome Trust helped me to secure copies and permissions for several images used in this book. My thanks to Stephen Holland and Jane Gallagher of Special Collections, Templeman Library, University of Kent for their assistance in securing the image from their collection. I wish to thank Mrs. Avril Monteath for giving me permission, on behalf of her late husband, Mr. Robin Monteath, to use the photograph of the Coonoor Pasteur Institute from the Robert McCarrison Collection at the Wellcome Library in this

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book. I am grateful to Miriam Sporri of the Institut d’histoire de la médecine et de la santé, Centre médicale universitaire, Geneva, for photocopying and sending me a rare document from their library. Previous versions of chapters 3 and 5 appeared in History of Science 48, no. 2 (2010): 125–52, and the Bulletin of the History of Medicine 84, no. 3 (2010): 387–423, respectively. I would like to thank the Johns Hopkins University Press for granting me permission to reprint a revised version here. My greatest debt is to Nandini. Throughout the writing of this book she endured my manic working style, listened to me with endless patience about germs, vaccines, and laboratory experiments, and read the chapters carefully, raising fundamental questions and suggesting the rewriting of parts. She did all this while conducting her own research and writing her own book. I have been able to write this book because of her love. My uncle (chotomama), Dr. Abhijit Mukherjee, to whose memory this book is dedicated, died while I was writing this book. His brilliant but tragically short life, his erudition, his critical acumen, his unfulfilled talent, and the deep sense of loss that I have are a constant source of pain and insight for me. What I miss most are the long talks that we had on the open terraces in Calcutta on hot summer evenings, on issues ranging from cricket to Kosambi to Kuhn. This book is my tribute to him.

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Abbreviations AIIHPH AIIMS APAC BCG BL BMA BMJ BMU Bulletin WHO CMG CMRI CRI CSTM DGIMS DSIR GBD GOI ICMR IJMR IMG IMJ IMS INC IRFA LSTM MRC MSA NAI PHC Pioneer Mail RAC RDS RSPCA SEATO SPCA

All India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health (Calcutta) All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi Asia, Pacific, & Africa Collections Bacillus Calmette-Guérin British Library British Medical Association (UK) British Medical Journal Bombay Medical Union Bulletin of the World Health Organization Civil & Military Gazette Central Medical Research Institute Central Research Institute, Kasauli Calcutta School of Tropical Medicine Director General of the Indian Medical Service Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (UK) Global Burden of Disease Government of India (British) Indian Council of Medical Research Indian Journal of Medical Research Indian Medical Gazette Indian Medical Journal Indian Medical Service Indian National Congress Indian Research Fund Association London School of Tropical Medicine Medical Research Council (UK) Maharashtra State Archive, Elphinstone College, Mumbai National Archive of India, New Delhi Public Health Commissioner of India Pioneer Mail and Indian Weekly News The Rockefeller Archive Center Research Defence Society (UK) Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (UK) Southeast Asia Treaty Organization Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Indian)

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Introduction Bacteriology in the Tropics In 1894, on a summer morning in Calcutta, the Jewish-Russian scientist Waldemar M. Haffkine dressed formally in a suit and tie went out to vaccinate slum dwellers of the imperial city against cholera. He had built a small workplace nearby where he prepared his vaccines every day. His work started early in the morning when he and his Bengali assistant, Dr. Chowdhury, prepared the vaccines to begin inoculations before sunrise, before the slum dwellers left for their daily labor. Haffkine and his assistant worked in the blazing sun with an umbrella as cover. After a break in the afternoon, they met again in the laboratory to prepare more vaccines for the next round of inoculations and then set out once more for the slums in another part of the city. They remained there, inoculating until late in the night under the light of the chirag (oil lamps) provided by local residents.1 In the slums of Calcutta, Haffkine was confronted with life and disease in the tropics. As he vaccinated the slum dwellers with his anticholera vaccines, he found that the lines between the laboratory and the world outside were often blurred. This was a novel experience for the European laboratory scientist: For those who, in Europe or in any other places, will judge my work from the point of view of laboratory research, and will discuss the most convenient conditions for getting precise answers to theoretical questions, I must say from the beginning that I was not and am not master of the plan of my operations. A country and a free population, and the various influences and currents of opinions intervening, and religious feelings and traditions, and the mixture of confidence and distrust on the part of the individuals and communities are conditions differing from that in which a quietly elaborated plan of operations is put to test in the walls of the laboratory or on an experimental field of cultivation, or in other similar conditions.2

Nevertheless, it was in search of conditions and realities where the cholera vibrio and humans supposedly lived closely and endemically that Haffkine had come from Paris to India, the “home of cholera,” with his vaccines. He arrived with impressive credentials. He had trained at the Pasteur Institute of Paris, where he developed a cholera vaccine. The British Government of India (GOI)

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Figure I.1. W. M. Haffkine’s anticholera inoculation in Calcutta (Kolkata), 1894. Reproduced with permission from the Wellcome Library, London.

subsequently invited him to undertake the inoculations in India. He came to India in 1893 to experiment with his vaccine in areas where cholera epidemics raged. During these anticholeric operations, Haffkine worked simultaneously within and beyond his laboratory, preparing and carrying the live cholera vaccine to the slums of Calcutta, the coal mines of Jharia, the tea plantations of Assam, and the prisons in Gaya and Darbhanga. This human laboratory was vital to Haffkine because only humans were known to be susceptible to cholera.3 Haffkine’s cholera vaccination in India was as much prophylactic as it was experimental. In the process, these sites not only put his vaccine to trial, but they also tested the very nature and method of bacteriological research in the tropics. He faced the reality of transferring the laboratory results that he arrived at in Paris among a large population in India. His vaccination campaign in Calcutta was the first experiment in developing bacteriological vaccines for mass human inoculation against an epidemic disease. This confluence of and encounter between bacteriology and the colonial world of the tropics is the subject of this book. It locates the scientific, cultural, and social contours of bacteriological research undertaken in the tropics. Bacteriological missions and institutions were introduced in the colonies and tropics from the late nineteenth century, almost simultaneously as they developed in Europe and northern America. In the French colonies in Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Africa, Pasteur institutes were established like those in Saigon (1891), Nha Trang (1895), Hanoi (1925), Dalat (1931), Hue (Vietnam), Vientiane (Laos), and Phnom Penh (1953). In different parts of Africa, Tunisia

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(1893), Algeria (1900), Tangier, Morocco (1910), Casablanca (1929), Saint Louis, Senegal (1896), Brazzaville, Congo (1908), Kindia, Guinea (1922), Madagascar (1898), and in Havana, Cuba (1885). They were also introduced in peripheral regions like Brazil and Argentina and in the settler colony of Australia.4 The tropical colonies were also subjected to the most intensive vaccination campaigns in plague, cholera, polio, typhoid, tuberculosis, rabies, etc. The motivation in introducing bacteriology in the tropics was the hope that germ theory and Pasteurian vaccines would provide the breakthrough in eradicating tropical diseases. Despite this long and expansive history, there is no conceptual framework to understand either the confluence of medical practices, institutionalization, or the social history that shaped bacteriology in the tropics or the transformation from clinical to laboratory medicine in the colonies. Historians have studied the Pasteurian expansion in the colonies or tropics within a metropolis-periphery framework, as a transfer of Pasteurism from Europe to the colonies.5 These works have focused essentially on the institutions and the bacteriologists in discussing the professional and institutional context of bacteriological research in the tropics. They have not elaborated how bacteriology created its own social, cultural, and ideological spaces in the tropics. Other historians have suggested that laboratory medicine in the colonies transformed the existing practices of tropical medicine by providing it with more specificity. Warwick Anderson has suggested that with the introduction of bacteriological research in Australia, tropical medicine left the field of geography and entered the confines of the laboratory, where the living organisms became the prime object of study.6 In the process, tropical medicine became “less an environmental discourse and more a vocabulary for modern citizenship . . . the ending of medical geography and the beginning of medical government.”7 By the early twentieth century, Australia was successfully cleansed of its tropical germs, and in fact of its tropicality. However, in India, as we have seen in the case of Haffkine’s view of his vaccination in Calcutta, there were no clear demarcations between the tropical environment and the laboratory. Here too the idea of the tropics was far more entrenched than it was in northern Australia; and here geography reinvented itself in various forms in bacteriological research, and germs were inescapably entwined in a moral imperial narrative of disease, filth, and putrefaction. We will begin by briefly tracing the emergence of the idea of the tropics. Historians have engaged variously with the idea of the tropics as it emerged with European colonialism from the seventeenth century. The tropics were a complex geographical, scientific, cultural, and imperial entity. In geographical terms, the tropics assumed complex meanings for Europeans. From the time of Columbus’s first journey to the Americas, they were described as places of excessive heat as well as of luxuriant growth. In subsequent centuries, tropical colonies were variously represented as bountiful places, as a beautiful and uncontaminated paradise.8 This diverse imagery developed along with the colonization of the tropics by Europeans, by which tropical flora and fauna became a major

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source of European wealth. In the eighteenth century, increasing European habitation led to an interest in the landscapes and cultures of the conquered lands.9 This appreciation of tropical wealth developed with the Orientalist construction of the Orient as the savage, the primeval, the irrational, or the “other.”10 By the nineteenth century, the mapping of tropical nature and landscape through botanical, trigonometrical, and geological surveys transformed the Indian subcontinent from an exotic land to a well-defined geographical entity.11 In medical terms, the idea of the tropics took shape from the seventeenthcentury reinvention of the Hippocratic corpus of “Airs, Waters, and Places,” which suggested that tropics or “torrid zones,” as they were referred to then, had their distinct climatic and environmental characteristics. Thomas Sydenham (1624–89) reinvigorated the Hippocratic tradition, particularly in relation to the several fevers that Europeans experienced in their travels abroad. These gave rise in the eighteenth century to a medical tradition of linking climate with diseases of warm climates under medical theorists like James Lind. The idea was that tropical climates and strong rays of the sun were ideal for the putrefaction both of the air and the body of humans, plants, and animals, leading to miasmas. Climatic determinism engendered a degree of optimism about European settlement in the tropics. Lind was well aware of the perils of life in the tropics, but he believed that Europeans could become acclimatized to such environments. Through the late eighteenth century, however, as the Europeans conquered the interiors and the hinterlands and tried to establish settlements, the romanticization of the tropics turned darker. Experiences of death, disease, and the discomforts of living in hot countries seemed not so much a decadent luxury as a sore trial, and perhaps even a death sentence. British soldiers in the colonies in the West Indies as well as in India suffered from very high mortality rates from diseases such as malaria, various types of fevers, yellow fever, and cholera. From the late eighteenth century, therefore, in scientific and medical discourse as well, aestheticism of the tropics was gradually obliterated. At the end of the eighteenth century, the writings of James Johnson encapsulated the growing pessimism among Europeans about their ability to colonize India and to adapt to its climate.12 This was a combination of the growth of polygenic racial theories as well as the effects of colonization. With most of the tropical world under their domination, Europeans now identified fundamental differences between the ruler and the ruled, believing that European climate, culture, and constitutions were superior to those of Africa and India.13 With the arrival of “Asiatic cholera” in Europe by the middle of the nineteenth century, the tropical regions, particularly India, came to be viewed as unclean, unhygienic, and unhealthy, and disease was firmly linked to cultural and social backwardness.14 It was during this time that the term “tropics” also lost its ambivalence in European medical and scientific discourse. Scientists and medical men explored possibilities of understanding the tropics and its inhabitants in terms of a new medical specialization and professional eminence.15 This scientific clarity has existed in conjunction

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with broader cultural, moral, and climatic ideas, which were used to describe colonized populations in large parts of the globe. This complex idea of the tropics exists today, alongside the reality that regions described as tropics are also the most disease and poverty stricken parts of the world. In brief, tropics aroused contrasting ideas of wilderness, romanticism, bounty, filth, unhealthiness, and poverty in European writing and they continue to do so at present. India was the primary geographical region both in terms of the articulation of the ideas of the tropics as well as in the application of tropical bacteriology. While from the seventeenth century Indian climate, culture, and human constitutions came under intense scrutiny in European writings, from the late nineteenth century the country experienced sustained bacteriological institutionalization. Following the discoveries of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, bacteriology appeared as a universal panacea against local scourge in colonial India. The British established several bacteriological laboratories, starting with the Imperial Bacteriological Laboratory at Poona (1890), the Bacteriological Laboratory at Agra (1892), the Plague Research Laboratory in Bombay (1896), the Pasteur Institutes of India at Kasauli (1900), Coonoor (1907), Rangoon (1916), Shillong (1917), and Calcutta (1924), and the Central Research Institute (CRI) at Kasauli in 1905. The same year, the Bacteriological Department, a special cadre of Indian Medical Service (IMS) officers, was formed to staff the newly established laboratories. In 1911, the GOI set up the Indian Research Fund Association (IRFA) for sponsoring and coordinating medical research in the country. The Pasteur Institutes of India vaccinated patients coming from various parts of the country. They came from northern India, Burma, Kashmir, Rajputana, central India, and Tibet to the Pasteur Institute of India in Kasauli. Originally catering predominantly to the European population, over time the Pasteur Institutes treated mostly Indians. This added new dimensions to tropical vaccine research, and issues like clothing, social habits, cultural beliefs, and indigenous treatments were discussed within these laboratories. In the institute’s publications, phrases like the “Pasteurian population” of India were commonly used.16 These institutions have received only scarce attention in the historiography of epidemics, public health, and vaccination in colonial India.17 An outcome of this limited focus has been the tendency to assume that these institutions conducted little in the way of medical research and that they had little impact on colonial medical or sanitary policy. The laboratories became the sites of extensive bacteriological experiments and for manufacturing vaccines for India and other parts of the British Empire in Asia and Africa. In postcolonial India, these have remained the main producers of bacterial and viral vaccines and sera for India and other countries in Asia and Africa as well as providing teaching and training in bacteriology and microbiology. Through a study of Indian bacteriological institutions, the popular and medical discourses that led to their establishment, the moralities of research and experiments undertaken in them, the social and cultural contexts of vaccination

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campaigns, and the explorations of the complex meaning of germs and vaccines in the tropics, this book shows that bacteriology in India established a new medical tradition, which was at the same time public and subliminal. It provided an institutional imperative by which Pasteur laboratories became part of a public movement and appeared as essential to transform the erstwhile practices of colonial medicine. It also introduced a new moral force in colonial medicine, as a singular mode of establishing causality and cure for the myriad realities of disease and pathologies that Europeans had encountered in India from the seventeenth century. Yet it remained subterranean because it marked a tension between the local and the universal. In the colonies, Pasteur and Koch’s germ theory and vaccines were subsumed within colonial ideas of the tropics in creating links between germs, climate, culture, and race. This book will explore how in the process an abstruse metamorphosis of bacteriology took place in colonial India. The subliminality and duality depicted in this book is distinct from the many histories of germ theories that have been uncovered over the last decade. Historians have concentrated on deconstructing the monolith of germ theory, in identifying its multifarious roots and diverse manifestations, to challenge the Pasteurian promotion of a singular germ theory of disease.18 Historians have shown that germ theory emerged from multifarious epistemological, social, and institutional roots and remained diverse as practiced in different places by different scientists and in treating different diseases. Rather than the diversity in its clinical practice, the subterraneity that I discuss in this book refers to the transformations that took place in bacteriology as it came in contact with imperialism and tropical medicine in British India and adopted erstwhile tropical climatic ideas as well as the institutional, racial, and political characteristics of colonial medicine. The subliminality of tropical bacteriology is also engendered in the fact that it was situated between two established medical traditions, bacteriology and tropical medicine. Both of these have generated intense historiographical examination.19 Yet bacteriological research in the tropics cannot be understood within these two distinct approaches. The connections made here between bacteriology and colonial medicine will query existing historiographical approaches toward both and posit bacteriology within a new historical problematic in the tropics.

Medicine in the Tropical Colonies Historians have seen medical research in tropical colonies as extensions of European research problematic and traditions, particularly in the context of imperial tropical medicine. Histories of tropical medicine, as we know them, have dominated the writings of British imperial medicine. In fact it has been the only theme through which the imperial medical experiences and encounters from the late nineteenth century have been analyzed, and as Michael Worboys wrote

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in 1976, “during the past 75 years tropical medicine has been the main scientific expression of Western medical and health policy for the Third World.”20 This approach has three characteristics. First, the large geographical scope of such works, encompassing the entire tropical world under British control from Assam to Accra. Second, the focus has been centered on individuals like Patrick Manson, Ronald Ross, and Leonard Rogers.21 Third, the consequential, yet surprising neglect of the history of tropical medicine practiced in the tropics. The social, cultural, and ethical contexts of medical research that was conducted in the British colonies needs a different problematic. One reason why a more region-specific history of tropical medicine has remained difficult to write is due to the pervasive nature of the works of its proponents. Manson’s career encompassed China, Scotland, and London. Ross worked his way through London, Netley, Madras, Vizianagram, Moulmein, Burma, and the Andaman Islands, finally finding the Anopheles vector in Ootacamund and Calcutta and glory in England and Stockholm. He continued to travel on research surveys in West Africa, the Suez Canal Zone, Greece, Mauritius, and Cyprus. This has meant that there are major gaps in our understanding of the specific nature of medical research conducted in places like British India, one of the principal tropical sites of British imperialism and medical experience. Worboys has identified three factors behind the emergence of tropical medicine: the emergence of a new science, the socio-institutional aspect of that science, and the influence of late nineteenth-century imperialism. All these factors conform to the classic mode of the emergence of scientific specialisms. This specialismoriented model has limited applicability in British India, where it is difficult to identify an institutional and cognitive development of tropical medicine similar to that in England. To begin with, India did not have an institute of tropical medicine till 1920, when the Calcutta School of Tropical Medicine (CSTM) was established, long after the discipline had entrenched itself in England. The establishment of the Calcutta School had more to do with the interplay of various interests of the GOI, the IMS officers, and the Western-educated Indian doctors than with scientific specialism.22 There are other problems in understanding twentieth-century colonial medicine through the prism of tropical medicine. It is difficult to conceptualize tropical medicine as a distinct scientific speciality, as it did not have a well-defined research methodology of its own. Tropical medicine as we know it was an invented tradition, a process particularly noticeable in two articles that Ross wrote in 1905 and 1914. In the first, his definition of tropical medicine was relatively vague. He admitted that “the term tropical medicine does not imply merely the treatment of tropical diseases.” What it implied was a “science of medicine,” and more importantly a medicine for the empire, where diseases were the “great enemies of civilization.”23 In 1914, Ross provided a more therapeutically defined identity to tropical medicine by announcing that “the movement really commenced with the work of the old parasitologists

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rather than with that of the bacteriologists.”24 But the specific lineage that he then sketched was essentially a history of the establishment of the two schools at Liverpool and London, not a history of the science of parasitology or of a distinct research methodology. This focus on parasitology in the development of tropical medicine in Britain was out of a certain professional expediency, as William Bynum has suggested: “the extent to which bacteriology was widely seen as a French or German science gave the British some comfort: tropical medicine was still there to be colonized.”25 The historiography on tropical medicine in the British Empire has followed almost exclusively the trails of Manson and Ross, and thus of parasitology. Scientists in the late nineteenth century used words like “germs” and “parasites” interchangeably while referring to Pasteur’s or Koch’s research.26 Therefore, in contemporary scientific thinking, bacteria and parasites were not distinguished; both were considered to be surviving on living bodies and could be cultivated in the laboratory.27 The scientists debated the nature of their origins and life cycle, not whether they were germs or parasites.28 Koch widened his field of bacteriology to include other diseases in the tropics, particularly malaria; he even went to Batavia to conduct malarial investigations.29 In his lecture at the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1909, he provided a wider definition of bacteriology: “bacteriology did not remain the exact definition, but different fields of knowledge are summarized under this name, because they use the same or comparable methods and have a common aim, investigation of infectious diseases and the fight against them.”30 Even otherwise, contemporary scientists identified malaria as a “germ disease.”31 In terms of research conducted in the laboratories, a study of medical research conducted in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century India reveals that much of it was not in conventional areas of tropical medicine. The Pasteur Institutes of India focused mainly on researching and producing vaccines for cholera, plague, rabies, typhoid, etc., true to their Pasteurian heritage. The treatment of leprosy in India meanwhile remained a combination of Western and traditional methods. The use of gurjon oil, a treatment developed by Surgeon J. Dougall of the Madras Medical Service in the early 1870s, remained popular throughout the early part of the twentieth century. Another indigenous remedy, chaulmugra oil, remained the main treatment for leprosy until the introduction of sulphone drugs in the 1940s.32 As far as smallpox is concerned, the efforts in India were toward vaccine production and eradication programs rather than research in new vaccines. The research focus was in developing modes of storing, preserving, and transporting vaccines.33 Researches in cholera did not enjoy a Mansonian tradition either. Cholera vaccines used in India had a distinct Pasteurian focus; Haffkine brought his vaccine from Paris to India at the invitation of the secretary of state of India. Malaria research in India was very much part of an international research program. As mentioned before, despite their Indian connections, both Ross and Manson were particularly international figures.

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The only substantial research on malaria in India was the work of Samuel R. Christophers on anopheles at the CRI. Christophers was sent to India by the Royal Society in 1900 to conduct experiments in malaria eradication and he had strong theoretical differences with Ross.34 Researches in kala-azar in India perhaps most closely followed the trajectories of tropical medicine, in the sense that the research traditions were clearly British. However, here the breakthrough came in Netley rather than in Calcutta. William B. Leishman entered the Army Medical Service in 1887 and in 1890 he was posted to India, where he remained for the next seven years. In 1899 he was posted back to Netley, where he made the discovery of the kala-azar parasite.35 There is therefore a need for new conceptual tools to understand these important and diverse research traditions conducted in the tropics. It is necessary to approach tropical medicine in India not as a particular and distinct scientific tradition but as a combination of several new and existing traditions in medical research, which was intrinsically linked with the establishment of various research institutes in or about the tropics from the late nineteenth century. Mark Harrison suggests that what came to be known as tropical medicine in the twentieth century had an early and varied origin in British ideas of health, hygiene, and climate in the tropics from the mid-eighteenth century.36 Tropical medicine developed in the convergence of two different fields of nineteenth-century medicine. On the one hand, it incorporated the several medical, environmental, cultural experiences, and acumen that Europeans had gathered in the colonies over the last two hundred years. One the other, it borrowed from germ theory, which shifted the medical attention from diseased environment to parasites and bacteria. Diseases endemic to the tropics were now believed to be curable through modern bacteriological and parasitological intervention. Therefore, it marked a return to geographical determinism of diseases along with the new confidence about germs and vectors. It thereby also proposed an apparently paradoxical thesis of germs and geography. There is a need for fresh conceptual tools to understand how ideas of the tropics figured in the history of germs and parasites.

Germs in the Tropics Germs appeared in scientific thought much before the establishment of germ theory or bacteriology as distinct scientific specializations. From the 1830s, scientists became aware that yeast consisted of small spherules, which had the property of multiplying and were therefore living organisms.37 Scientists discovered a “new world of life,” aided by new microscopes, laboratories, and experiments. Louis Pasteur established that fermentation depended on living forms and that there was vital and dynamic character to this change. The action or process of subjecting milk, wine, food, etc., to partial sterilization destroyed most of the

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microorganisms and enzymes present in it, making it safe for consumption and improving its preservation. He used the same principle to develop the idea of vaccines from attenuated living germs. The evolution of the idea of germs was as complex a scientific and historical phenomenon as was the idea of the tropics. By the twentieth century, germs embodied a wide range of human fears and anxieties. During the First World War, a British officer posted at Menin after the Battle of Ypres (1918) saw a mad dog running away in front of his room, and it immediately represented to him the madness of war itself, “all epitomized as it were in one single moment by the rush of that mad dog across my door.” He was aware that a specific germ caused hydrophobia, but to him that germ represented a deeper malaise: “these germs are about us always, only waiting for the wickedness or foolishness of man to call them into activity.”38 In the tropics, Pasteur’s and Koch’s ideas of germs and bacterial fermentation assumed new meanings. They provided new explanation to the phenomenon of putrefaction in the tropics, hitherto associated with heat and hot climates. This provided both optimism about European colonization of and habitation in the tropics and simultaneously generated new apprehensions about germs in the colonies. Possibilities appeared that with vaccines diseases could now be decisively separated from tropical climatology. At the same time, questions arose whether germs behaved differently in hot climates, whether tropics had a peculiar predisposition to causing fermentation and virulence of germs, whether vaccines could be produced and preserved in the tropics. These were helped by the fact that precisely at the time, around the 1880s and 1890s, that bacteriology and germ theory were making important theoretical advances, epidemic outbreaks of cholera (the “fifth pandemic”) and plague (the “third pandemic”) took place in different parts of Asia and Africa.39 The outbreaks confirmed in the minds of scientists the links between germs and the tropics, imprinted in popular discourse the need for bacteriological intervention, and provided the setting for the establishment of bacteriological laboratories and experimentations in the tropics. Worboys has shown that in Britain the newly discovered ideas of bacteriology were incorporated into existing notions of causation, which often paid as much attention to questions of lifestyle, heredity, and environment as they did to the spread of pathogens. In the process, germ theory lost both its specificity and the revolutionary characteristics that were often attached to it, and emerged rather as an evolutionary science.40 In the tropical colonies, it was precisely due to the links with existing colonial ideas of causation of disease in the tropics that germ theory emerged as both a dominant and a revolutionary medical paradigm. Bacteriology promised a unique panacea in colonial medicine, a way by which the multifarious political, social, environmental, and medical problems and anxieties of the colonies, intrinsically linked to its diseases, could have a singular resolution.41 As chapter 1 elaborates, the proponents of the Pasteur Institutes

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in India envisaged that bacteriology could treat all diseases endemic to India, not just rabies, plague, and cholera. Bacteriology appeared as a new paradigm of progress and hope. As a British resident in India wrote, “bacteriology is not the outcome of one branch of knowledge only, but of all the divisions of natural science; that it is truly the study of life and death for the humans and animal species.”42 For Europeans in the tropics, the concerns of life and death were paramount. This moral paradigm made ideological inroads among Indians as well, who too believed in the application of germ theory to tackle diseases in India. At the same time that Haffkine carried out the vaccination campaigns in Calcutta, he gave a rousing speech at the Calcutta Medical College in a hall crowded with local physicians and medical students. By the end of his speech, he had sixty volunteers who offered themselves for vaccination.43 A similar audience received his speech at Agra Medical College with “deafening applause.”44 Haffkine promoted his vaccine with the message that he had turned the “poison” of cholera into its “potion.” This made unique sense in India, as this paradigm had long been a part of European-Orientalist medical thought and praxis. From the eighteenth century, Orientalists such as William Jones studied poisonous items like arsenic and mercury to explore the possibilities of alternative Oriental remedies.45 Chapter 4 will elaborate how this linking of “poisons” and “potions,” which led to the Pasteurian discovery of antivenin, also revived nationalist interest in indigenous antisnake venom remedies produced from the venom itself. The idea that snake venoms were autotoxic, which was fundamental to the development of antivenins, was originally proposed by British scientists who studied Indian snakes, observed Indian snake charmers and their apparent immunity from snake bites, read classical Indian medical texts, and examined indigenous drugs in India from the mid-nineteenth century. Following Albert Calmette’s discovery of antivenin, this entire project received new meaning and legitimacy within the Indian Pasteur Institutes. Since bacteriology appealed in such diverse ways to imperial scientists and British residents in India, it is necessary to reject the rather neat national divisions in late nineteenth-century tropical medicine, which tends to assign parasitology to the British and bacteriology to the French and German. It is then possible to see that Ross, Manson, and the London and Liverpool “schools” did not play such a critical role in the medical researches of the colonies. In colonial India, bacteriology, and more specifically Pasteurism, played a more defining role both in medical research and in its institutionalization. Pasteurism provided a new moral imperative as well as an institutional motivation, which was crucial in the setting up of the Indian research laboratories. As chapter 1 elaborates, the Pasteur Institutes in India were products of a decade-long and sustained public movement launched by three groups: the Anglo-Indian press, such as the Civil & Military Gazette and the Pioneer Mail, which reflected viewpoints of the British residents (civil and military) in India; the British scientists and physicians based in India; and the Indian elites. A point to note is that many

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of the medical researchers in India around this time did not train within the British tropical medicine tradition. Several colonial medical men, such as A. Barclay, W. A. Crawford Roe, Kenneth McLeod, Robert W. S. Lyons, and Ernest H. Hankin, received training at the bacteriological laboratories in Paris or Berlin and not in tropical medicine. Others such as David Semple were trained under Almroth Wright at Netley. Much of the initial thrust for introducing the Pasteurian method in India came from these men. There was also a great appreciation of French and German medical research among the colonial scientists. One Anglo-Indian physician wrote to the Indian Medical Gazette (IMG, the forum of the IMS) in 1892, “The French beat us all to sticks, and the Germans will all do the same. . . . Have you seen any of the recent French books on tropical disease . . . ? If you have not, you will weep on reading them and say with me—‘My country, oh! My country.’”46 The mood among the Anglo-Indian medical men in India in the 1890s was surprisingly proresearch and probacteriology, much more so than in England or in the United States, leading to the establishment of several Pasteur institutes in the early decades of the twentieth century. It was within this climate of euphoria, hope, and optimism that bacteriology became a moral force in the tropics.

Bacteriology and Morality in the Tropical Colonies Medicine is as much an art of healing as it is a moral crusade against diseases. As a pursuit of the ideal modes of curing and caring for the sick and supporting the weak and the vulnerable, it is invariably represented in moral terms. This morality resides at various sites, at the bedside (patient-doctor relationships), in the discovery of new drugs and vaccines, and in social and cultural hegemony, faith, and power. This morality was evident in Pasteurian science and bacteriology as a crusade against germs. The moralistic tones of germ theory have been analyzed in two ways. Nancy Tomes has shown how the germ theory of disease inspired mass health education crusades in America that viewed the human body as the polluter and led to moralization about tuberculosis-related behaviors.47 At the end of the nineteenth century, bacteriology gave rise to a widespread public health movement in America involving bacteriologists, health reformers, philanthropists, and hygienists, which instilled a new sense of public health morality and a new code of personal and domestic hygiene. Germs as the “invisible menace” played a crucial role in spreading this public fear and in creating the moralizing tone of the public health authorities. As Tomes writes, “The dangers of contagion were all the more insidious because of the invisible, insensible nature of germs.”48 Historians have identified another moralistic role of germ theory and tropical medicine in the tropical colonies, where the spread of germ theory and the identification of germs has been seen to have developed hand-in-hand with the

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pathologization and the morbific visualization of the tropics. At the end of the nineteenth century, the tropics and tropical bodies were seen as the natural home for the habitation of deadly pathogens. Germ theory here was thus represented as a crusade not merely against disease, germs, and social/cultural prejudices, but also against the tropics themselves.49 My understanding of the morality of tropical bacteriology shares these ideas, but suggests that in the tropical colonies bacteriology assumed other forms of moral connotations as well. First, as I have shown, the pathologization of the tropics and the moralistic overtones associated with it was not a late nineteenthcentury phenomenon. It was a complex historical process that accompanied European colonization of the tropics over a century previous to the advent of germ theory to the tropics. So germ theory reinforced many of these assumptions rather than initiate them. Second, I argue that the morality of tropical bacteriology was located not so much in the networks and the hegemonic role of the new breed of scientists and hygienists, but in the nature of the hope and optimism that the science of germ theory proposed in the tropics. This was at a time, I argue, when British medicine in the tropical colonies was faced with a crisis of epidemic outbreaks, high mortalities, and international critique of its sanitarian policies. As a laboratory-based scientific medicine, germ theory and bacteriology, which promised the eradication of most diseases through the use of vaccines, provided a new advantage to the moral crusade against diseases in the tropical colonies. The identification of germs appeared as a positive development rather than arousing the fear of the invisible, which was already evident in the tropical miasmas. Haffkine’s vaccine was promoted in India as one that had transformed the perilous pathogens into a “sweet oblivious antidote”; that instance captured the hope among the British and Indians that the abstract, multiple, and complex causalities of disease in the tropics could have a singular cure or prevention. This was accompanied with the strong moral rhetoric of late nineteenth-century imperialism, the framework and tone of which was entrenched in civilizational terms as a campaign against ignorance, backwardness, and the prejudices of the colonized. Europeans saw disease in the tropical colonies as a moral as much as a physical affliction. These two combined to provide a moral depth to colonial bacteriology. This book first traces the convergence between Pasteurian ideology and imperial morality in the tropics. In Europe bacteriology evolved as a laboratory method with a distinct ideology: that diseases caused by specific microbes could be controlled and even eradicated by the same microbes in an attenuated form. In the colony, it acquired new moral and ideological connotations as it appeared as the new Western rational method, uniquely capable of eradicating diseases in the tropics. This ideology became a moral force in India for two reasons. First, its universality and claim that all diseases in all parts of the world could be eradicated, as long as their causal microbes could be identified and their respective

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vaccines could be developed. Second, this unified ideology of causation and cure translated itself within the existing traditions of Western medicine as a moral crusade against supposed immoralities, irrationalities, prejudices, and maladies of life in the tropics. Thereby bacteriology appeared more as a moral force in the tropics than it did in Europe. So much so that both British scientists and Indians aggressively sidelined the ethical issues of the use of animals in Indian laboratories (see chapter 3). The exploration of these convergent moralities will allow us to examine some of the complex historical associations that were made in the researches on germs in the tropics, such as that between tropical heat and vaccine research, cholera and its tropical home, and the use of live and dead vaccines in hot climates. In a book on bacteriology and laboratory research, it is important to recognize the distinctions between morality and ethics in medicine. This book refers to morality in medicine as a broader problematic than that of medical ethics, without disengaging from the latter. It links morality with the question of the establishment of scientific truth and explores the ways in which bacteriology and germ theory were established in colonial India as a new and revolutionary scientific paradigm. It explores how it came to represent a new moral force in colonial medicine through the exercise of hegemony, legitimacy, institutionalization, and imperial power. It explores ethics within that thematic in reference to the debates around the modes of conducting and legitimizing research and experiments in colonial laboratories. The suggestion that laboratories occupied moral spaces in the colonies requires an engagement with the question of reductionism and holism in medicine. Laboratory medicine has been characterized in the existing literature as a typically reductionist and even immoral discipline. Historians have proposed that laboratory medicine reduced the multifarious possibilities of mid-nineteenth-century medical theories around germs. This is from two ends. On the one hand, some historians have seen the history of nineteenth-century bacteriology as a journey (or a process) from the inclusive to the reductionist, from a multifarious understanding to a monolithic paradigm.50 Therefore, historians have also questioned the proclaimed paradigm break to highlight the continuities of bacteriology with existing medical traditions.51 The institutional and social networks that Pasteur developed while promoting his method furthered this process.52 The hegemonic role that Pasteur and his followers played in the French colonies in promoting their experimental and institutional methods has also been studied closely as part of this progress of the Pasteurian method.53 On the other hand, holistic medicine, defined as medicine in its more inclusive forms, has been defined in moral and progressive terms, fulfilling, as it were, a “moral demand.”54 From the 1920s, holistic medicine and biomedicine have been seen to reverse the reductionist trajectory of laboratory medicine and to restore medicine to where it belongs, in the confluence of biology, ecology, and society.55

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There is a moral undertaking in the writing of holistic medicine. As nineteenth-century scientists projected the Pasteurian engagement with germs in the laboratory as a new medical paradigm in the crusade against diseases, historians in turn have tended to view the laboratory and the science of bacteriology as a site of either evolutionary or unethical and limitative practices.56 As a critique of the claims of nineteenth- and twentieth-century bacteriologists who posited the laboratory as a privileged site of research and scientific truth, historians have stressed how it was in fact the laboratory that was devoid of knowledge in its true complexity. Therefore, in the historiography discussed above, the laboratory has been defined in opposition to the world outside, to the “field”: the environment, ecology, and humans. In this the former has been assumed to be sanitized and contrived and the latter as real and natural. The problem here is twofold; first, positing the two in binary opposition to each other is not only in acceptance of the fundamental claim of the bacteriologists albeit in inversion, but it also leads to the stereotyping of both the sites. The other is the tendency to identify scientific research as holistic when scientists leave the confines of the laboratory. It is out of this urge of historians of medicine to go beyond the laboratory that much of the historiographical focus has been on dissemination, on field research, on the narratives of the myriad ways in which bacteriology influenced public health movements: how the “lessons of the laboratory . . . became part of the fabric of everyday life.”57 Judith W. Leavitt has questioned the suggestions that bacteriology induced limitations on the scope of twentieth-century public health activities.58 Through a fascinating study of popular and scientists’ attitudes toward Mary Mallon, more commonly known as “Typhoid Mary,” Leavitt portrays how the laboratory-based science of bacteriology affected clinical medicine and public health profoundly. She shows that germ theory as a theoretical breakthrough “of huge proportions and wide-ranging implications, constituted a genuinely new approach to understanding the etiology of many diseases and, as such, significantly altered subsequent prevention and therapeutic efforts.” But she too focuses on “how the laboratory affected public health.”59 For Leavitt, the main story unfolded in the lessons that public health officials learned from the laboratory-based “Typhoid Mary” episode and how it shaped twentieth-century American public health. Rather than studying the dissemination of laboratory ideas into public health and household practices, this book analyzes how the colonial laboratories embodied a political and moral regime. One reason why the laboratory has appeared more monolithic than the field and also very distinct from the world outside is because historians have focused more on its institutional histories and have tended to contest the assertions of nineteenth-century bacteriologists about the uniqueness of laboratory space. The research traditions studied closely in this book—the development of antirabic, anticholeric, and antivenene vaccines; plague research in Bombay; the epidemiological mapping of twentiethcentury cholera; animal experimentations in Indian Pasteur institutes—show

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that research within the laboratories was always linked to the complex social, political, and economic realities of the colony. Since the very essence of scientific knowledge making is in the pursuit of a singular truth, science itself is inherently reductive. From this perspective, it is difficult to argue that bacteriology was any more reductionist than other scientific specializations like biomedicine or tropical medicine. In this perspective it is possible to see the growing influence of Pasteurian bacteriology not simply as a marginalization of existing paradigms, but also as an extension of nineteenth-century therapeutics and science, which developed in pursuit of a panacea against diseases. In the pre-Pasteur years, too, physicians and scientists in Europe were involved in a search for a panacea for most epidemic diseases. A close study of the various pre-Pasteur nineteenth-century rabies treatments in Europe shows how Pasteur brought about the notion of a single panacea within a wide variety of treatments and concepts of a single disease. Pasteur’s method became popular among contemporary scientists because of the willingness among them to accept his work even before the specific microorganism that caused rabies could be identified.60 Pasteur’s method obtained its power as a singular paradigm of causation and cure because an aspiration for such a paradigm was always engendered within contemporary scientific thinking. This is not to suggest that because of this unique Pasteurian motivation, bacteriology emerged as an uncontested discipline in the colonies. One of the themes that this book focuses on is the peculiar metamorphosis of French Pasteurism in a British colony like India, shaped by British imperial moralities and ideas of Indian climate and culture. To that extent, colonial bacteriology extended the existing premises of colonial medicine. Bacteriology nevertheless indicated one important shift in the medical practices of the colonies, which is encapsulated in the episode that we started with: a Russian scientist trained in Paris who inoculated slum dwellers in Calcutta, a British colony. Bacteriology along with parasitology ushered internationalism in colonial medicine. This was also a shift from colonial medicine to imperial medicine. Worboys has defined the term “colonial medicine” as a twentiethcentury phenomenon, marked by parasitology, bacteriology, and twentieth-century imperialism. However, my contention is that it was the nineteenth century, marked by localized definitions of diseases, ideas of anticontagionism, and racial pathology as well as colonial territorial expansion in Asia and Africa, that characterized colonial medicine, while the internationalism of both twentiethcentury medicine and imperial rivalry had cast medicine within a broader imperial framework.61 The localized medical experiences in the colonies, which had developed through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in India, were now inscribed within the imperial paradigm of the twentieth century. It was situated within a wider understanding and exchange of ideas about diseases within different European empires, and the colonies became important fields for European bacteriological research. At the turn of the century, India became a field

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for trials for antiplague serums from all over the world: Florence, Brazil, Paris, Russia, etc. At the same time, colonial medical men were being trained in Paris and Berlin in laboratory methods. These international orientations marked an expansion of the field of laboratory medicine, rather than a contraction. It also marked the emergence of important developments in medicine in the twentieth century: the beginning of international strategies of healthcare in the colonies and subsequently the Third World, where disease became an international political, economic, military, and diplomatic concern. From the 1930s, British imperial medicine increasingly found itself in a changing world. International health initiatives and funding, from the interwar era, were fast changing the norms of colonial health policy and research. By the 1920s, American institutes like the Johns Hopkins, Yale, and Harvard schools of public health became the centers of public health instruction, attracting large numbers of foreign students. In addition, organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation increasingly intervened in various degrees in tropical health policies and research funding in Asia.62 Therefore, the colonial laboratories, although established to serve local health concerns, also became part of international and later global health strategies. Given such a wide geographical and conceptual scope, how do we define the colonial laboratory where tropical bacteriology was practiced?

The Colonial Laboratory What was the colonial laboratory? Was it any different from its European or North American counterparts? Or was the entire colonial society itself a laboratory, as some historians have suggested?63 The historiography of the modern laboratory in Europe and the United States has limited application in understanding colonial laboratories. Robert Kohler has recently asked historians to renew their interest in the study of the laboratory as a social institution.64 In the absence of which, he states, it has “reverted to what it was in the bad old days: a neutral, invisible stage for scientific fact making.”65 This seems a predominantly Euro-America-centric appeal since even the agenda of understanding the laboratory as a social institution raises different problems in the colonial social history. There are two main ways that the bacteriological laboratory has been approached by social scientists. According to some historians, as discussed above, the laboratory offers limited possibilities as a study of a social institution, as it is a reductionist institution. For them writing the social history of medicine is possible only when science leaves the laboratory in pursuit of more holistic knowledge. We have previously noted the problem with this binary assumption. The other approach has been the social constructivist model, which has engaged with the possibilities of writing a social history of the laboratory itself. These have been influenced by the works of Steven Shapin and Harry M. Collins,

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which questioned the authority of scientific facts by demonstrating that scientific knowledge is intrinsically linked with the social world, which conditions its epistemological structures.66 Harry M. Marks applied this paradigm of laboratory science to suggest that trust in the moral integrity of individuals remains fundamental in present-day science. He studied the emergence of a medical “republic of science” to show how consensus regarding specific clinical trials has emerged in the practice of medicine.67 The problems in these approaches are with the understanding of the social as a salient, distinct, and autonomous category. The social history of science continues to be confined within sociological categories where knowledge formation is seen in terms of “networks” and trust. Here scientific practice is approached through social habits and conventions of scientists and their engagements with machines, microscopes, and microbes. Can we conceptualize the colonial laboratory within this predominantly sociological model? Warwick Anderson has suggested that tropical medicine converted the tropics (“the dirty, humid, teeming, complex environment”) itself into a laboratory.68 He makes this suggestion by extending Bruno Latour’s “Pasteurization” thesis to the tropics. The examination of this proposition has to first engage with Latour’s original thesis. Although Latour criticized SSK (sociology of scientific knowledge) for its reductionism, in his own work he retained the same methodological problems of the sociological approach. Latour critiqued sociological reductionism and explored social expansiveness by studying both human and nonhuman actors. In Laboratory Life, Latour and Steve Woolgar studied the more conventional way in which the daily activities of scientists led to the “construction of scientific facts.”69 In his later and more seminal work Pasteurization of France, Latour’s language is more like that of a liberator who seeks to provide social scientists the freedom to pick their own “actors,” disregarding the assertions of the scientists.70 Pasteurization of France alludes to the pasteurization process in which Pasteur used live virus in creating a controlled condition of existence. In so doing Pasteur assumed a position of power. Latour’s model of human and particularly nonhuman actors and their agency challenges the godlike status that is claimed by the scientist; in this case, Pasteur. He points out that through such an assertion, Pasteur appeared stronger than the bacillus as well as the farmers, who were then subjected to his method. In this undertaking, Latour shows that there was no difference between the laboratory and the real world; when Pasteur’s vaccine proved effective in treating anthrax, then the real world had become a laboratory. To challenge this, Latour adopted an egalitarian approach and assumed a sense of a commune of various factors that informed the construction of scientific fact. “Hygienists, biologists, surgeons, sanitary engineers, veterinary surgeons, physiologists . . . as well as tuberculosis, cholera, diphtheria, tetanus, yellow fever, rabies, and the plague, all move according to different paths.”71 But such radical egalitarianism reflects analytical flatness and lacks the appreciation of equations of power.72 Latour seeks to merely reverse the process and appears as the new liberator who assigns “life” to the microbes

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in much the same way as Pasteur himself, and in the process, as Schaffer pointed out, draws a “deliberate comparison of himself with Pasteur.”73 It is difficult to understand bacteriological laboratories in the tropics through this Latourian approach. Even within European history, Pasteur’s associations with his microbes were more complex than Latour presents them to be. Pasteur himself granted agency to the microbes in his attempt to develop vaccines with “living” viruses. This acquired a different significance in the tropics, where bacteriologists believed germs “acted” differently and where the virulence of germs appeared much greater. As chapter 5 shows, Pasteurian categories of “living” and “dead” vaccines assumed a different significance in the production of antirabic vaccines in the tropics. While a group of scientists considered a dead vaccine to be ideal for use in hot tropical conditions, others believed that in India, where rabies was endemic, they needed more virulent live vaccines. These moralities and rationalities of using dead or living vaccines and the faith that vaccines and germs act differently in different climates have continued to shape vaccine development and vaccination programs in the tropical and developing countries. More important, Latour’s concept of the “social,” which he developed in opposition to the laboratory, is incompatible with colonial social history. This is due to two reasons. First, as we have seen, the demarcation between the colonial laboratory and tropical society and culture was often blurred. Second, the main thrust behind Latour’s assertion of the social is his concern with agency. His choice of actors as an analytical category is to identify social agency of both the social scientists and their diverse actors.74 For him the actors assume agency when they become social entities. There is a sociological determinism in this seemingly endless extension of the possibilities of the social, where the laboratory becomes almost unrecognizable.75 Agency itself cannot be privileged as critique. It needs to be identified with respect to economic and social power and discrimination. The problem lies with Latour’s definition of society, which is a site “where participants explicitly engage in the reassembling of the collective.” This definition of society is derived from sociology, to which he intends to return it: “the science of the living together.”76 Anderson uses Latour to suggest that “colonial society and environment were given meaning in the laboratory, and colonial bodies were there reduced to the categories of medical science.”77 However, he fails to identify the distinctions between his own understanding of the term “colonial society” as a historical category and Latour’s conceptualization of the “social” as a sociological one. This ambiguity leads Anderson to suggest that it was laboratory research, which essentially reduced colonial bodies into medical categories. This suggestion overlooks the complex historical processes from the eighteenth century by which the colonial regime had used science, maps, legislation, anthropology, and language to categorize and classify the colonial subject. The making of the colonial laboratory needs to be posited within this wider historical process.

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It is important to problematize social agency and the choice of actors, particularly in colonial history. It is also important to understand colonial laboratories through colonial social history, which has emerged as an important mode of understanding power, hegemony, and loss of agency within colonialism.78 It is through the slippages of agency that Indian animals entered the colonial laboratories. Animal experimentation in the Indian laboratories was legitimized through complex processes by which the British assumed moral agency in colonial society. The British represented Indians as childlike and cruel on the one hand, and themselves as mature and caring on the other. They introduced legislation to stop cruelty against animals as performed by Indians but not as performed by the British themselves. The legislation introduced a legal and rational paradigm within the perceived irrationality of the human-animal relationship in Indian society and justified the use of animals for the moral cause of eradicating diseases in India. At the same time, animals were used in colonial enterprises on a massive scale: in the timber industry, in the army, and in hunting sports. This assumption of social agency by the British helped them to sanction animal experimentation in the Indian laboratories. The British became the actors and the masters, while Indian animals were subjected to experiments and Indians themselves were designated as cruel and servile. The task of conceptualizing the colonial laboratory needs to begin by challenging the assumption that biomedicine and epidemiology as practiced in the colonies were more holistic than laboratory science. It suggests that with biomedicine, medical research left the confines of the laboratory to venture into the “true” complex social and environmental realities of the tropics. And reductionism in colonial medicine too requires closer scrutiny. Historians of colonial medicine have described how the multifarious germ theories of Calcutta or Hong Kong were merged into the monolithic germ theory of the metropolis.79 This approach is misleading. First, it tends to situate the pregerm theory colonial periphery as a liberal site of science, a site where the practice of science in the pre-Pasteurian era is perceived to be eclectic and relatively free from metropolitan institutionalization and dominance. Modern science was introduced in the colonies as a knowledge form that could transcribe multifarious realities to European intellect, aesthetics, and productivity. Reductionism was inherent to colonial science from the eighteenth century, which developed by transforming the myriad cultural, biological, and social epistemologies that Europeans had encountered and nurtured in the tropical colonies into a centripetal scientific discipline by the nineteenth century.80 The appeal of germ theory was evident in the colonies particularly because it promised a unified mode of causation and cure. We have to understand bacteriology in the colonies not just by the walls of exclusivity that its laboratories supposedly erected, but also by the moral parameter that it was established within.

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Helen Tilley’s study of the research programs in trypanosomiasis in Africa proposes that colonial medical research appeared “living” and “complex” only when it went to the field, the colonial site. Here the ecological and cultural realities of Africa are depicted as exotic and complex and in clear distinction from the sterile atmosphere of the laboratory, and thereby enriching Western medicine.81 It is necessary to ask here, why should a focus on the body, the individual, or the microbe be any more reductive than a focus on the environment, climate, or society, particularly when the latter is constructed in Orientalist, racial, and colonial categories of the “other”? In their biomedical studies in Africa, European scientists created links between their understanding of African culture and nature.82 Chapter 6 shows that the search for a “broad based” causality of cholera by British scientists in the post-Haffkine era led to the epidemiological studies that in fact limited the possibilities of cholera research in India. After Haffkine, the most important bacteriological research on cholera in India was conducted by Major Edward David Wilson Greig, assistant director of CRI, who found that the life of the cholera vibrio outside the human host in natural conditions in India was very short, thereby negating the climatic theories to a great extent. Greig promoted the theory of the “human factor” in the spread of cholera, as opposed to the ecological one. However, in 1916 he was withdrawn for vaccine production duties at CRI. This put an abrupt end to the researches in cholera on humans, leading to the years of epidemiological research and environmental determinism on cholera in India. The IRFA took up epidemiological research, and the surveys produced detailed epidemiological maps of cholera that identified the global problem of cholera to Bengal, the riverine plains of which were once the richest source of agricultural revenue for the colonial state. Epidemiology provided cartographic visibility and statistical clarity to the disease, which was essential to the purposes of power and governmentality. It also provided the moral continuum by linking colonial diseases with climate and culture. Consequently, little progress took place in the analysis and control of the microbe itself. In social and institutional terms, bacteriology and laboratories did not necessarily initiate esoterism in colonial medicine in the same way as it did in Europe. Medicine as practiced by British medical men and patronized by the IMS in nineteenth-century India was already institutionalized in elitist modes. Chapter 2 analyzes how existing British imperial elitism and segregation shaped the establishment and functioning of the Indian Pasteur institutes. In the nineteen thirties their status and existence in the remote hill stations became part of an intense political struggle between the British and the nationalist medical men; the latter did this as part of their challenge of the general privileges of colonial rule. Yet Indian nation building has not been without its own institutions and sites of privilege. Medical infrastructure, despite substantial investment in rural sectors through planned economy, has tended to remain urban oriented and

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assumed the privileges and characteristics of the modern Indian nation. The need is to understand the laboratory as a dynamic institution and yet not as a ubiquitous one.83 As an institution, laboratories reflect power. Its dynamism is a reflection of the power of the state, the epistemology and the morality that nurtured it. This book understands the colonial laboratory as an institution whose isolation was never complete, but whose elitism was always evident. It is necessary to approach laboratories in colonial India as dynamic institutions, which created their own distinct moral context. Bacteriology, like modern science in general, created important links with Indian cultures, imperial moralities, and colonial society. Hankin, the imperial chemical examiner based in Agra, discovered the “remarkable” power of self-purification of the water of the Ganges River, which was due to the presence of volatile acid substances.84 The Hindus otherwise considered this river as sacred and pristine. This contributed to the legitimization of bacteriological research in northern India. The laboratory in India was always a “living” entity and bacteriology as practiced within and outside the laboratory was a complex medical experience. Bacteriological research in India accommodated the social and ecological factors in the colonies from the very beginning. Haffkine, who introduced human bacteriological vaccination in India, suggested that diseases had different environmental relationships. Diseases like rabies, syphilis, smallpox, or leprosy, “where the infection is to be found in the patient alone” needed different segregation precautions from those like typhoid, cholera, or plague, where “the patient was a limited source of danger” and the focus had to be on the environment: Inoculation cannot be substituted for a good water supply, the draining, cleansing, or improvements in the buildings of cities. . . . The part of vaccination and preventive inoculation in combating epidemics stands in the same relation to general sanitary measures as therapeutics and the art of the healing physician stand to domestic hygiene and sanitation. It is certain that neither of these can ever be substituted for the other.85

In terms of cholera research, British medical men and bacteriologists treated the whole of India as the site of cholera and as their laboratory, partly because of the identification of specific colonial regions as disease zones from the eighteenth century. In the tropics, environmental and ecological conditions were always vital to European medical practice. British medical men had seen the hot climate as a factor in the causation of diseases in India, the West Indies, Africa, etc.86 The first two chapters show that from the very onset of bacteriological research in India, climatic and environmental factors played a critical role, often invoking the moral geographies of disease in the tropics. This was evident in the debates about locating the laboratories in the salubrious hill stations of India. Moreover, as the experiences of early bacteriologists in India such as Haffkine, Hankin, and Semple demonstrate, laboratory

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research and vaccination in the colony had to confront the myriad cultural, social, and political situations in the country. The bacteriological laboratory underwent important transformations in the tropical colonies, even as bacteriology proposed a new medical paradigm. While Haffkine came to India with new hope and a new vaccine, he also faced considerable skepticism and hostility from the British medical establishment in India. With his arrival in Calcutta, bacteriology directly confronted the nineteenth-century medical paradigm well entrenched in India, based on anticontagionism and climatic determinism. This led to regular negotiations between the two, which reflected negotiations between different types of moralities and also different attitudes toward germs. The insistence on climatic and environmental factors, as proposed by the German hygienist Max Joseph von Pettenkofer (1818–1901), was received with great enthusiasm in British India, along with the ideas of Pasteur.87 Haffkine’s own work changed; he came to India with a live cholera vaccine, following the Pasteurian faith in such vaccines. However, for his subsequent plague inoculation in Bombay, he developed a dead vaccine, following the British-Indian medical opinion that the tropics needed dead vaccines. This negotiation next became evident in the choice of the site of the Indian Pasteur institutes. Chapter 2 studies how the location of the laboratories was determined through an invention of a medical tradition that suggested that tropical germs needed to be studied in isolation in the remote and salubrious hill stations. It is for this intermediary status of tropical bacteriology that it needs to be studied both inside and outside the walls of the laboratory. Laboratories in the empire did not develop in isolation to colonial society, culture, and state. The debates around animal experimentation in the Indian laboratories were informed by both late Victorian moralities as well as Hindu sensibilities around the contemporary cow protection movement. Indian nationalists produced a critique of the location of the laboratories in the hills, drawing from the political critique of colonial control over Indian healthcare and recruitment, reiterating the links between geographical, political, and scientific spaces. The book describes how bacteriology found its home in the tropics. It proposes a new mode of understanding bacteriology in the colonies: as a mode of knowledge that combined causation and cure within a singular paradigm to provide a new moral force in resolving the myriad realities of what were known as colonial pathologies. At the same time, it was ideologically entrenched among Indians who were convinced of the benefits of Western science and who often adopted the ideas of germs and the use of vaccines enthusiastically. Through this convergence of new ideas bacteriology was introduced, adopted, and practiced in colonial India within existing parameters of colonial science. The expansion of the field of operation and the moral and material dynamism of the colonial laboratory did not lead to a dislocation of the basic premises of colonial science. This book highlights the confines of bacteriology and of medical research in

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the colonies, entangled within an imperial moral paradigm. To that extent, bacteriology in the tropics also became a model of colonial science and reflected its duality: its intense engagement with, and investigation of, the realities of life and health in the colonies could not lead to a comprehension of the effects of colonialism itself. The book shows how this duality ultimately created a hiatus between causality and the cure of diseases in the tropics that even the unified propositions of bacteriology failed to bridge.

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Chapter One

Bacteriology in India A Moral Paradigm Germs found new life and meanings in the tropics. They added new depth to the phenomenon of putrefaction previously associated with hot climates. Following the emergence of the idea of germs as causal organisms of diseases, European physicians and scientists no longer perceived the tropics as merely hot and miasmatic places, they also, it appeared, saw them as infested with germs. The identification of specific viruses and bacteria for diseases provided both optimism about the European colonization of and habitation in the tropics and, simultaneously and paradoxically, raised new apprehensions about germs in the tropics. While bacteriology provided the possibility that with vaccines colonial diseases could now be rescued from the fatalism of tropical climatology, it also generated new anxieties in colonial medicine. Physicians worried about whether germs behaved differently in hot climates; if tropical fecundity was ideal for the spread of germs; whether the native bodies and habits were peculiarly predisposed to harbor germs; whether vaccines could be produced and preserved in the tropics; and, finally, if bacteriology had to play an even more revolutionary role in the tropical colonies. Bacteriology emerged in India within the morality and paternalism of nineteenth-century public health and sanitarianism. In India as in Britain, bacteriology in the nineteenth century coexisted with heavy measures of sanitary doctrines. The zymotic theory of the 1870s united the new germ theory with earlier ideas of putrefaction, absorbing the same moral values associated with filth and decomposition. Both filth and germs were seen as contributing to disease.1 Physicians believed that moral miasmas corresponded to physical ones; moral filth was as much a concern as physical filth.2 These ideas of filth and germs found new meaning in the tropical colonies where imperial medical men represented themselves as involved in a moral crusade against colonial and tropical diseases and germs. By the 1830s, scientists found evidence that yeast consisted of small spherules that had the property of multiplying and were therefore living organisms. Pasteur established that fermentation depended on living forms and that there was vital and dynamic character to this change. Aided by new microscopes, laboratories, and experiments, scientists gradually discovered a “new world of life.”3

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Soon bacteriology also offered important commercial benefits to wine, milk, tobacco, and silk industries by the introduction of the process of pasteurization. Meanwhile, experimental bacteriology helped in the identification of microbes causing diseases as well as the means by which these germs could be “mastered” by applying the concepts of fermentation and pasteurization. Pasteur attenuated bacterial viruses such as those of anthrax and rabies and developed vaccines. This led to the application of bacteriology in human and animal bodies in the form of vaccines, starting with anthrax, tuberculosis, cholera, and typhoid. Simultaneously bacteriology was introduced in the colonies. In India colonial bacteriology developed in the confluence of Victorian imperialism and the Pasteurian revolution. Bacteriology and Pasteurism enjoyed a moral ascendancy in colonial India that it did not have in Britain. This chapter will explain how Pasteurism and bacteriology were introduced in the British colony through the reworking of the ideas of germs in the tropics. It occurred through two long-term processes. The first was the emergence of germ theory as the new moral and medical philosophy in colonial medicine. The second was the institutional entrenchments that bacteriology made in the colony as a new medical and scientific practice. British residents in India along with certain sections of the Indian elite launched a public movement in the late 1880s to establish a Pasteur institute in India. Pasteurian bacteriology offered different promises to different sections of the colonial establishment in India. To the colonial state, it offered commercial benefits for its agricultural investments and veterinary solutions for its military establishment. To the younger generation of British medical men in India, it offered a new and revolutionary means to challenge the existing modes of British colonial medicine and thereby foster their own professional eminence. To the British civilian residents in India, it appeared as a hope to conquer, through a relatively simple process of vaccination, the various tropical realities and pathologies that they felt constrained their lives. To the Indian princes and elites like the Rana of Dholpur or the Nizam of Hyderabad, the adoption and sponsorship of modern laboratory science had a political motive. It was an important mode of demonstrating their modern and progressive credentials to the Raj and, in the process, attempting to retain their fragile and partial autonomy vis-à-vis the colonial state. For educated Indians, who by the end of the nineteenth century were deeply influenced by modern science and were eagerly participating in science education and research, germ theory and vaccines appeared as a revolutionary new medicine. Various sections of British and Indian society supported Pasteurian bacteriology and played their part in the construct of the new medical paradigm, which proposed a simple mode of identifying and treating all diseases. The establishment of laboratories rather than hospitals appealed to colonial medical men as a new institutional organization with which to counter diseases in the tropics. This new ideological and institutional motif was particularly powerful in the tropical colonies that otherwise seemed forever immersed in a myriad of unresolved

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social, ecological, and cultural realities. To that extent, the Pasteur movement also reinforced the moral imperatives of the British crusade against tropical diseases, establishing bacteriology as an imperial panacea. Before pursuing the question of morality and imperial medicine, it is important to indicate another layer in the discourse of morality and science in India. From the late nineteenth century, Indians themselves had adopted science as a moral force in their ideas of nation building, and there was a convergence in the ideas of science, morality, and the laboratory in contemporary Indian nationalist discourse. Indian nationalist promoters of science saw laboratory research as essential to Indian adoption and practice of Western science and the general pursuit of modernity and nationhood that characterized Indian nationalism in this period. This was evident in the setting up of the first Indian nationalist science institution, the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, by M. L. Sircar in 1876. Sircar adopted Western science as a moral force that represented enlightenment, the path toward correct judgment, true moral character, and rational thinking. He therefore stressed the need for Indians to be active participants in scientific research, to practice and cultivate science in laboratories rather than remain its mere observers. In his institute he created a small physics laboratory.4 From the 1880s Indian nationalists and scientists also launched movements to establishment physical, chemical, and technical research laboratories.5 This meant that despite the contestation for control and management of different domains and institutions of science between colonial and nationalist scientists, as we shall see later, laboratories emerged as sites of progress and enlightenment in colonial India.

Morality and Medicine in Victorian India Western medicine assumed important moral spaces in the tropical colonies where Europeans viewed disease as both a physical and a moral affliction. From the early nineteenth century, British medical men viewed European medicine as a panacea against the prevailing immoralities, prejudices, and maladies in the Indian colony. By the middle of the nineteenth century, British medicine, public health, and state medicine emerged as a dominant and distinct form of medical practice in India, leaving behind the more hybrid experiences of the eighteenth century.6 This was also shaped by Victorian imperialism, which projected the British governance of India as a moral undertaking. Following the Revolt of 1857 and the imposition of crown rule in India the British administration formally undertook to uphold the “moral and material” well-being of its Indian subjects. From 1859, the India Office published the Statement Exhibiting the Moral and Material Progress of India every ten years. The Under Secretary of State for India highlighted the moral ideals of Indian governance: “To raise the Indian people in the moral, intellectual, and social scale of nations; to stimulate

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their progress in the sciences which prolong life, and in the arts which beautify it, and in the beneficent enterprises of well-ordered intelligence.”7 Moral progress and the well-being of Indians became the raison d’être of Victorian rule of India, and in 1897, William Lee-Warner (1846–1914), the political and secret secretary at the India Office, in his speech to the Society of Arts spoke on the “Moral Advance of the People of India during the Reign of Queen Victoria.”8 This agenda of “moral and material well being” was deeply entrenched in the imperial psyche by the end of nineteenth century, particularly when there was a growing awareness among Indians about the immoralities of colonial rule, which drained the resources of the country. Early Indian nationalists like Dadabhai Naoroji produced a particularly moralistic critique of the economic “drain of India” by the British, describing it as a “moral drain,” which led to the “moral poverty of India.”9 He wrote that “the English with their scientific scalpel cut to the very heart [of India], and yet, lo! there is no wound to be seen, and soon the plaster of the high talk of civilization, progress, and what not, covers up the wound!”10 In the face of such critique, imperial medicine and public health, along with Western education, became the last and crucial bastion of the imperial moral enterprise. It was within this context that bacteriology appeared in India in the late nineteenth century. The premises of colonial medicine in India were established through a process that started from the end of the eighteenth century, when British medical men became proponents of theories of diseases of hot climates. India offered them a vast field for observing and theorizing on diseases of the tropics. By the middle of the nineteenth century, British medical men became leaders in the study of tropical diseases. At the same time, within the colony, Western medicine, public health, hospitals, European drugs, and sanitary ideas had become dominant modes of medical practice. This dominance of British imperial medicine was evident in the formation of the IMS, a unique body of medical men, which emerged from the military traditions of the English East India Company.11 As the company’s territorial control over the Indian subcontinent expanded by the middle of the nineteenth century, British physicians and surgeons belonging to the military establishment enjoyed large civilian practices as well in the newly established hospitals, dispensaries, and research establishments in various parts of the country. This dual role of the IMS was unique and it was crucial to its power and hegemony in colonial India. With the assumption of crown rule from 1858, Indian public health became an important concern of the colonial government and greatly enhanced the sphere of activity of the IMS officers. The colonial government simultaneously sought to retain its metropolitan character. The entrance exams for recruitment for the IMS were held only in England and its candidates were almost entirely trained in British universities. In the Indian universities, courses in medical science and research remained rudimentary. Very few Indians joined the IMS until the turn of the century.

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Since the cadres of the IMS and graduates from British universities dominated imperial medical practice and research, graduates of Indian universities, who were mostly Indians, were left to pursue research in other sciences—physics, chemistry, and mathematics, which received little imperial patronage and funding. By the early twentieth century, although there were several Indian scientists who conducted research in the physical or chemical sciences, very few worked in medicine.12 These researches were invariably underfunded and seldom supported by the state. Throughout the colonial period there were few institutional facilities or laboratories for research in physics or chemistry outside the small university laboratories.13 In 1889, the British agricultural scientist John A. Voelcker, FRS, came to India to compile a report on the state of agricultural research in the country. His report, published in 1893, highlighted the dismal state of scientific and technical research and showed that there was little attempt at linking scientific inquiry with practical purposes.14 During the 1890s, Indian nationalists started a movement for establishing technical institutions and physical and chemical laboratories in India. In 1890, the Indian Association (a nationalist organization) established its own laboratory with a donation from the Maharaja of Vizianagram.15 These efforts received little support from the colonial government despite several appeals from the nationalists.16 Neither did the nationalist initiatives of establishing their own laboratories receive any sympathy from the British residents who were at the time campaigning throughout the country for establishing Pasteur institutes. When Prasanna Kumar Sen was travelling throughout north and central India to collect funds for a technical institute for Indians in Calcutta, the editorial of Civil & Military Gazette queried, “Why cannot Calcutta, or at any rate Bengal, pay for its own technical schools?”17 Apprehension among the British about the consequences of the practice of science by Indians, particularly in the context of the growing nationalist political and cultural assertion, also motivated this reluctance. In 1890, an editorial in the Civil & Military Gazette commented on the risks of introducing modern scientific ideas to Indians. “One has to be careful because the crooked native mind could transfer any knowledge, as it had done with modern education, rather than accepting as an idea of reason, into an ideology of dissent. . . . Science might have the unexpected effect—as education has had—of enabling one to pervert the truth.”18 Simultaneously, medicine was considered to be the monopoly of the imperial regime, and thereby a safer investment of imperial resources. At the first Indian Medical Congress in 1894, a suggestion was put forward by British medical men that some of the government funds for native education could be better used for building medical research institutes. This received approval from Britain as well. The British Medical Journal (BMJ ) supported the idea since it believed that modern education had only led the “Bengali babus” to becoming

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“disloyal and seditious agitators.”19 Although Indians had entered the corridors of modern science, medicine remained largely in the hands of the British. While other sciences suffered from apathy in the colony, medicine remained a moral undertaking and the white man’s burden. Yet by the end of the nineteenth century, colonial medicine, which was invested with colonial patronage and moral authority, was faced with its own moral crisis. Confronted with epidemics of the cholera, plague, and kala-azar that visited India repeatedly throughout the late nineteenth century, to which the existing modes of colonial medicine in sanitation, drugs, and the hospitals offered little respite and hope, British residents and medical officers aspired for change. As diseases and epidemics claimed the lives of both the British and Indians, impatience with the old medical establishment gathered public sentiment in India. This was when English newspapers in India such as the Civil & Military Gazette and Pioneer Mail, which were run by British residents, participated in the critique of colonial medical practices. In 1893, the Civil & Military Gazette declared that it had lost faith in the existing medical establishment of India. It published a long editorial, titled “Lagging behind the Times,” in which it argued for a new vision in colonial medicine. “What the present state of science demands are men able to investigate epidemic disease scientifically, who can ascertain whether a disease is due or not to a microbe, can follow out that germ through its life history.”20 Pasteur and his science appeared as the resolution to this moral crisis, as a new medical breakthrough and a new mode of dealing with the multifarious disease realities of the tropics. Pasteur became the new hope in colonial medicine. In 1893 when Koch had made his discovery of the comma bacillus and Pasteur was vaccinating with his rabies and anthrax vaccines, the Civil & Military Gazette editorial asked impatiently, “Why should we English lag behind in the march of scientific progress?” Highlighting the need for a Pasteur Institute in India, it argued that Pasteur’s research had saved the silk industry of France, German scientists had helped their cattle industry, and similar steps were needed in India. It cited the recent cattle epidemic in Kangra district (in Punjab) that drove people to starvation and death, in order to assert, “Here will be a powerful argument for the establishment of such an institution . . . to search out scientifically the life, history, causes and mode of contagion of the germ.” It suggested that bacteriology and Pasteurian science had an even greater role to play in India (“If there is one country more than any other in which a vast field is open for study it is India).” Pasteur appeared as the new savior in the colonies, and the movement was launched for an Indian Pasteur institute. The movement articulated a critique of British science in India and in turn the British governance of India: Is that the Government of India is indifferent to the loss of life, and consequent loss of money? Or is it that anything like progress or advance in knowledge is prohibited by officialism and jealousy? . . . Scientific investigation, as

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now conducted, if it does not discover a remedy, at least gives sound reasons for its opinions. When it cannot heal, it points out how to avert disease, because science accepts nothing but facts, and proved facts.

The editorial of Civil & Military Gazette expressed its discontent with the existing colonial research institutes, pointing out that the veterinary institute at Poona neither investigated human diseases nor trained students in bacteriology. “What has this Poona institute done? Has a single pupil been taught? Or a vaccine sent out for use? Has a single case of hydrophobia been treated here?” This critique of governmental apathy became a common theme in Civil & Military Gazette’s campaign for a Pasteur institute in India. The lack of Pasteurian medicine in India was also expressed as a matter of imperial embarrassment. In 1890, a British resident wrote to Civil & Military Gazette that he was “ashamed” that patients could not enjoy Pasteur treatment in India, but had to travel six thousand miles to Paris for it.21 The theme that appeared repeatedly in the campaign was that the existing medical practices of India were obsolete and that Pasteur represented the muchneeded change. This engendered a critique of contemporary British science as well. Anglo-Indian newspapers described the absence of a Pasteur institute in England as “little short of a national calamity” and “a national disgrace.”22 This became a critique of the science practiced by the British in the colonies. In 1893, another article that appeared in Civil & Military Gazette titled “Obstructive Heads” interpreted the delay in establishing a Pasteur institute in India as a result of the resistance of the old medical establishment. The article lamented that these men who belonged to an earlier generation of medical experts were “so far behind the times” that they continued to doubt Pasteur’s methods and were “afraid to commit themselves to” what the author of the article believed were “irrefutable” facts. This stagnation and obstinacy came from their lack of awareness of the “advancement of new scientific theories.” The time had come for the older generation to make way for new men with new ideas. The rising generation of doctors breathe quite a different scientific atmosphere from that inhaled by their predecessors, who by the length of their meritorious service are also their superiors in India. . . . The latter [younger generation of colonial medical men] are keen to advance and the former (older generation) content to stand still.23

The piece ended with a firm commitment toward that change, which Pasteur institutes symbolized: “we will not drop the subject of the urgent need of a Pasteur Institute in India until one is established.” As the article pointed out, this disillusionment with the existing colonial medical establishment and the enthusiasm for Pasteur also reflected a change of guard in colonial medicine. A new breed of medical men was working toward a change in the therapeutic approaches within colonial medicine. As Pasteurian science made great

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strides, a growing number of British physicians in India urged its immediate introduction in India.

Change of Guard in Colonial Medicine Why the interest in Pasteur among British medical men, particularly among members of the IMS, which was after all the “grand old service,” the “steel frame” of the British sanitary regime in India, and which had previously posed challenges to Koch and Pasteur? In 1917, Pardey Lukis (director general of the IMS), while writing about the evolution of medical research in British India, noted that by the late nineteenth century, a number of men “with a bent for medical research” came to India “fired by enthusiasm and determined to take full advantage of the unique advantages that India offers for original investigation and scientific discovery.”24 Pasteur institutes promised new scientific eminence and career opportunities for colonial scientists. Most of these younger British medical men who came to India in the 1880s had been exposed to developments in medical science on the continent of Europe. Their visits to laboratories in France and Germany to learn bacteriological methods and their urge to establish Pasteur institutes in India were shaped by the tradition of apprenticeship and prophetic lineage established in the various Pasteur institutes of Europe and elsewhere.25 The Pasteurian lineage proved important in India as well. In 1893, when Haffkine reached India with his cholera vaccine the Allahabad-based Anglo-Indian paper Pioneer Mail welcomed him: “the fact that he comes to us under the aegis of the Pasteur Institute, and that his method has been elaborated under the eyes of Pasteur and his colleagues, is a favourable augury for his success.”26 Several of the British medical officers who came to India in the 1880s were trained in the research institutes in France and Germany. Major R. W. S. Lyons, an IMS officer, was trained in the Pasteur Institute at Lille in 1899, along with Semple and R. N. Andrews, both of whom served in India.27 Lyons worked on snake venoms under the French Pasteurist Albert Calmette. Even Hankin, who came to Agra as a chemical examiner, was trained in Koch’s laboratory in Berlin. McLeod, another IMS officer, was also on a furlough to Europe during the 1880s visiting the Pasteur institutes and Koch’s laboratory.28 Even Indian princes sent Western-trained Indian physicians to Europe to be trained in bacteriology. In 1894, the ruler of  the state of Palanpur (in western India) spent six thousand rupees to sponsor the trip of Dr. Nasawanji F. Surveyor, honorary physician of J. J. Hospital, Bombay, to undertake a course in bacteriology at University College London.29 Another IMS officer, Roe, who later initiated the movement for the establishment of the Indian Pasteur institutes in the Punjab, wrote from Berlin, where he was studying bacteriology, to the secretary of state for India about his experiences

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in Paris and Germany and the “new science of bacteriology” that he had learned. On the eve of his return to India, he asked the colonial government if he should carry with him instruments and equipment necessary to establish a Pasteur institute there. He also offered to carry with him the virus fixe from Paris in order to start both rabies and anthrax treatments in India.30 The IMG, the mouthpiece of the IMS, enthusiastically supported the plan, adding, “It is not improbable that a Pasteur Institute will be established before long in India.”31 Alfred Lingard (who was not a member of the IMS) was trained in France and Germany before joining the Imperial Bateriological Laboratory. He too hoped that a Pasteur institute could be established in India with him in charge. In a letter to the principal of the College of Science at Poona in 1891, he wrote: It appears to me that the question of rabies in India has not received the attention that is given to it at the present time in all civilized countries . . . within the short period of my residence in Poona several telegrams have been received by me, asking for advice and assistance in cases of hydrophobia, and requesting me to supply and forward at once the necessary remedies advocated by M. Pasteur.32

Lingard wanted the institute to serve only European residents and troops and suggested that under his supervision the Poona laboratory should be authorized to manufacture Pasteur’s antirabic vaccines.33 This new generation of medical men in the colony encountered opposition from the old medical establishment in India and Britain. British medicine in colonial India in the nineteenth century was dominated by ideas of anticontagionism and showed a slow acceptance of and even hostility toward Pasteurian ideas. These established ideas had support from eminent scientists in Britain as well. In 1893, when the Agra-based scientist Hankin wrote to the Pioneer Mail about the need to establish a Pasteur institute in India, Edward Haughton of Trinity College, Dublin, reacted negatively by citing the earlier contribution of British medicinal men to the study of Indian diseases. “[Hankin] will hardly compare himself with the gentlemen whom I have named as an exponent of the art of healing, as some of them were practising that art before he was even born.” Nonetheless, in India reverence for the old tradition was wearing thin. The editorial of the Lahore-based daily Civil & Military Gazette ridiculed Haughton’s comments as futile in the face of inevitable change. “This is in the delicious vein of the old lady who denounced her engineer nephew for believing in railway communication because she had travelled from London to York in a stage coach before he was born. . . . It is the old story of all scientific progress. . . . A few years, however, will see the last of obstruction of this kind in the natural course of Nature.”34 Pasteur became the symbol of this change of guard in colonial medicine. By the 1890s even the IMG insisted on the need for Pasteurian treatment in India. In 1893 the journal appealed for the establishment of a Pasteur institute in India

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and for change in the old order of British medicine in India: the old methods, it emphasized, “needed to be replaced by the new,” and Pasteur heralded the “dawn of a new era for preventive medicine.”35 The IMG, like newspapers such as the Civil & Military Gazette, represented the Pasteur Institute not just as a scientific institution but also as the symbol of scientific progress. As a new and revolutionary medical practice, Pasteur at this time represented a more holistic approach in medicine. The journal reiterated the need to adopt a broader vision of medical practice, to involve men trained in chemical, physiological, pathological, and biological science who would be able to exploit the full potential of Pasteurian science in India, and to address: “the many important problems relating to Indian diseases of man and the lower animals, and also the much neglected mysteries connected to the agricultural pests.”36 Pasteurian science promised a new scientific paradigm that could revitalize medicine in the tropics. The sentiments that the IMG and the new breed of colonial medical officers represented were not in isolation. There was a wider appreciation among medical men in Europe and in the colonies of the significant role that bacteriology and Pasteurian vaccines could play in the tropical colonies. This led to ideological convergences between early Pasteurism and imperial medicine. The Pasteurian sentiments in India developed within this emerging consensus.

Early Pasteurism and Imperial Medicine The convergence of the imperial idiom of tropical medicine and the panacean rhetoric of Pasteurian bacteriology was evident at the establishment of the London School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) in 1899. In the inaugural presidential speech on the establishment of the LSTM, Joseph Chamberlain (MP and founder of the LSTM), urged the institute and its medical men to take up the white man’s burden: “I cannot myself think of any subject of scientific research and philanthropic enterprise which is more interesting, and the duty of supporting is one, which we owe to the Empire, and from which we cannot divest ourselves whatever our political opinions may be.” He continued, among loud cheers, about the moral responsibility of imperial medicine. This duty to which I refer has increased in recent years with the continual extension of our territory, with the increase of our scientific knowledge, and our opportunities, and also with what I may call the awakening of our Imperial conscience (cheers). We owe this duty to the vast population for which we have gradually made ourselves responsible and we owe it still more to those of our own race who are daily risking health and life to maintain the honour and interests of this country (hear, hear). . . . In the last half century Africa has been disclosed to the world, and in what has been called “the race for Africa” it was impossible that we should not have had our share.37

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At this important juncture of British imperial medicine, Chamberlain paid the first and primary tribute to the French scientist, Louis Pasteur, thereby linking Pasteurian bacteriology with British tropical medicine. “It is our first duty to do all that is in our power to reduce this blood tribute that we pay to the Empire. . . . The discoveries of M. Pasteur . . . laid the foundation for all the recent works of scientific research.”38 Undoubtedly, bacteriology and Pasteurism in India was an imperial enterprise, manned by British medical men and driven by imperial concerns of health and disease in the tropics. Prior to the World War 1, IMS officers held most of the posts in the medical research institutes and professorships at Indian colleges. This tradition continued when they became the directors of the Indian Pasteur institutes as well. The staffing of the research labs was regularized by the formation of a distinct cadre of IMS officers, the Bacteriological Department of the GOI (later the Medical Research Department), in 1906. Mark Harrison has described the growth of medical research institutes in colonial India as an autonomous and fragmented colonial development with little metropolitan connection. He has highlighted three factors: the Colonial Office had little influence upon policymaking in India; the laboratories were developed mainly for local economic and political situations; and the scientific workforce in India, mainly the IMS officers, functioned in a state of isolation with little contact with metropolitan scientific developments. He also suggests that the outbreaks of plague and cholera toward the end of the nineteenth century in India prompted the setting up of the bacteriological laboratories.39 This is slightly misleading. While it is true that these outbreaks did prompt the institutionalization of medical research, there were other forces at work as well to bring about the institutional and organizational change much before the outbreaks. Moreover, before the establishment of Pasteur institutes, the facilities of the existing colonial laboratories provide little evidence for the autonomous growth of medical research in India. The laboratories that Haffkine and David Douglas (D. D.) Cunningham (1843–1914) worked at in Bombay and Calcutta for research in plague and cholera, respectively, were small and ad hoc establishments, with no plans for the future network of laboratories and no vision of eradicating the general diseases of India. The movement to introduce Pasteurian science and establish Pasteur institutes in India was based on a complex reworking of metropolitan science in colonial contexts. Pasteurism introduced distinct imperatives as a new scientific method and institution in contemporary Europe and the French colonies. Within France, the spread of Pasteurian science depended on a whole network

of forces, including the public hygiene movement, the medical profession, and colonial interests.40 Overseas, it often adopted strong moral connotations and religious overtones. Pasteur’s disciples represented him as the prophet or the “pilgrim father.” As A.  M. Moulin has shown, those who were trained directly under him and who headed later institutions in the French colonies “displayed the proofs of his lineage: he [the French colonial Pasteurist] was

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trained by one of the early companions of the prophet.” The French colonial Pasteur institutes also served the economic considerations of French imperialism. The French Pasteur institutes in Saigon, Tunis, and Morocco were created out of a “collusion” of the colonial lobby and the Pasteurian scientists to address issues related to agriculture, veterinary medicine, or rabies.41 The Paris Pasteur Institute tended to see the peripheral institutes as devoted to applied research based on the “pure” research done at Paris. In the British colonies, Pasteurian science did not enjoy the same religious overtones or the close-knit networks, but it nevertheless inspired a readjustment in the imperial medical thinking around germs and colonial pathology. With the rise of germ theory, native bodies and the tropical climate were seen as the “original and cardinal site of dangerous pathogens.”42 Bacteriology provided the methods and means by which these colonial pathogens could be identified and even eradicated. Armed with the possibilities of germ theory in the tropics, European scientists at the turn of the century returned with new vigor and urgency to the vexing question, “Is the acclimatisation of Europeans in tropical climates possible?”43 The microbiologist Luigi Sambon identified two causes of disease in the tropics: heat and germs. He suggested that diseases prevalent in the tropics, such as malaria, yellow fever, and liver abscesses, could be attributed not just to heat, but also to the climatic and ecological conditions of the tropics that bred the germs. If these breeding places could be avoided or eliminated, then the main obstacle to the colonization of the tropics by Europeans could be removed.44 Pasteurian bacteriology presented a new method of dealing with colonial germs. By promising to identify and cleanse the germs of the tropics, bacteriology provided a new morality to colonial medicine. This moral imperative and revolutionary prospect was absent in the other major contemporary British medical breakthrough: Listerism, which provided a slightly different theory of putrefaction and urged the systematic use of antiseptics in dealing with germs and putrefaction during the performance of operations and the treatment of wounds. In India, Listerism remained predominantly a surgical method, and a similar movement to introduce it in India failed to gain popular support. The retired IMS officer McLeod wrote about his experiences in the Calcutta Medical College. Edward Lawrie, who joined the service in the 1870s and had trained under Lister and Syme in Britain, tried to introduce Lister’s methods in Calcutta but found that the “appliances went missing” and there were very few skilled assistants to perform the antiseptic practices properly. During 1876–77, McLeod was in Britain on a furlough for fifteen months and studied Lister’s antiseptic methods at the Edinburgh Infirmary. When he returned to Calcutta and rejoined the Calcutta hospital in 1879, he tried to reintroduce it. He was faced with the same problems. Unable to introduce the new surgical hygiene, he described the Calcutta hospital as a “hot-bed of every description of septic disease, and the mortality following surgical operations was deplorable.”45 The problem remained entangled at the level of lack of instruments and skilled

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assistants in colonial hospitals and thereby within the existing parameters of colonial medicine. Listerism provided continuity to the existing ideas of imperial sanitation in India rather than provide a new moral paradigm. It is also important to note that even in Britain contemporary scientific opinion remained strongly in favor of Pasteur’s treatment, despite the very visible opposition that Pasteur faced from antivivisectionists and antivaccination campaigners. The 1887 Report from Select Committee of House of Lords on Rabies in Dogs had strongly favored Pasteur’s rabies treatment. The committee boasted of leading scientists such as James Paget, Thomas Lauder Brunton, G. Fleming (chief veterinary surgeon), Joseph Lister, Richard Quain, H. E. Roscoe, Burdon-Sanderson, and Victor Horsley. Lauder Brunton apparently went to Paris incredulous of Pasteur’s rabies treatment and returned perfectly convinced of its utility.46 Marc A. Ruffer (1859–1917) was the foremost proponent of Pasteur in Britain.47 He had studied under Pasteur and Metchnikoff at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and in 1889 organized a national conference on the efficacy of Pasteur’s antirabies vaccine in Britain. Speakers here included the Lord Mayor, Paget, Roscoe, Lister, Lubbock, Foster, Brunton, Lancaster, Horsley, Stokes, and Ernest A. Hart. At the end of the conference, Ruffer sent a telegram to Pasteur. “Meeting grand success. The votes on all resolutions were unanimous in a milieu of enthusiastic applause for M. Pasteur and his method.”48 In the same year at the meeting of the Society for Arts, Ruffer gave his strong support to the Paris Pasteur Institute. Lister, who chaired the meeting, praised Pasteur as well, and as he was acutely aware of the antivivisectionists in Britain he also highlighted Pasteur’s “kindness of heart” and his particular tenderness toward suffering humans and animals.49 Ruffer produced evidence in support of Pasteur’s treatment of hydrophobia in different parts of the world: Odessa, Moscow, Turin, Palermo, Naples, and Havana (37–39). However, perhaps aware of the sentiments against Pasteur in Britain, he stopped short of suggesting establishing a Pasteur institute there. Instead, he recommended the registration and muzzling of all dogs, the destruction of all stray dogs, and quarantining all imported dogs (34–35). For the treatment of rabies, he advised that patients should “take the first train to Paris and be inoculated (39).” Therefore, although there was no real move to establish a Pasteur institute in Britain, there was a general acceptance of Pasteur’s method among leading British scientists. These scientists looked toward India with great hope and anticipation of establishing a Pasteur institute and exploring the possibilities of Pasteurism in the tropics. Scientists like Ruffer and Lister and journals like the Lancet, Science, and BMJ closely followed the development of the Pasteur movement in India.50 Ruffer came to India as a member of the Plague Commission in 1898–99 and raised the point about the necessity for a Pasteur institute in India. At the same time, contemporary scientific breakthroughs around bacteriology in Europe were making a strong impact on British medical men and the social elite of India. Several IMS officers like Roe and Barclay had been to both Paris and Berlin around the 1880s to learn the new research

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techniques and subsequently became forerunners in the introduction of bacteriological research in India. Pasteurian scientists outside Britain and France too looked at India as an ideal ground for the introduction of new vaccines. In 1889 Nikolai Gamaleya of the Pasteur Institute in Odessa proposed to establish an institute for the treatment of hydrophobia in India.51 At that time, Gamaleya was involved in both antirabies and anticholera research.52 The GOI turned down the proposal, explaining that it had no such plans “for the present at all events.”53 Hart, the influential editor of the BMJ, was the other British scientist who played an important role in linking British imperial medicine and Pasteurism. He was the first scientist in Britain to urge the establishment of a Pasteur institute in India. Throughout the 1890s under him the BMJ provided a critique of the existing facilities for British medicine in India and urged the introduction of Pasteur’s methods. With the advent of Pasteurian bacteriology, limitations of tropical medical education came to view. Hart visited India in 1894 and at the first Indian Medical Congress in Calcutta spoke on the “Ignorance of Tropical Diseases.” According to him, medical education in England was not focused on teaching tropical diseases, and physicians from England who went to the tropics went without the basic idea of the diseases that they confronted there. The need was to introduce bacteriological institutes in the colonies both for training as well as for conducting experiments.54 He urged the government of India to organize a “complete system of scientific medical research.”55 According to Hart, Pasteur institutes could represent this new “system,” which was already expanding in other colonies. The institutes were needed not just for the treatment of hydrophobia but also to treat most other diseases in India, particularly cholera and malaria. He suggested Darjeeling as a possible site for the institute, as it was closer to the cholera and malarial regions of Bengal.56 He also suggested the formal convergence of bacteriology and tropical medicine; in the tropics, bacteriology and tropical medicine had the same goal, since tropical diseases were caused by “tropical germs.”57 In 1897, Hart made another appeal in the BMJ for the introduction of bacteriological research in India, declaring that “nowhere in the world is there such a patent necessity for an ample endowment of bacteriological research as there is in India.”58 In India, Hart also served as a member of a committee appointed to look into the existing provisions for bacteriological investigation and teaching. He was thoroughly disappointed with the state of medical research in the country.59 In his report he produced the first plan for a network of bacteriological laboratories, proclaiming that “in the virgin soil of India Bacteriological research would offer special opportunities.”60 Pasteur institutes in India also promised to privilege medical research within colonial medicine. Before the advent of Pasteur laboratories in India, laboratory research was conducted at a rudimentary and makeshift basis. In Punjab, the Lahore laboratory was situated in a few rooms within the city’s medical college, “which were not intended for such purpose.”61 The small laboratory was used for a wide range of services, including medico-legal examinations of the

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whole of the Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province, and the teaching of chemistry, physics, and toxicology in the medical college. The laboratory at Agra was located in a bungalow rented from a native state. In it, too, authorities conducted medico-legal duties such as examination of viscera in human and cattle poisoning, and general chemical examination of public water supplies, fireworks, and food materials.62 Under the initiative of local Parsis the governor of Bombay inaugurated the Framjee Dinshaw Petit Laboratory for Scientific Medical Research in 1890. A financial gift from Framjee Petit, the eldest surviving son of Dinshaw, made this possible. This was to be essentially a teaching institution.63 It was in the corridors of the Framjee Dinshaw Petit Laboratory of the Grant Medical College that Haffkine set up his laboratory for plague research when he arrived in Bombay in October 1896. The first purely medical research laboratory was established in 1884 in Calcutta at the Presidency General Hospital for cholera research under D. D. Cunningham.64 This makeshift setup came for strong criticism from outside and from within the colony in the 1880s and 1890s. The critique of scientific institutions as pointed out by Hart and others so fervently in this period also served to diffuse to a certain extent the nationalist critique of the colonial scientific policy and lack of investment in research, and Indian scientists and elite also participated in the movement. The colonial government itself took an early interest in Pasteur, particularly in the commercial benefits of his research in the veterinary and agricultural sectors. This was a period of rapid military expansion in India, and from the early nineteenth century, cattle breeding programs had started in Punjab, particularly in Hissar.65 The cattle plague of 1869 accelerated official and professional interest in veterinary science and research. Moreover, the silk industry in India suffered from disease in 1886 identical to that which ravaged France and Europe between 1845 and 1865, and the GOI felt the need to introduce Pasteur’s treatment here.66 In 1890, the first bacteriological laboratory was established in India, the veterinary laboratory at Poona for the “microscopical investigation of cattle diseases,” with a special staff to superintendent operations.67 The veterinary laboratory in Poona was established primarily to import and then manufacture anthrax vaccine in India. In other words, it was to bring Pasteur’s “revolutionary” new science to India. The GOI decided to extend its scope and make it a central laboratory for experimental research.68 It brought Alfred Lingard from England and appointed him the grand title of an “imperial bacteriologist,” along with a less pretentious one as the “microscopist” at the Poona lab. The Poona Conference recommended that a bacteriological survey be instituted in all the provinces. John Cooper, a veterinary surgeon, was given charge of the survey, but he soon resigned.69 These developments were soon linked to the establishment of an Indian Pasteur institute. In 1892, the secretary of state for India communicated with the Pasteur Institute in Paris, and experiments with Pasteur’s anthrax vaccines were carried out in Bombay. The subsequent report was presented by Lingard. He wrote of the difficulty of bringing the anthrax vac-

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cine from Paris and requested the manufacture of these in India. He also asked for an immediate bacteriological survey of India.70 The introduction of the first Pasteurian vaccine in India proved abortive. Prior to the establishment of the Poona laboratory, two Indians (Bengalis) were sent to Paris to learn the methods of cultivation and use of the anthrax vaccine, and some apparatus were brought from Paris for use in India.71 Cooper (who was to be placed in charge of the lab) was also sent to Paris to supervise the plan. They visited Paris with a very definite plan, to study “merely the preparation and distribution of Pasteur’s anthrax vaccine.” However, once the vaccine was brought to India scientists realized that anthrax was a relatively rare disease among Indian cattle and they felt that vaccination might actually introduce the disease into India.72 The Lucknow-based Pioneer Mail, the Anglo-Indian newspaper that strongly supported the Pasteur movement in India, did not take this misadventure lightly. It interpreted this as another instance of the general resistance to Pasteur’s methods, as well as an “illustration of the utter incapacity of the Bengalis for any kind of scientific work . . . neither of the two young men who had gone through a course of training in the Pasteur Laboratory had succeeded in acquiring any knowledge of the purpose.” It cautioned the government and its officials of dabbling casually in a science that they knew little about, “the danger of mistakes is peculiarly great when we have to deal, on the one hand, with a practically autocratic bureaucrat, and, on the other hand, with the very uneducated and undeveloped herd that passes for public opinion in India.”73 Despite this metropolitan link, the adoption of French Pasteurian values and methods in India was not straightforward. To begin with, India was part of the British Empire and the Indian Pasteur institutes had little to do with the French institutes, even those in Indochina. More important, Pasteur was a controversial figure in contemporary England and was subjected to a strong critique from a group of radical and influential activists. Having failed to establish a Pasteur institute, the scientific elite in Britain had settled for the innocuously named “British Institute of Preventive Medicine.”74 Similar apprehensions about establishing an institute in the name of Pasteur were expressed in India as well. In 1897, Lord Elgin, the governor general of India, wrote to the secretary of state for India that he was keen to see a bacteriological institute in India, but added, “I should avoid Pasteur’s name.”75 Therefore, what was transferred to the colony also had a problematic lineage in the metropolis. Pasteurism was reinvented in India as a colonial science with unique connections made between Victorian imperial and Pasteurian moralities.

“To Tea and Microbes at 4 PM”: Reinventing Pasteur in Colonial India “To tea and microbes at 4 PM”: this was the invitation sent out by the collector of Aligarh (in north India) and printed in the local newspapers inviting people to

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Haffkine’s anticholera vaccination camp, or to a “cholera party.” The somewhat unusual tea invitation and even the plans for vaccination appeared consistent with Anglo-Indian social life. The Pioneer Mail reported that the “Collector’s hospitable bungalow became a shrine to which a motley crowd of pilgrims resorted.”76 For Indians, too, the program was meaningful. Along with the prospects of a visit to the collector’s bungalow, a message was spread among the locals of Aligarh that “the dreaded Haiza-ka-kira [germs of cholera] had been captured, and that from its bosom had been plucked the ‘perilous stuff’ to make ‘a sweet oblivious antidote,’” and all were invited “to come, taste and see.”77 In India, vaccination did not arouse the same images of horror and fear as it had in Britain. The possibility of a singular cause and cure had its appeal for Indians, to whom the concept of a cholera vaccine produced from the germs of the dreaded disease was compelling. Bacteriology universalized the concept of poisons to be used as potions. This metaphorical understanding of germ theory had particular potency in the tropical colonies and provided new impetus to its erstwhile scientific endeavors. In India the attempts were to find the roots of vaccination in Indian antiquity. From the early nineteenth century, Orientalist scholars like T. H. Colebrook, J. F. Royle, and F. W. Ellis had sought to identify traces of modern scientific ideas and rationalism in classical Indian texts written in Sanskrit, Tamil, and Persian. In this enterprise, particularly in interpreting Hindu texts, Indian pundits, the classically trained indigenous intelligentsia, primarily Brahmins, helped them. They discovered evidences of modern chemistry, astronomy, and surgery in these texts.78 This was the genesis of the modern discovery and celebration of the antiquity of Indian science and medicine.79 From the early nineteenth century, with the introduction of smallpox vaccination, Sanskrit scholars had searched for evidence of its ancient Indian practice.80 An article in 1819 in The Madras Courier, a popular daily newspaper, expressed the opinion that there existed an ancient Sanskrit text describing in detail the process of vaccination. This claim has remained contentious.81 By the end of nineteenth century, when bacteriological vaccines were introduced in India, this claim was revisited in search of the ancient Indian roots of bacteriological vaccination and even germ theory. In 1905, when the King Institute of Madras formally opened for undertaking vaccination and bacteriological research (it formerly functioned as a smallpox vaccination unit), Lord Ampthill, the governor of Madras, referred in his inaugural speech to the various modern medical and hygienic ideas in which India had anticipated Europe by centuries. He also repeated the earlier claim that ancient Hindus were familiar with vaccination.82 Ampthill derived the information from a 1899 essay in the Madras Mail by Walter G. King, the director of the institute. King had attempted to locate the origin of the extracts in question in the ancient text Dhanwantari, with the help of Sanskrit scholars. He found that the nearest source for this was a Sanskrit text titled Áuyrvedavijnana, which was a modern compilation of extracts from various authors. It was here that he found the reference to the practice of vaccination in ancient India.83

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However, the BMJ challenged the claim and suggested that the passage of the Dhanwantari was a later insertion within the ancient Sanskrit text. It argued that in order to overcome Indian opposition toward vaccination, the Sanskrit scholar Ellis had composed a short poem on vaccination in Sanskrit, which was then inserted within an old text. Similar interventions occurred when vaccination was introduced in Bengal as well. Here an Indian physician of Bareilly apparently placed in the hands of Dr. Gillman, the station surgeon, some leaves on which were inscribed an extract purporting to be taken from a Sanskrit work on medicine titled “Sudya Sangraha,” said to have been written by a physician named Mahadeva. It contained a chapter on Masurika, or chicken pox. After recommending application of leeches for the relief of sores, the text suddenly mentioned that pustules produced naturally on the teats of cows should be carefully preserved and then introduced into the human body: “make with a fine instrument a small puncture like that made by a goat on a child’s limb, and introduce into the blood as much as of the matter as is measured by a quarter of a ratti [traditional Indian unit for measurement].” This passage was suspected to be an interpolation by the other Sanskrit scholar Colebrook.84 King responded by suggesting that his reference was also found in the Sabdakalpadruma, another modern compilation of old texts by Raja Radhakanta Deb Bahadur, who, he pointed out, was praised by Max Muller as an eminent Sanskrit scholar. King also noted that Ellis had referred to the passage in contention as early as 1778; Jenner’s discovery did not take place until 1798, and vaccination was not introduced into India until 1802.85 King was supported by the Brahmin scholar from Madras, Pandit D. Gopala Charlu, who claimed that an eminent and respected scholar like Ellis would never have been party to “such fraud . . . as we learn from his life that he is a man of man of high moral character.”86 Later research has suggested that the whole affair was probably occasioned by overzealous British vaccination propagandists who composed tracts on vaccination in local languages and probably in Sanskrit.87 Although the Indian antiquity of vaccination remained contested, vaccines and germ theory were firmly established in India, and contemporary indigenous medical practices, both Ayurveda as well as Unani, incorporated aspects of germ theory and vaccination within their medical cosmology.88 Pasteur soon became a familiar name in India, particularly among the educated Indians. Vernacular newspapers and magazines received his discovery of the antirabic vaccine with enthusiasm, describing it as “revolutionary.” In 1887, the Bengali popular magazine Bharati carried a long report on Pasteur’s new hydrophobia treatment.89 It introduced Pasteur to Bengali readers as a great humanitarian. “He is a French scientist. His main skill is that he excels in those areas that benefit humankind” (378). The report discussed Pasteur’s research in silk worms and anthrax, which had benefitted the French industries. It also discussed in detail his experiments in the treatment of rabies, described the dried cord method, the manufacture of the vaccine using rabbits, his process of attenuation, trials of his

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vaccines, and the report by the British committee, which had found his treatment effective. It created a link between his vaccine and the smallpox vaccines that were already in use in India. “Pasteur’s new hydrophobia method and his vaccine protects the same way against rabies as vaccination protects against smallpox.” It also pointed out that the same principle could now be used for all other diseases. “Pasteur’s method could be gradually used for all other diseases caused by germs. Some people are of the opinion that all the diseases in our bodies are caused by some germs or other. . . . If the human body could be made inhabitable for such germs, then these germs will cease to bother us” (380). The article highlighted a vital difference between nineteenth-century smallpox vaccines and Pasteur’s method. The latter was based on sound rational principles while the former was based on conjecture: “Earlier, in the case of smallpox, some had guessed that this [attenuation of germs to prepare the vaccine against the same germ] could be why vaccines worked. . . . Pasteur did not just guess, he proved it” (383). There was also a notable absence of any mention of the critique that Pasteur faced in contemporary Europe. Therefore, by the late 1880s a large section of educated Indians became aware of the research methodologies of Pasteur and its scientific promise to India. The campaign for Pasteur institutes in India was launched by three groups: British medical men, British civilian residents in India, and a section of the Indian elite including native princes and businessmen. The movement first developed in print around the time that the Paris Pasteur Institute was established, in Indian medical journals such as the IMG and the Indian Medical Record (IMR) and in newspapers such as Civil & Military Gazette and the Pioneer Mail. This soon led to the formation of Pasteur committees in several Indian cities, and regular meetings and public speeches were held in support of Pasteur and his new method. Funds for an Indian Pasteur institute were raised, starting with a donation from the wealthy Indian merchant Khan Bahadur Barjorjee D. Patel. The Civil & Military Gazette announced at this point: “science is just now entering upon a new world of conquest, and in this life saving war against disease the greatest triumphs could certainly be won in India.”90 This public movement to establish a Pasteur institute in India originated in Punjab, a region that had become vital to the British colonial government in India from the middle of the nineteenth century because of military and revenue factors.91 Punjab had the largest military and civilian establishments of the Raj, and the Punjab government had taken the earliest initiatives in introducing bacteriological research in animal husbandry and agriculture.92 E. Kay Robinson (known as “EKR”), who edited the Lahore-based (the capital of the Punjab) Civil & Military Gazette between 1887 and 1895, led the movement. Robinson was an enthusiastic journalist and field naturalist who was born in India but educated at Cheltenham College. He began his journalistic career at the age of nineteen in England and after few years returned to India and Lahore. His editorial assistant was Rudyard Kipling. The Civil & Military Gazette became the

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main platform for the Pasteur movement in Punjab. In 1890 the Civil & Military Gazette published an article quoting from the issue of the Lancet that carried a report on the success of the Pasteur Institute in Paris. It quoted this particular paragraph declaring the victory of Pasteurism: The day of controversy is apparently nearly over, opposition has become an anachronism, hostile criticism is growing silent, and it seems no longer premature to acknowledge with gratitude that our age has witnessed one of the most fundamental and far-reaching advances that have marked the history of medicine from the rise of our art until the present day.93

In 1893, Robinson wrote to the chief secretary of the Punjab government about setting up a Pasteur institute in the province, adding that there was a public movement in favor of it and it was the “universal desire of the whole community who warmly advocate its establishment in the Province.”94 He referred to the movement in Punjab, where Khan Bahadur D. Patel, an influential contractor in Quetta in the North-West Frontier Province, had offered one thousand rupees for the proposed institute. Several wealthy Indians, particularly Parsis in Quetta and other parts of Baluchistan, also wrote to Robinson offering to contribute for a Pasteur institute.95 The lieutenant governor of Punjab too was in favor of the scheme. Roe, who had recently returned from his training in Paris and Berlin to become the surgeon-lieutenant of Sialkot in Punjab (and later the sanitary commissioner of Punjab), also joined the movement. In March 1893, the editors of Civil & Military Gazette requested Roe to draw up a plan for an Indian Pasteur institute. Roe’s plans were published in the newspaper.96 In the same year he wrote to the inspector general of civil hospitals of Punjab about his plans to establish a “Punjab Pasteur Institute.” He had a broad plan for the institute; it would serve both Europeans and Indians and be suitable for a poor country like India. “The object of this Institution is primarily for the relief of the natives of India who are unable from poverty or other causes to proceed to Paris for treatment.”97 He suggested Kasauli or Shimla as the site and added that the Maharaja of Patiala (in Punjab) was willing to provide facilities for the erection of a building.98 In another letter to the inspector general, Roe mentioned that he had succeeded in preparing the “virus fixe” for antirabic vaccines in his laboratory, which could be used in the future Pasteur institute.99 Pioneer Mail, the other Anglo-Indian weekly newspaper published from Allahabad, carried correspondence from the resident British civil population about the need for a Pasteur institute. In 1892, a correspondent to the newspaper emphatically declared, “This is a country where a Pasteur Institute is more wanted than almost anywhere else”100 The participation of the Anglo-Indian newspapers in the Pasteur movement reflected a general appreciation about Pasteur and bacteriology among the British civilian population in India. While in India Hart noticed this change. “The Anglo-Indian public,” he wrote, “have recognised the

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need for bacteriological research in the support they have given to the scheme for a Pasteur Institute, that has been pushed with praiseworthy energy and determination.”101 In 1894, the first Indian Medical Congress in Calcutta, which Hart attended, passed a resolution on the “need of a Pasteur Institute.”102 In 1893, the year Haffkine came to India, a great flurry of activity led to the formation of several Pasteur committees in Lahore, Calcutta, and Madras. Leading British residents, including members of the IMS and some prominent Indians, formed a central Pasteur institute committee. It included Colonel James Cleghorn (inspector-general of hospitals, Punjab), Colonel A. Stephen (sanitary commissioner of Punjab), H.  S. Browne (principal, Medical College, Lahore), J.  A. Nunn (Principal, Veterinary College, Lahore), Hankin, Roe, B. Blood, W.  H. Rattigan (Vice Chancellor, Punjab University), and Barjorjee D. Patel. Robinson proudly asserted that although the movement had started in Punjab, it had assumed an all-India character.103 Soon, other prominent Indians such as Khan Bahadur Barkat Ali Khan of Lahore, Sirdar Muhammad Hyat Khan (CSI, senior member of council, Kashmir), and Rai Bahadur Lala Ram Kishen of Delhi also joined the central committee.104 Soon provincial committees were set up and the Pasteur committees became the social hubs of the Raj. In 1894, a meeting was held in the town hall in Bombay, presided over by the governor of the Bombay presidency, Lord Harris. Hankin was also present and gave a lecture on the principles and methods of Pasteur’s research. The committee passed a resolution in favor of the formation of a Pasteur institute of India. A similar meeting was held in Bangalore chaired by Colonel Henderson, the British resident of the Mysore state. A local committee was formed with C. C. Hewetson, H. Oleff, Narianswamy Moodaliar, Abdul Rahman, and Major C. W. Ravenshaw as members. In Madras, the meeting was held at the banqueting hall of the government house, presided over by the governor, Lord B. L. Wenlock.105 The meeting led to the formation of a Madras Pasteur committee that would support the scheme of a Pasteur institute in the province. According to the resolutions of the meeting, the future institute would employ Pasteur’s method to investigate all diseases prevalent in the tropics.106 In Calcutta the surgeon-general of Bengal, Robert Harvey, presided over a similar meeting to establish a Pasteur institute in Bengal.107 Several newspapers in India and Britain had published articles on the formation of the Pasteur committees. By 1896, about seventy thousand rupees was collected for the establishment of the Pasteur Institute in India and the Lancet reported that “the movement is a public one and the subscriptions have been quite spontaneous.”108 The Civil & Military Gazette continued raising funds from public donations, organizing public meetings, and appealing for popular support.109 It frequently reminded its readers why a Pasteur institute was “badly needed in India.”110 It reported that the honorary secretary of the Pasteur Institute Committee had received “piteous” appeals from natives who had been bitten by dogs and were asking for immediate treatment.111

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While importing the antirabic vaccine to India seemed a relatively straightforward transmission of a laboratory method, translating and applying Pasteurism to the common diseases in India was yet an unexplored and uncertain proposition. The debate within the Indian Pasteur committees was whether to start the Pasteur Institute in India on a limited scale to treat cases of rabies, or to establish it on a grand scale to do justice to the growing aspirations around the institute in the colony. The GOI itself was in doubt regarding the Pasteur Institute because while Pasteur aroused visions of scientific progress in India, he conjured up fears of vivisection and large-scale cruelty toward animals in Britain. The GOI feared opposition from vivisectionists in Britain and was unwilling to invest in a broad-based Pasteur institute in India. One option was to keep the Pasteur Institute and general bacteriological research separate. When the GOI established the bacteriological laboratory at Poona in 1891, it was reluctant to support a Pasteur institute. In 1893, C.  J. Lyall, the secretary to the GOI, wrote that the government was unwilling to extend bacteriological research in India for treating human diseases.112 The Governor of Punjab, Dennis Fitzpatrick, suggested a compromise; bacteriological research would focus on several tropical diseases while the Pasteur institute would be, “pure and simple, i.e., an institute merely for treating hydrophobia.”113 Similar pragmatism was reflected in the English newspapers in India. Despite highlighting the broader appeal of Pasteur’s revolutionary new science, they represented the Indian Pasteur Institute as catering only to hydrophobia. “At first, however, the coat will have to be cut according to the cloth. Bacteriology in general is the less pressing, inasmuch as it has just been taken under the charge of the Government in the Himalayas. What is wanted urgently for the moment is an Institute for the prevention of Hydrophobia.”114 EKR, the editor of Civil & Military Gazette, wrote to the governor of Punjab suggesting that a separate bacteriological institute be established with support from the government with a broader scheme.115 This pragmatism soon gave way to a wider plan.

Pasteurism and Tropical Disease As the popular sentiments toward Pasteur gathered ground, and as Pasteur committees were established and newspapers carried appeals for Indian Pasteur institutes and news of the nationwide collection of funds more regularly, Pasteurian aspirations took a broader shape in India. Soon the newspapers projected that the proposed Pasteur institute would treat all tropical diseases, not just rabies. This wider aspiration also came with the realization that, as an editorial in Civil & Military Gazette pointed out, despite the hype, hydrophobia deaths in India were “but a drop compared to the great volume of the river of death from cholera, fever, dysentery and other diseases which are peculiarly prevalent in this land of severe climatic conditions.”116

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At the same time, the nature of the appeal changed. From the need to adopt Pasteurian methods in India, the suggestion became that by opening its doors to Pasteur, India could also open new opportunities for Pasteurian science. The editorial in Civil & Military Gazette commented, “we find large masses of population annually afflicted with fatal and enfeebling disease, and the field of investigation is consequently more extensive than in Europe.”117 Another editorial piece of the same newspaper pointed out that hydrophobia “hardly deserved to be mentioned in the same sentence with such diseases as cholera, fever, typhoid, or even leprosy.” According to it, Pasteurian science should be used to develop vaccines to eradicate the “terrible annual mortality conveyed in the word ‘fever’ alone” from India. It highlighted that in doing so, “the greatest triumphs could certainly be won in India, because here the field of disease is alas, the largest and the richest in the world.”118 Elsewhere the Civil & Military Gazette pointed out that by adopting Pasteur in India to eradicate “dire Indian diseases” like cholera, fever, and leprosy, the British Empire “may take its place among the foremost nations in the world”: We confidently appeal for the funds necessary to establish and maintain an Institution in India where the means of prevention of the dire Indian diseases, such as cholera, fever and leprosy, may be diligently sought out, where those who are in actual danger of hydrophobia may be saved by the resources of modern science, and whereby the newest and most valuable life-saving knowledge of the West may be brought to the very door of the poorest native of India, so that this Empire may take place among the foremost nations in the world in the honourable race for distinction as the home of healing science.119

India now appeared as the site “where scientific research may confidently hope for the richest reward.”120 A Pasteur institute in India could also serve the other “white man’s burden,” by inducing the “natives” to “exact thinking, and to the ways of getting at truth.”121 Similarly, in 1894, the Indian Medical Congress resolved that a Pasteur institute was essential for India “to the advancement of science, the investigation of Indian diseases in man, animals and plants and the treatment of diphtheria as well as those bitten by rabid animals.”122 By the mid 1890s, the Indian Pasteur institutes were conceived within this wider vision and morality of saving human lives, inspiring rational thinking, and reasserting the gifts of Europe to its colonies. The involvement of scientists like Haffkine in the movement helped the diversification of the movement for an Indian Pasteur institute in various directions. In 1896, the Indian Pasteur committee held its meeting at Shimla, which was presided over by Haffkine. It resolved to involve the practical application of bacteriology to the prevention and cure of diseases like rabies, cholera, anthrax, diphtheria, tuberculin, and tetanus, and in the investigation of tropical diseases like cholera, malaria, kala-azar, dysentery, abscess of the liver, enteric fever, and snakebite, and to provide a scope for teaching and training in bacteriology.

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Haffkine spoke amid loud applause that bacteriology had opened up possibilities for revolutionary treatment in all diseases in the tropics like cholera, enteric fever, dysentery, and malaria, which killed many more people in India than did rabies. He also called for the involvement of the major economic sectors of the country such as the tea, jute, indigo, and mining industries in the plans for the development of bacteriological laboratories.123 These sectors were the main British-dominated industries in India with strong lobbies in government and an interest in controlling epidemic diseases. The committee decided to involve Indian mining and tea associations in the project. In a letter to the government, Hankin wrote that the bacteriological laboratories would serve various diseases such as plague, cholera, enteric fever research, and his own area of research “on the self-purifying power of rivers.”124 At the same time, the editorials of Civil & Military Gazette highlighted Koch and Pasteur’s contribution in treating diseases other than hydrophobia.125 It referred to Haffkine as “one of M. Pasteur’s able assistants and pupil” and to his efforts in the prevention of cholera in India by saying that “it would be no small honour to the Pasteur Institute of India if within its walls should be matured the boon of immunity from cholera.” It also stated that their own role was to “show to the public at large what benefit would result, from the establishment in this country of such an Institute, to science, health, art and agriculture.”126 At the time of this new plan and ambition around Pasteur institutes in the tropics, the IMG drew up the plan of a wide network of research laboratories in India in 1897. It was this plan that the Indian Plague Commission reiterated later in its report published in 1902. The journal argued that the remit of preventive medicine was misguided in India, where it was assumed to be a matter of only sanitation and vaccination. It articulated the holistic appeal of Pasteurian science that included “every subject that conduces to the health and comfort of civilised communities.” Such laboratory medicine, the report pointed out, was in fact concerned with chemistry, physics, physiology, pathology, bacteriology, hygiene, water supply, drainage, ventilation, food and dietaries, clothing and building, meteorology, climatology, geology, “and in fact everything that bears directly or indirectly on the preservation of health and the prevention of disease amongst mankind.” It suggested that a central research institute should deal with these issues, while all the provincial laboratories under it could focus mainly on teaching and on provincial municipal work; “over and above, and quite separate from this, the Imperial or Central Institute should deal with the larger and more intricate problems that cannot be solved by merely applying to India the results obtained by observers in Europe.”127 In the middle of this optimism, a new development changed the course of the Pasteur movement in India. In September 1896, plague broke out in the Mandvi region of Bombay, which was densely populated, mainly by grain dealers. BMJ reported that inhabitants observed large numbers of rats dying in their houses and in the granaries. The plague soon spread to other regions, killing several

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people. By the end of the month, two hundred people had died from plague in the city of Bombay alone.128 On January 6, 1897, Surgeon Major Robert Manser, the senior physician to the Native Hospital in Bombay died from plague.129 The plague diverted the attention of the government and the British residents from the plans of establishing the Pasteur institute.

An Experimental Theater of Vaccines: Bombay in the Time of Plague Historians have seen the Bombay plague of 1896–97 as a watershed in the history of epidemics in modern India. M. Harrison has argued that it ushered an institutional change in public health in India through the recommendations of the Indian Plague Commission, privileging the need for bacteriological research.130 Mary Sutphen highlighted the continuities between the bacteriological researches and the traditional sanitary regimes in her description of the application of germ theory to the plague in Hong Kong that preceded the one in Bombay.131 Others have argued that the outbreak of plague in Bombay led to the implementation of the first intensive local sanitary regulations and restrictions in India.132 More important, it was also the first epidemic outbreak that led to political and social strife between the colonial sanitary regime and Indians.133 David Arnold has described the plague and the subsequent interventionist medical and sanitary measures of the colonial government in Bombay as an “assault on the body.” For Arnold, the Bombay plague was the critical moment in the colonization of the body: “If there was a single moment when Western medicine in India appeared to have turned a corner, to become something more than just colonial medicine, that moment surely came in the aftermath of the first phase of the plague epidemic.”134 However, his description of such a momentous event does not explore the significance of the vaccination campaigns that took place in Bombay and elsewhere, which were the most intrusive instances of Western medicine, whereby antigens were injected within the colonized body. This singular focus on the enforcement of sanitary measures and the subsequent resistance by Indians has tended to overlook the significance of the bacteriological history of the Bombay plague. There were two distinct trajectories in the British management of the Bombay plague: sanitary and segregation measures, and vaccine research and vaccination campaigns. At the same time that the colonial government enforced sanitary measures, it also invited bacteriologists from different parts of the world to investigate the plague and produce effective vaccines. In terms of response, while Indians protested against the intrusive sanitary regimes and consequent restrictions on their movements, they were far more ambiguous toward vaccination campaigns. This ambiguity reflected the complex attitudes toward bacteriology and the acceptance of Pasteurian vaccines already evident among Indians by the 1890s.

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The existing historiography has failed to identify this distinction. The bacteriological experiments conducted in Bombay and the vaccination campaigns undertaken throughout the Bombay presidency, as well as in the Punjab and Hyderabad, reflected a more complex interplay of the assault on both the body and the mind than has been assumed so far. Bombay during the plague was a site of large-scale experiments with vaccines. To begin with, when the plague outbreak took place, there were several different and competing vaccines available for treating it. Moreover, the outbreak in the city of Bombay, with its massive and diverse population, jails, hospitals, and slums, provided an ideal setting for experimenting with these various competing vaccines and serums. In the case of cholera, Haffkine vaccinated in areas and among populations that had not recently experienced the disease, so the efficacy of his prophylactic treatment remained unconfirmed. In Bombay, the situation was different; here he was at the center of a raging epidemic and could try both curative and prophylactic vaccines that he and other scientists had recently discovered. Haffkine was provided with, in the words of a British medical officer, a “particularly good opportunity” in Bombay.135 The city became not only “a common market of bacilli,” but of vaccines too.136 The vaccination campaigns in Bombay also exposed the prejudices and resistances of the established British sanitary officials toward bacteriology. They directed their opposition particularly against Haffkine and his vaccines. Indians, who protested vehemently against segregation measures, did not oppose the vaccination campaigns in the same way, even after the Mulkowal disaster of 1902, where nineteen people died from tetanus infection following vaccination with a serum that had been altered to meet high demands. The Bombay plague was not an isolated event. In 1894 plague had broken out in Canton (Guangzhou) and Hong Kong, and this epidemic in turn prompted medical authorities in Hong Kong and bacteriologists to intensify the bacteriological investigations on plague. In 1894, Alexandre Yersin and Shibasaburo Kitasato independently announced the isolation of the plague organism. They represented the two schools of bacteriology competing with each other in bacteriological research in Asia. Kitasato was trained under Koch in Germany and started his research on cholera and dysentery. Yersin had joined Calmette at the French Pasteur Institute in Indochina. In 1895, Yersin opened a second Pasteur institute at Nha Trang. Both investigators were previously in Hong Kong in June 1894 to study the epidemic of bubonic plague, which had spread through southern China and claimed over forty thousand lives. This created a competitive atmosphere and both claimed to isolate the plague bacteria simultaneously in 1894.137 It was on this foreground of plague research in Southeast Asia that Haffkine started his own research in Bombay. The global spread of plague also introduced the factor of race in medical research. In January 1898, when plague spread to Africa and West Asia, Haffkine suggested that “certain human races, like Europeans, Egyptians, Somalis,

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Kaffirs, perhaps also Arabs and the Felahin, appeared less receptive of plague than others, the Chinese or Indians, for example; while in some respects, e.g., in regard to typhoid fever or the effects of the sun, the mutual positions of Europeans and Indians appeared the reverse of the above.”138 The origin of the plague in Bombay remained obscure. According to some reports, it could have been brought from the Himalayan villages by pilgrims, or by ships from Hong Kong, the Turkish Arabia, or the Persian Gulf.139 Preceding the plague outbreak there was a flood in the low-lying areas of the city and sewage was thrown up through the manholes, the grain stores were soaked with water, and the grain was then allowed to rot. British medical officers in Bombay believed that it was in this local condition of putrefaction that plague spread in Bombay.140 Whatever the nature of its origin, the spread of the epidemic in the city was rapid. By January 1897, 75 percent of the population had left the city either to escape the plague or the sanitary measures enforced by the government to restrict their movements.141 In September 1896, the GOI asked Haffkine to help with the plague situation in Bombay. He soon established the Plague Research Laboratory, initially in a room in the Petit Laboratory at the Grant Medical College of Bombay. His staff included one “native clerk and three peons lent by the municipality.” In the Petit lab, Haffkine manufactured the curative serum according to the method recommended by Yersin, but found it to be “useless.”142 He soon started developing his own prophylactic vaccine. In April 1897, a bungalow on the Malabar hill was converted into the new laboratory, and subsequently another laboratory was built in a large bungalow in Mazagaon with funds from the Ismaili leader and businessman Aga Khan III. The laboratory remained there for more than a year, after which in July 1899 it moved to its permanent base at the Government House at Parel.143 Soon after outbreak, public health officials of the city started experiments in Bombay hospitals with different vaccines among different patients, sometimes indiscriminately. In January 1897, Yersin reached Bombay. He came with strong recommendations from Lister to the secretary of state for India: “[Yersin’s] treatment acts with great certainty and very speedily.”144 In the Old Parel Hospital in 1897, patients injected with the Roux-Yersin curative serum included those who had been admitted not for plague, but for meningitis, hepatitis, and “some other disease not specified.” In January 1897, Haffkine started self-experimentation; he inoculated himself, and soon other medical men and volunteers, to demonstrate publicly its safety and to popularize the vaccine.145 The IMG congratulated Haffkine on his plague vaccine. “The discoverer of prophylactics against two [cholera and plague] of the most dreaded of all diseases will take a place amongst the greatest benefactors of mankind.”146 For scientists from European metropolises, such as A. Lustig (Professor of Pathology, Royal University of Florence), Yersin, and Simond, the city of Bombay appeared as a laboratory and Haffkine’s campaign as a vital opportunity to try their own vaccines. In

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Figure 1.1. Incubating room, plague section. Haffkine Institute, Bombay. Over a million doses. Souvenir, the Indian Empire, Being a Brief Description of the Chief Features of India and Its Medical and Sanitary Problems, plate 3. Reproduced with permission from the Wellcome Library, London.

Florence, Lustig concluded that a curative serum for plague could be prepared by the injection of horses with nucleo-albumen derived from masses of plague germs treated with certain chemicals by experiment on small animals. In June 1897, the British government sent his curative serum to Bombay to try it out on human beings for the first time. Lustig himself came to Bombay to supervise the operations and found them “completely satisfactory in every regard.”147 In March 1897, Paul-Louis Simond of the Pasteur Institute of Paris also came to India with his own vaccines to conduct experiments. Simond traveled to India at Emile Roux’s request to replace Yersin in his fieldwork and to sustain the Pasteurian enterprise in Bombay. Simond’s task was to popularize the new Pasteur antiserum prepared from live cultures of Yersin pestis. After the initial encouraging results with serotherapy, subsequent tests were unsuccessful. Nevertheless, Simond remained undaunted in his efforts to continue the work begun by Yersin.148 The unfolding of this great experimental theater in Bombay did not go unnoticed in Indian vernacular newspapers. The Bengali newspaper Hitavadi commented in 1898:

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Western doctors are now discovering microbes in all diseases, and an attempt is being made to destroy these microbes. In the west, however, the microbe destroying medicines and processes are experimented upon cats and dogs, but in this country they are experimented upon natives, who are regarded as no better than cats and dogs. Cholera inoculation, plague inoculation, in fact, inoculations of all sorts have been experimented upon the Indian people. Of plague serums there are three different kinds cultured by three different savants—Haffkine, Lustig and Simond. All these three classes of plague serums are being experimented upon the persons of the natives of India.149

Hitavadi’s critique was not against the vaccination campaigns as such, but about the mode of vaccination practiced in Bombay by European scientists and the colonial authorities where Indians were allegedly used indiscriminately as experimental cats and dogs. This was a critique of the method of choice of the experimental subject, of the apparent differences in these methods in the West and in India, and of the racial prejudices and discrimination evident in contemporary scientific research. This was also an assertion of political identity, which was concomitant to the rise of Indian nationalism. Despite this critique of the use of Indians as experimental subjects, the acceptance and even enthusiastic adoption of bacteriological vaccination by Indians was evident in the fact that most of these experiments, statistical comparisons, and analyses of various methods in Bombay were conducted by an Indian doctor, Nusservanji H. Choksy. Choksy, the assistant health officer in charge of the plague operations, conducted all the experiments with the eight vaccines developed by Yersin-Roux, Haffkine, and Lustig, along with those developed by Camillo Terni, Ernst Tavel, Richard Palthauf, Vital Brazil, and a Japanese vaccine developed by Kitasato.150 He also reported regularly to both BMJ and the Lancet about the results. He initially tried the sero-therapy of Yersin to an “extremely limited scale.”151 He subsequently used different serums: one prepared by Haffkine, one prepared by Lustig, and a third serum prepared in Russia according to Yersin’s method. He considered Haffkine’s and Lustig’s serums “experimental,” as those had not been tried before and had not undergone clinical trials. According to him, Lustig’s curative serum was the most effective, it was tried in six very serious cases and the results were “exceedingly satisfactory,” as all six cases recovered.152 Following these initial trials, Choksy became a vocal advocate of Lustig’s method.153 Lustig’s serum was used most extensively (on 1,551 people), but the later results did not correspond with the earlier results.154 Choksy’s experiments with plague vaccines were an important yet little known instance of bacteriological investigations in India, both for its international implications as well as for local factors. To conduct his experiments with Lustig’s serum, he adopted a “selective” method. Lustig’s serum was a curative serum that needed to be tested on plague patients rather than on healthy individuals. Choksy’s method consisted of first rejecting all those who were diagnosed

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to have “hardly any probability of benefiting by the serum treatment.” He further eliminated the convalescent and semiconvalescent cases as well as those in which the disease had already lasted for six days (the latter were excluded since experience had shown that patients who were alive on the sixth day were either too far advanced for treatment or were just beginning to improve spontaneously). According to him, the reasons for such exclusions were “obvious to all experimenters.” The aim was “to eliminate all disturbing factors that tend to vitiate the final results.”155 From his experience of treating plague in Bombay, the convalescent and advanced cases were regarded as “disturbing” cases and were excluded. The advanced cases were beyond the reach of all possible human help, and in the case of the convalescent ones the “battle . . . had been already fought and won outside the hospital.” According to him, such a method of selection indicated the value of the serum method in the “really acute” cases, which were “fit for treatment.”156 Choksy later adopted this selective method for the trial of eight different varieties of vaccines and described this as a “rational system of treatment” necessary for the extensive trials.157 After rejecting the unfit cases, every alternate case was treated with the serum, so that those left untreated served as controls. This system of what he called “rational alternation” demonstrated that the serum treatment was capable of increasing the ratio of recovery by 33 percent as compared with ordinary drug treatment. In other words, Choksy had sought to convert the city of Bombay into an experimental laboratory. Choksy faced criticism from a few British scientists for adopting such a selective experimental method in the trial of Lustig’s serum. In a report in the Lancet, a “special correspondent” objected to the selective method adopted in the Bombay vaccine trials where patients in an advanced stage of the disease and those with mild cases were excluded. This made it, according to the report, “impossible to place in the returns notwithstanding that the mortality under the serum treatment is reported to have been five times less than that of cases treated without it.”158 The criticism raised two important issues: first, the validity of an experimental method adopted in a city where plague was raging; and second, the legitimacy of experimental methods devised autonomously and spontaneously by an Indian physician in the colony. In response, Choksy asked for time and faith in the experiments being conducted in Bombay and for relative autonomy to “let those best conversant with the subject to work out, quietly and undisturbed, their destiny until they reach their goal, which has but one and only aim in view—viz., the lessening of human suffering and the saving of human life.” Two important points are evident from Choksy’s response: first, the serum vaccination adopted extensively in Bombay was not mainly for curative or prophylactic purposes, but for trials. Bombay had become an experimental theater of plague vaccines. Second, while he wished to conduct his experiments in Bombay “quietly and undisturbed,” he also sought for legitimacy for his experimental method from London. While Bombay was

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the experimental theater, scientific opinion in and sanction from England about its modes and methods remained fundamental. He began by criticizing the Lancet’s correspondent for posing as the “sole arbiter” of the destiny of the serum therapy, describing his criticism as a product of “unjust and unfair prejudice.” He then presented the letter that he wrote to the Lancet as if it was evidence in a trial of truth, seeking to provide the “plain and unvarnished facts” of his experiments and offer the readers of the Lancet “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Choksy insisted that the experiments in Bombay had proved that Lustig’s serum treatment was the “only treatment that can in any way appreciably reduce the high mortality of plague.”159 From the extensive trials of eight different varieties of vaccines that he conducted through similar methods, Choksy later claimed to have arrived at a “rational system of treatment.”160 Professor C.  J. Martin of the Lister Institute (and a member of the Committee for Plague Investigation in India) endorsed Choksy’s method.161 During his campaign against the severe outbreak of the plague, Choksy himself contracted the plague on three occasions, most seriously in 1904, when he recovered following inoculation with Lustig’s curative serum.162 Choksy earned praise from the British journalist G. W. Steevens, who visited Bombay in 1899. Steevens found that in all the horror, popular protest, and despair of the plague in the city, Choksy was someone “who knows his duty and does it.”163 By 1900, the Lancet reported that around seven thousand people came forward every week in Bombay alone for vaccination and an estimated one-tenth of the population of the city was vaccinated.164 Meanwhile, questions about the plague vaccines were raised from one quarter of the public health establishment of the city: the surgeon general of Bombay, G. Bainbridge. Bainbridge had joined the IMS in 1867 and retained strong sentiments on the virtues of sanitation instead of the use of vaccines. There was a strong skeptical element within the IMS, and Bainbridge belonged to this section of medical officials who often opposed even vaccinations, citing the supposed antipathy of Indians to vaccination. This argument was spurious. Although initially reluctant, Indians were mostly amenable to vaccination.165 Often, Indians accepted vaccination because it offered exemption from the segregational practices during an epidemic.166 In Bombay, residents opposed the segregation practices of the Anglo-Indian public health administration much more than they did vaccination. The conservative element among the IMS officers who took recourse to citing Indian cultural and religious prejudices against vaccines in fact were representing their own moral dilemma about and ethical opposition to vaccination. This same opposition, a tradition well entrenched among medical men in nineteenth-century Britain, was manifest in their opposition to Pasteur as well. On January 19, 1898, at the peak of popular protests against the government’s plague measures, Bainbridge wrote confidentially to the governor of Bombay, Lord Sandhurst. He asserted that the composition of Haffkine’s vaccine would “make it objectionable for use by many of the natives of India.” He

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added that he was “confident” that it would be “absolutely offensive to most Hindus or to Mohammedans.” He also provisionally offered to resign if the vaccine was not withdrawn, “since the efficacy of the prophylactics was still unproven,” because he considered its continued use “politically dangerous.”167 Sandhurst forwarded the letter to Viceroy Elgin, who in turn was duly concerned and asked the Governor: “What is the ingredient which he believes to be offensive?”168 The ingredient in question was peptone. In Haffkine’s method, the plague bacillus was cultivated in a broth of goat flesh with ghee and peptone. Bainbridge believed that peptone would be offensive to Indians, as it was prepared in fact from the stomach of pigs. Sandhurst replied to Elgin that although secrecy was maintained, these “facts are necessarily known to many persons.”169 Elgin consulted the Home Department in London and suggested that the best policy to follow was to “offer inoculation to those who volunteer.” He also raised it with Haffkine, who in turn insisted that Bainbridge be questioned on the supposed opposition to his vaccine among Indians. He also added that he was in fact using a vegetable peptone. It was around this time that Elgin became aware the professional jealousy at stake here, as he replied to Sandhurst, “I am bound to add that I know there is a jealousy of Haffkine in some medical minds, and I think the Surgeon-General with the Bombay Government ought to be above such motives.”170 Bainbridge persisted with his opposition, and in another letter he provided a detailed description of the method by which the peptone used by Haffkine was prepared: “it is well known that Pepsine [sic] as sold in the market is most usually obtained from the stomachs of pigs—much less frequently from those of other animals.” He added that the peptone Haffkine used was prepared by “digesting animal albumen (I am told it is beef) with stomachs of pigs or with Pepsine; & I found that much of the Peptone in the market & probably that in question—is made by digesting pigs’ stomach in their secretions. I have no doubt that the substance used by Mons Haffkine is an animal peptone prepared in one of the two ways above indicated.” He also described Haffkine’s claim of using a vegetable peptone as “spurious.”171 Not content with raising this issue with Elgin and the governor general, Bainbridge decided to breach confidentiality and informed the Bombay Chamber of Commerce, an organization that included members of the Hindu business class (who were staunchly against eating beef), about the animal component of peptone. In the process a whole range of prospective fears were created and nurtured in certain sections of the colonial official discourse against Haffkine’s vaccine. Elgin attempted to settle the issue, and after several communications with Haffkine, he wrote to Sandhurst, “I believe that a preparation can be used which will be free from the objections taken by Dr Bainbridge.” He found Bainbridge’s objections excessive and obstructive. “Even the ‘odium theologicum’ pales before the jealousy of doctors and it is useless to complain of the action taken by Dr Bainbridge. One would have thought that looking to the incalculable advantage of

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discovering some prophylactic his first care, if he saw a danger ahead, would be to help to remove it. And when I learn that the nature of the objection had been openly stated to Members of the Chamber of Commerce I can only hold up my hands in amazement.”172 Haffkine and Bannerman had indeed succeeded in producing a wheat peptone.173 The matter, however, did not end here, and certain sections of British officials persisted with their opposition to Haffkine and his vaccine. In 1902, during plague inoculations in Hyderabad (a Muslim-dominated province), a British medical officer publicly claimed that the vaccine had “pig’s blood” in it.174 Meanwhile, in Bombay at the plague research laboratory Haffkine faced opposition from his British subordinates, particularly Bannerman. The dispute between Haffkine and Bannerman was regarding the time of Haffkine’s leave in Europe, when Bannerman had assumed the directorship of the laboratory and, according to Haffkine, was reluctant to hand it back when Haffkine returned. Bannerman, on the other hand, wanted independent charge of the operations.175 Here his British colleagues E. D. W. Greig and W. G. Liston (both worked at the Parel Lab under Haffkine) supported Bannerman.176 While the various contestations continued, plague spread to other parts of the country and vaccination campaigns advanced there. In Punjab, Lieutenant Governor Charles Rivaz launched an ambitious plan to inoculate ten million volunteers in six months. The campaign started successfully and inoculated two hundred thousand people in the first two weeks.177 However, disaster soon struck in a village in the Punjab. In November 1902, in the village of Mulkowal (Punjab), 19 out of 107 persons vaccinated with Haffkine’s vaccine developed tetanus and died. The blame fell squarely on Haffkine’s failure to ensure the safety of the vaccines. The Mulkowal incident almost ended the plague vaccination campaign, although three hundred thousand more inoculations were carried out in the Punjab.178 In Bombay, by 1904, plague mortality numbers declined remarkably, which the acting assistant surgeon, Edward H. Hume, attributed to the inoculations.179 The Indian vernacular newspapers followed and reported on the Mulkowal incident closely. The incident in rural Punjab was potentially a volatile one since this was the period of the beginning of political disenchantment against British rule in rural Punjab.180 Although vernacular newspapers carried the news with headlines like “Mulkowal Disaster,” “Inoculation Blunder at Malkowal,” and “Mulkowal Catastrophe,” they blamed the organizational failures, rather than the vaccination campaign, as an intrusive mode of Western medical practice. The critique in the Indian vernacular newspapers was part of the contemporary nationalist criticism of colonial policies and distinct from that by Bainbridge and other British officials, who were opposed to the vaccine and the vaccination campaign itself. The newspaper Indian People wrote, “It is our reasoned belief, [that] inoculation is a valuable protective measure against plague, and further, if the people generally have ceased to benefit themselves by it chiefly because of the suspicion naturally engendered by the Mulkowal mishap, the responsibility of the high officers of Simla and Downing Street for much avoidable loss of

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life on account of plague is simply awful.” The article accused the Punjab government of not arranging for an adequate supply of the vaccine from Bombay, which resulted in the preparation of a “new fluid” locally that turned out to be unfit for use. It reported that prior to the incident at Mulkowal, inoculating officers of provinces such as the Punjab had complained about the quality of the “new fluid” and that abscesses had occurred in many places. It also squarely blamed Rivaz, who supervised the operations. “Not merely in this one respect, but in the entire conduct of the campaign Sir Charles Rivaz blundered, and blundered badly.”181 The Hindostan reported that despite the apprehensions within the administration after the incident, when they stopped all inoculation in the Punjab, “The villagers have . . . recognised that it was a mishap, the blame, if any, being entirely due to the doctors who prepared the serum, and are quite prepared to go on with inoculation when authorities make a fresh start. Only the phial of serum was contaminated, and it appears probable that some virus accidentally got into it.”182 Similarly, Oudh Samachar reported that the incident occurred due to bad planning and organization.183 This was at the same time when Colonel Geoffrey Hall, a retired IMS officer, soon after the Mulkowal incident wrote to the Anglo-Indian newspaper Pioneer Mail criticizing the validity of Haffkine’s vaccine and the entire operation. “I have always thought the Government was ill-advised, to embark upon such an expensive scheme on such slender proofs as still exists of the active value of inoculation.”184 It is difficult to provide a singular answer to the question as to why Indians showed this ambiguity and even support toward vaccination in plague, and as we shall see, in cholera, rabies (which required several inoculations over a period of time), and antivenin vaccinations. We shall explore this question further in this book, particularly in the final chapter. To begin with, smallpox inoculations in India in the nineteenth century had provided the foreground for bacteriological vaccinations. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the GOI had adopted varied smallpox vaccination strategies involving different local institutions, local groups of inoculators, leading to a “multiple vaccinating systems.”185 The bacteriological vaccinations in plague and cholera in the 1890s were carried out at similarly local levels and by local physicians. Deepak Kumar has stressed the significance of the involvement of native inoculators and Brahmins in the smallpox inoculations.186 It is important not to read colonial records that represented the unwillingness of Indians to undertake vaccinations uncritically. It is also necessary not to interpose the British metropolitan experiences of and oppositions to vaccination and Pasteur to colonial India. The negative impact of the Mulkowal incident featured much more strongly in colonial official minds than it did among the villagers of the Punjab. In 1904, S. B. Smith (IMS) at the time of this criticism of Haffkine’s vaccine reported that immediately after the incident the inoculations in Punjab during 1902–3 reduced mortality numbers. More important, he pointed out the fact that villagers continuing to come

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forward for inoculations should be “considered to be the expressed opinion of the people themselves that inoculation is good.”187 Villagers offered to be reinoculated even after Mulkowal: In a large number of villages in the district there is now a strong feeling in favor of inoculation, and I hear of many villages which express a wish for reinoculation in the end of the autumn, as they say that, now they see the value of the measure, they are not going to wait a second time until the disease is well established, but will all be inoculated before it begins.188

Finally, Pasteurian vaccines had gained a strong support among the educated Indian elites like Petit and Bajaj, and Indian physicians like Choksy and Chowdhury, who carried out most of the inoculations. In London in 1899, Lister noted that Haffkine’s plague vaccine played an important role in creating trust between the Indians and the British government. “The good done by Mr. Haffkine in India reached beyond the saving of thousands of lives, for it convinced the people of India that the Government and Europeans were trying to do their best for them, and thus his work tended to break down the barrier that existed between the British and the people of India.”189 While Indian newspapers wrangled over the methods of vaccination and the mismanagement by colonial officials, British officials used the Mulkowal incident to emphasize the difficulties of conducting bacteriology in the Indian plains and to criticize Haffkine’s campaign. Herbert H. Risley, secretary to the government of Bombay, condemned the Mulkowal incident and insisted that contamination of the vaccines was typical of matters in the Indian plains. He believed that the Mulkowal incident demonstrated that bacteriological research in Indian plains had “a greater risk of failure” and that the “disadvantages are serious” in such an undertaking. He even argued that “a disaster such as that of Mulkowal might set back the cause of anti-rabic treatment in India for a generation.”190 Risley’s apprehensions, as we shall see, were unfounded. However, the Mulkowal incident left Haffkine disappointed and he left India in 1904. Haffkine received strong support from Ross, W.  J. Simpson, and others who wrote to the Times, which ultimately helped in his exoneration.191 Although there was no firm evidence found against Haffkine or the Bombay laboratory, the incident effectively put an end to Haffkine’s involvement in bacteriological research in India.192 The Bombay government eventually placed Bannerman in charge of the Bombay laboratory in 1907.193 Although the Mulkowal incident stalled the antiplague inoculations and the efficacy of vaccines in treating plague remained unconfirmed, the developments in Bombay established bacteriology as a new paradigm in British Indian medical discourse and practice. At the same time, the plague in Bombay delayed the plans for the Indian Pasteur institute that had been developed by the Indian Pasteur committees throughout the 1890s. The plans even contracted in scope.

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After Haffkine became involved in plague research in 1896, the plans for the Indian Pasteur institute tended to get confined, and the first Pasteur institute was established in 1900, initially only to treat rabies.

Bacteriology and Imperial Medicine Pasteur and bacteriology in general captured various aspects of the British imagination concerning diseases, their prevention, and their cures in the tropics. From the middle of the nineteenth century, the expansion of imperial control in different parts of Asia and Africa led to the crystallization of racial pathology, and indeed an increase in European suspicion of the tropics in terms of both tropical cultures and climate. The Pasteur movement in India started at a time of “new imperialism,” the period when the British Empire was expanding in Africa and consolidating its position in India with large military and civilian establishments. It was also the time of growing pessimism among the British about settling permanently in the tropics.194 At the end of the nineteenth century, the great confidence in imperial expansion coexisted with the growing criticism of the older medical traditions and practices in the colonies. Germ theory and bacteriology appeared as the new hope and the means of dispelling these fears and in providing a new force in the expansion and consolidation of the British Empire. Pasteurism provided a critical moral and institutional imperative within colonial medicine, which led to the setting up of the Indian research laboratories. Through a complex reworking of morality, fear, and hope, the Pasteur movement in India reinforced existing imperial medical moralities, but also provided new motivation among the British and their Indian subjects. The Pasteur movement in India, moreover, brought the scientific laboratory, germs, and vaccines in the public domain and received popular support, much more than it had done in Britain. Bacteriology appeared as a new medical paradigm of progress in colonial India and a break from the older practices of colonial medicine. The movement and the establishment of Pasteur institutes were not just a process in the making of a particular laboratory and research tradition, but were also the consensual and simultaneous building of a scientific idiom, a moral fabric and its artifacts in the colony. This chapter has shown how a French laboratory tradition became a symbol of scientific modernity in a British colony. Since the bacteriological laboratories were established in colonial India through a prolonged historical process, popular movements, and public deliberations and donations, and were not implanted suddenly, as had been done in North Africa or Indochina, these laboratories became unique institutions of healthcare in India. They were overtly British colonial laboratories in remote hill stations, inspired by French and German medical traditions, sustained with the support of the Indian and British elite and scientists, optimistically planned to eradicate diseases in the tropics among the illiterate masses of people.

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Chapter Two

Moral Geographies of Tropical Bacteriology Bacteriological laboratories in India emerged out of a particular confluence of British and French medical and imperial discourses. While the intersection of two diverse medical traditions promised new breakthroughs in imperial medicine, it was also entrenched in existing modes of imperial medical form and praxis. It is through this process of assimilation that germ theory and Pasteur institutes acquired a unique specificity in the tropics. Imperial attitudes toward the tropics and a Victorian moralistic distaste of tropical pathogens shaped the Pasteur institutes and bacteriological practices in India. In the process, tropical bacteriology came to function within a “moral geography.” David N. Livingstone has referred to “moral climatology” to show that late nineteenth-century scientific and medical discourse defined climate in the tropics in moralistic idioms. There was a “pathologization of space” under medical men like Manson and Sambon, who closely linked the existence of parasites in tropical countries to the older, previously held categories of tropicality. The consequence of this connection was a regime of “moral prophylaxis.”1 Here I use the word “geography” instead of “climate” to refer to the negative characterization of the tropics through wider medical, moral, cultural, and racial categories, within which medical and administrative officials conceived and established colonial bacteriology. This chapter narrates the story of the conflicts and convergences that took place when the established traditions of tropical medicine met with Pasteurism in India. At one level, this was a confluence of French-German laboratory research with British imperial medicine. At another, this resulted in the grating of the universal with the local, whereby the universalist propositions of germ theory that germs existed everywhere were translated into the localist underpinnings of tropical medicine that assumed tropics as unique pathological regions. The chapter first studies the debates around the location of Indian Pasteur institutes, which sought to define the ideal climatic and environmental conditions for the practice of bacteriology in the tropics. This led to the construction of a new ecology of germ theory in India. Next, this chapter shows that this spatial paradigm of colonial bacteriology also incorporated racial and imperial ideas of segregation and superiority. In the 1930s, when Indian scientists and nationalists challenged British control over Indian bacteriological institutes, British colonial bacteriologists resisted it by resorting to this dual framework of moral geography

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and racial supremacy. In the process, by incorporating the ideas of race and climate, a conceptual and methodological redefinition of bacteriology took place in the tropics.

“Reasonable Distance from a Town”: Laboratories in the Hills When Lingard arrived at Poona and suggested the establishment of the Pasteur Institute within the existing facilities of the veterinary institute, he was convinced that Poona was the ideal site for the institute. He wrote to T. Cooke, principal of the city’s College of Science, that his “proposal is perfectly feasible and the position and climate of Poona suitable for the purpose.”2 J. Pinkerton, surgeon-general of the Bombay presidency, agreed with the plans and suggested that a Pasteur institute specifically for the treatment of rabies should be established at Poona and asked for an estimate of costs.3 Cooke forwarded Lingard’s estimates of personnel, equipment, and establishment costs.4 The plans progressed smoothly for a while, during which Lingard wrote to Cooke about a suitable house that he had identified that had waiting and inoculation rooms for patients and a laboratory. He also suggested that huts needed to be built in the adjacent grounds for patient housing, if they were to be kept under constant observation.5 The government also seemed enthusiastic about the plan, and J. P. Hewett, officiating secretary to the GOI, wrote to the government of Bombay that the initial cost of ten thousand rupees could be met from a private donation of one lakh (one hundred thousand) rupees, which had been offered by a Parsi businessman. The recurring cost of maintenance was to be met from the interest earned from the remaining ninety thousand rupees from the donation and the rest could be met from the Bombay government’s provincial revenues. The only liability of the government was to pay the salary of the commissioned medical officer.6 The finance department of GOI supported the establishment of the Pasteur Institute at Poona and suggested that the institution should bear the name of the Parsi donor rather than that of Pasteur.7 At the height of optimism about the prospects for the Pasteur Institute, things took an abrupt turn. In August of 1892, the Bombay government wrote to the GOI that plans for the laboratory would have to be abandoned “on ground of unsuitability of climate.”8 The complaint about the climate of Poona came from Lingard, who after spending his first summer in the city thought that Poona was not the ideal site for a Pasteur institute, or even for the existing veterinary institute. In a letter to Cooke dated July 8, 1892, Lingard wrote that when he had previously supported Poona as the site for the Pasteur Institute he had “no experience of the hot season in Poona.”9 In order to provide scientific validation for his claims, he wrote that recent research published in French and German journals “proved” that bacteriological research could be adversely affected in hot

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climates, vaccines could not be prepared during the long summer months, and antirabic vaccination had to be suspended.10 Lingard’s assertion was interesting because it was precisely at this time that the Paris Pasteur Institute was expanding in equatorial and tropical regions in North Africa, Western Africa, South America, and Indochina, and climate did not appear to have been a concern there. This divergence between the French and British medical thinking about climate and bacteriological research changed the course of bacteriological research in India. The British notion of escaping from the tropical heat and dust while conducting bacteriological research and identifying germs in the tropics diverged from the basic ideals of French imperial Pasteurism, which was indeed a proposition to conquer the tropics. Lingard’s objection was significant because, following this suggestion, tropical climate appeared as a major impediment in the Anglo-Indian thinking about bacteriological research. All the laboratories over the next twenty years were established in the salubrious climate of the hill stations. However, “climate” was an eclectic category in this view. It was the location of the laboratory in Poona, in the middle of the crowded city, that bothered Lingard. The laboratory, as Lingard described in his report, was surrounded by markets, cattle, and filth: The Laboratory [at Poona] is situated in the centre of a plot of rising ground . . . surrounded by four roads, all much frequented. One of these roads leads to Government House, Ganesh-Khind; those to the east, south and west are kacha road, during the greater part of the year some inches deep in dust; within a hundred yards of the laboratory premises, in south-westerly direction, a large stone quarry exists, which is used by the large village population of Mahars and Mangs who live in the immediate neighbourhood, as a latrine and a place to throw the carcasses of horses and cattle after the removal of their hides. When the wind blows from this quarter, and specially from this quarter, and especially during the hot season of the year, the consequence are most unpleasant for the inmates of the Laboratory buildings and cannot be considered advantageous for the investigations carried on thereon.11

The “hot season,” which Lingard had raised as a problem in conducting bacteriological research in Poona, in fact reiterated that idea of the tropics that the British had loathed in India in the nineteenth century. The British in this period saw the hot, dusty tropics, the teeming towns, and the bazaars as pathological and unhealthy sites. Lingard also found that a cattle market functioned in “dangerous proximity” to the laboratory animals.12 Bazaars, which in the eighteenth century were the sources of European profit and prosperity, were seen as the “hotbeds” of disease and decay in the nineteenth century. Florence Nightingale declared them to be “the first stage of savage social life . . . the real hot-beds of disease.”13 While in the eighteenth century the British visited the Indian markets frequently in search of merchandise for trade and consumption, in the nineteenth century they maintained a safe distance from these sites. Lingard’s

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laboratory therefore needed to be away from tropical heat and these realities, somewhere “well away from traffic and [a] reasonable distance from a town.”14 Lingard was adamant about moving his laboratories to the Himalayas and dismissed suggestions of “cold rooms” put forward at the Poona Veterinary Conference. He considered special cold rooms to be “too expensive” and preferred to move his entire laboratory, equipment, experimental animals, and assistants to the mountains, at 7,000 feet or above.15 Subsequently, in 1893, Lingard moved his veterinary laboratory and equipment to Mukteswar in the Kumaon hills at a height of 7,500 feet over an estate of about three thousand acres to conduct his veterinary research on Indian cattle, leaving his plans for rabies and the Indian Pasteur institute behind. In Mukteswar, Lingard’s research interests diverted from his Pasteurian veterinary interests in anthrax for which the lab at Poona was originally established. He increasingly became interested in research on rinderpest (a viral disease, closely related to human measles), which he discovered to be the most deadly and common disease among cattle in India. He also found that rinderpest was more common in the Punjab region than in Bombay, which information he forwarded to Cooke as another justification for his move to Mukteswar, which was near the Punjab region. “As I desire to undertake a research into the immediate etiology and treatment of rinderpest, no cases of the disease have been reported to me during my tenure of office, although I am informed that it is always prevalent in other parts of India, especially the Punjab.”16 Lingard’s move to the hills was not an isolated event. The relocation of bacteriological laboratories to the Indian mountains was entrenched within British attitudes toward the tropics, climate, and race in the nineteenth century. Exclusive space and isolation were important imperial concerns for the British in colonial India. The pursuit of racial and climatic distance from the heat, dust, and disease of tropical plains, and the clamor and filth produced by its inhabitants drove the British to the salubrious hills from the middle of the nineteenth century. In the thickly wooded hills and swirling mists of the hill stations of colonial India, the British built for themselves replicas of an English life in a familiar, more pleasant climate.17 By the end of the nineteenth century, medical, official, and popular British discourse generally condemned towns in the Indian plains as the sites of filth and germs, the bazaars as “hotbeds of disease,” and the hill stations in contrast as free from these. British medical officers believed that diseases common in the cantonments, such as enteric fevers, were caused by the “filthy and lazy” habits of native cooks and servants. British medical men and military personnel complained that their Indian subordinates did not respected European ideas of hygiene.18 British bacteriologists like Lingard followed the same trend and sought isolation from the heat and dust involved in conducting medical research in the tropics, conditions that Haffkine did not object to while conducting his research in Calcutta and Bombay.

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In the subsequent debates around the Indian Pasteur Institute, location remained important. There were two points of view. One section of British physicians in India, such as W. G. King and T. H. Hendley, believed that the institute should not be situated away from the sites of diseases. They gave examples of French Pasteur institutes in Southeast Asia and Africa, which operated in the middle of the bustling cities and in hot climates. They concurred with Haffkine when he sought to exploit the greater economic benefits of the Pasteurian movement by catering to the agricultural and industrial labor forces. The other group of men, such as Lingard and Semple, believed that bacteriology in the tropics needed to operate within a distinct institutional and conceptual paradigm. In 1896, when Haffkine was involved with the plans of the Indian Pasteur institute, the Pasteur movement had broader plans of treating diseases like cholera and plague, and of catering to the needs of an industrial labor force, the natural site appeared to be near or at the places where these diseases occurred. Since Haffkine decided to involve the Indian mining and tea associations, both of which were based in Bengal, he believed that the institute was to be located in the imperial capital city of Calcutta. In this discussion, the question of climate never came up. Haffkine pointed out that when he undertook his cholera research in the North-Western Provinces and Punjab region for a year, his work suffered because he was unable to find cases of cholera there.19 Meanwhile, Lingard’s move raised concerns for medical men in other parts of India that were far from the Himalayan hill stations. Soon after the imperial veterinary laboratory shifted to Mukteswar, the Madras Pasteur Committee (in southern India) passed a resolution that it was not necessary to situate the Pasteur Institute in the hills, particularly since antirabic institutes were functioning successfully in Algiers, Rio de Janeiro, Saigon, and Batavia. They also supported the adoption of a decentralized mode of operation for the Indian Pasteur institutes and suggested that the GOI should attach a Pasteur wing to their existing laboratories in the cities.20 But by this time, medical men in the Punjab region, where the Pasteur movement had originated and where most of the British hill stations were located, veered clearly in favor of the logic of conducting bacteriological research in the hills. This was also to ensure that the first institute would be situated in the Punjab. They also had the tacit support of the GOI, which had its summer capital in Shimla, in the Punjab hills. In the second half of the nineteenth century, following the Revolt of 1857, Punjab had become a province of growing military and economic investments for the British Empire. To maintain its authority and bond with the rural population of the Punjab, from whom the British army recruited heavily in this period, the colonial government invested in the agricultural and irrigational facilities of the region. This was also where several of the hill stations were located.

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This inclination toward the hills of the Punjab led to an intense debate between the Punjab and Madras Pasteur committees, primarily around the question of the location of the institutes, but the debate involved wider issues such as germs, climate, and medicine in the tropics. In 1896, an editorial of the Punjab-based Civil & Military Gazette commented that every local committee had accepted the hills as ideal sites for the Pasteur Institute except Madras; not only that, but “so far Madras has been more liberal in its criticism than subscriptions.”21 The report supported the hills as the site of the institute, as it was better to conduct research in cool temperatures. It cited the case of Lingard’s move to Mukteswar and claimed that the move had “established” that bacteriology could not be conducted in the tropical plains and the task was to look for a hill site with temperatures “comparable to Paris.” This would also ensure that the medical staff would be able to “maintain their health” and not be troubled by fevers and “other tropical complaints” while conducting research on tropical diseases.22 Despite the attempts by the Civil & Military Gazette to isolate and marginalize the point of view of the Madras committee, the Calcutta group soon joined the debate. In 1898, T. H. Hendley (inspector-general of civil hospitals in Bengal) wrote that the imperial bacteriological institute should be established in Calcutta as originally planned under Haffkine. He pointed out that at that very moment Haffkine was conducting his research on plague virus in “the moist heat of Bombay.” According to him, Calcutta had the advantage of hospitals, patients, and medical men, and was the ideal site “especially in the study of tropical diseases into which one assume[s] á priori investigations should be made under the conditions under which the diseases themselves exist.”23 In 1899, Hendley repeated his concerns about the move to the hills. “I would ask how is it possible to obtain fresh tissues or fresh alvine discharges in such disorder, for example, as cholera or dysentery in an isolated station in the hills where there are no large hospitals.”24 The GOI did not adhere to the suggestions and resolved the question of the location of the first Pasteur Institute of India by referring to the move to Mukteswar by Lingard.25 The first Indian Pasteur Institute was established in 1900 in Kasauli at six thousand feet in the Punjab hills, near Shimla, with David Semple, who was trained at the Paris Institute and was already posted at the cantonment in Kasauli, as its director. Kasauli was a quaint English settlement, described in the Civil & Military Gazette as a “gay and sociable” place with “dance parties, amateur drama performances, clubs, tennis courts, and ladies wearing spangled net frocks.”26 Shimla was the summer capital of the British Raj. The Pasteur Institute in Kasauli was established primarily to treat patients suffering from rabies, but it also had a wider role in studying, diagnosing and teaching bacteriology in “all its branches” for diseases of humans, animals and plants. It also undertook to apply “bacteriological methods” to the prevention and cure of “Tropical diseases.”27 With the establishment of the Kasauli Pasteur

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Institute, IMG proudly announced, “This is the first step towards the realisation of the scheme for Bacteriological Institutes in every Province of India,— quod bonum felix faustumque sit.”28 Following the establishment of the first Pasteur Institute, British medical men regarded Kasauli more for its general climatic advantages that supposedly helped medical research than for any specific discussion on the advantages of the colder climate for conducting bacteriological research. They found diverse advantages with the site, especially compared to the plains. When C. J. Martin, director of the Lister Institute of London, visited the plague laboratory in Bombay in 1901, he found the climate of Bombay not conducive to “the manifestation of acute mental alertness and enthusiasm.”29 When George Lamb left the Bombay laboratory in 1903 to join the Pasteur Institute at Kasauli, Martin sent his approval of the choice of the hill station as the site of his laboratory research on Indian snake venoms. “Kasauli, being situated on the summit of the foot-hills of the Himalayas, enjoys a delightful climate, excellent for children, and addiction to laboratory work may be indulged with as little injury to health as in this country.”30 Another British army officer who had been bitten by his own dog, which had turned rabid, traveled to Kasauli for treatment. He found the journey to the hills from the tropical plains itself as therapeutic: A pony ride of a dozen miles or so took me up and up by narrow corkscrew pathways from the great heavy-leaved foliage of the tropic world by insensible gradations to cool scented air of the pines. . . . Far off stood out the proscenium of the snows that hides the mystic drama of interior Asia. By the entrance of the station there stood a small stone church which might have been taken bodily from an English village. . . . Next day I entered on my course.31

He described Kasauli as a paradise and a refuge for Europeans. Here the British could escape from “the scorched, suffocating plains and enjoy for a brief spell a climate like that of their own far-distant homeland.” The escape was not only from the tropical climate, but also from various tropical afflictions, “the most appalling diseases known to poor humanity.”32 In all these deliberations, no scientific explanation was provided for the choice of the hills as sites of bacteriological research in India. Despite endorsements from British scientists and patients, in the initial years Kasauli was not an ideal site for Indian patients arriving from the distant plains for treatment. The annual reports of the Pasteur Institute stated that the rate of mortality in cases of rabies was much higher among Indians compared to Europeans, as most of them arrived too late because of the difficulties of traveling to Kasauli. Several of them arrived starving, as they had spent all their money in traveling. Semple commented, “In some cases it was a matter of feeding them and paying their railway journey from the funds of the Institute.”33 Gradually, however, as infrastructure improved, Kasauli became a popular site for treatment

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Figure 2.1. Pasteur Institute of India, Kasauli, Indian patients outside the building. Souvenir, the Indian Empire, Being a Brief Description of the Chief Features of India and Its Medical and Sanitary Problems, plate 9. Reproduced with permission from the Wellcome Library, London.

for Indians as well. Wealthy Indians donated money to provide for some basic facilities for poor patients arriving from different parts of the country. Lala Ghunta Mian, a local businessman, offered a large house in the bazaar with sixteen rooms for the accommodation of poor Indian patients. Khan Bahadur Dhanjibhoy of Rawalpindi offered blankets, warm clothing, and food at his own expense to poor patients.34 As a result, in his 1927 report on medical research in India, F.  P. Mackie (director of the Haffkine Institute, Bombay) wrote that Kasauli had become the site of rejuvenation for Indians. “The crowd of patients of every class collected together every morning waiting for treatment is a unique sight and one which can only be fully appreciated when seen.”35

Pasteurism in the Tropics The establishment of Pasteur institutes in the hills in British India was an important epistemological moment in the practice of Pasteurism in the tropics.

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Pasteurism in contemporary France has been described as a wider movement in which Pasteur successfully involved the French farmers, industrialists, politicians, and the scientific establishment in establishing a new scientific paradigm that transformed not only clinical medicine but also the economy.36 French colonial Pasteurism and the establishment of overseas Pasteur institutes has been seen as an even more dramatic episode in the spread of Pasteurian ideas, as it combined the transformation of colonial economy and clinical medicine, including the introduction of vaccines with ideas of French imperial benevolence and the civilizing mission.37 French colonial Pasteurism was an aggressive and powerful imperial intervention; the institutes were situated in the middle of busy colonial cities, French bacteriologists and military doctors boldly waged war against tropical diseases and even tropical realities, and Pasteurists like Ernest Conseil and Emile Sergent declared Tunis and Algiers to be “hygienized” and “pasteurized” cities, respectively.38 British Pasteurism in the tropics was a more complicated, although no less significant, medical intervention. Pasteurism here was incorporated within a climatic understanding of diseases in the tropics that British medical men had developed, beginning in the eighteenth century. For several British medical men tropical geography (in its climatic and cultural sense) appeared as the fundamental challenge in the adoption of Pasteurism, which led to the debate in India in the early twentieth century. While the French and a few British scientists believed in the universality of Pasteurian science, which could be adopted in any climate and region, including, with minor modifications, the tropics, the majority of British medical men argued that Pasteurism and Pasteur institutes needed to create climatic conditions similar to that of Europe, where the science had originated. This entire debate unfolded, as explained earlier, within the context in which the colonial government in India from the late nineteenth century had sought to move its administrative headquarters, military cantonments, and exclusive social spaces like clubs and sporting facilities to the hills. The location of laboratories in India was not resolved with the establishment of the Pasteur Institute in Kasauli. When the second Pasteur institute was planned in south India, where there were fewer hill stations, the matter became contentious once again. Lieutenant-Colonel W.  G. King, the sanitary commissioner of Madras who had previously opposed this move to the hills, entered into correspondence with Dr. M. Metin, the director of the Pasteur Institute in Saigon. The French Pasteur Institute was located in the middle of Saigon in a crowded part of the town. King wrote to the Madras government that Metin had assured him “that pasteurism can be satisfactorily conducted on the plains of India.”39 According to Metin, climatic conditions of Saigon only retarded the incubation of rabies in the rabbit, and he accelerated the desired process by weakening the virulence of the virus in the preserved spinal cords. The government of Madras forwarded this communication to GOI, adding that the climatic conditions of Madras and Saigon were similar, and “if they [the climatic factors]

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do not forbid correct working and can be successfully met at the former place, there appears to be no reason why equally successful results should not be attained elsewhere than in a hill climate.”40 King added a personal note to the dispatch from Madras with an appeal to reopen the issue of climate and bacteriological research in India. He suggested that the need was to adapt “European discoveries to the circumstances of India.” He also wrote to Semple, the director of the existing institute in Kasauli, about “the possibilities of conducting pasteurism on the plains in Madras.” King pointed out the true reason for the choice of hill stations as sites of bacteriological laboratories: “it seems to me that his claim for a hill climate was more based on the question of comfort of European patients than on the possibility of pasteurism.” He added that when Calmette established the institute in Saigon, “he entertained no fear as to the influence of a tropical climate that could not be overcome.”41 The contention was about the fundamentals of Pasteurism. According to King, the need of the moment was to modify research according to tropical temperatures, as Metin had done, and in the process display the flexibility and universality of Pasteurism (1372–74). King also wrote to Calmette, who was by then in Lille, and received a reply assuring him that in the practice of “Pasteurism” a tropical climate provided no hindrance. Calmette insisted that an institute intended to treat Indian patients and diseases common to India needed to be located in major Indian cities like Madras. “It may be accepted that the majority of patients in time will be natives, and that inducement to use the Institute would be far greater if within their cognisance, attached to a large city of 500,000 than if situated in a little known locality on the hills” (1375). King attached Calmette’s letter, where the latter stated emphatically that “Pasteurism” could be practiced anywhere in the tropics, and elaborated how he had conducted his own research in Saigon (1372–79). Despite the plea from King and the Madras establishment, the GOI seemed to have made up its mind, and the secretary, Risley, replied that the government remained strongly in favor of a hill site for the second institute. He also cited the Mulkowal accident to argue that bacteriological research had “a greater risk of failure” in the plains.42 Risley attached a note from Semple, which the latter had written in response to King’s note. Semple rejected Madras as a site for a Pasteur institute on two grounds. First, he believed that Madras was too hot for European patients. “A European undergoing intensive treatment at Guindy [in Madras] during the hot weather season would have much to complain of.” Moreover, Semple argued that a journey to the hills itself was therapeutic. Even for the Indians it “invariably” improved their health and “appearance.” He suggested that the antirabic treatment itself was painful and there was no need to subject the patients to the “debilitating climate” as well. He also believed the climate of the hills kept the staff of the institute in good spirits and health. Semple did not address the possibilities of adjusting bacteriological research to tropical

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conditions, which possibilities King and Calmette raised, but instead reversed the logic of universality of Pasteurism to suggest that the Kasauli Institute was based on the true principles of Pasteur institutes, as it replicated the climatic conditions of Paris and Lille.43 King was not about to give up. He replied to the GOI, repeatedly referring to the “true virtues” of “Pasteurism,” and how Lingard and Semple had betrayed those virtues. According to him, British scientists had never practiced “Pasteurism” in the tropics. He pointed out that Lingard had changed his mind after his “experience of two hot seasons” in Poona. He should have instead used a cold room and “actually conducted pasteurism.” Semple’s preference for conducting bacteriological research in the hills received approval from “members of the British Medical profession,” but according to King it was not recognized by French experts who had “special experience in dealing with pasteurism in [a] tropical climate, which is precisely the experience which is needed, and is precisely that which Lieutenant-Colonel Semple has not.”44 He even countered Semple’s claim regarding the similarities between the climates of Kasauli and Paris by providing meteorological data to show that the temperature in Kasauli fluctuated widely and it was much hotter in summer and colder in winter months than the temperature in Paris.45 He argued that although the movement to establish the Pasteur institutes had developed in the major Indian cities of Lahore, Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras, the institute had failed to become popular since it was established in a remote site like Kasauli. “I fail to see that the Kasauli Institute has made one-tenth part of the progress in popularising pasteurism during the years it has been opened that might have been reasonably expected, had it been situated within some populous centre in the plains.”46 He added that natives of Madras did not enjoy a hill climate, as Semple claimed. Semple’s mentor Almroth Wright in fact supported King, agreeing as he did that the advantages of a hill climate did not compare with the clinical advantages of working near hospitals in the Indian plains. “So greatly do the disadvantages of the bacteriologist in the hills working away from hospitals weigh with me that, if I were to be given my choice, I would unhesitatingly sacrifice the amenities of a hill climate in order to work in the plains in contact with hospitals.”47 King’s appeal and the testimonials and evidence he sent made little impact on the colonial government, and the under secretary to the GOI, J.  C. Fergusson, replied that the government saw “no reason to reverse the decision.”48 The question for the government was rather the choice of hill station, “whether it [the Pasteur Institute] should be established at Ootcamund or at Coonoor.”49 The second Pasteur institute was established in Coonoor in the Nilgiri Hills in 1907. Around the same time that the institute in Coonoor was established, a central medical research institute, chiefly for bacteriological research, was established in Kasauli adjacent to the existing Pasteur Institute. The Report of the Indian Plague

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Figure 2.2. The Pasteur Institute of Southern India, Coonoor (Nilgiri Hills). Album containing b/w photographs of Coonoor, GC/205/C/1, box 1, Wellcome Library Archives. Reproduced with permission from the Wellcome Library, London.

Commission (IPC), published in 1901, outlined plans for a network of bacteriological laboratories in India along the lines suggested in the 1890s by British medical men during the campaign for the Pasteur Institute. The medical men who supported the hill station received support from the IPC. It supported a plan for a central laboratory in the hills and recommended that the manufacture of vaccines and sera take place in the central laboratory and that a network of provincial laboratories to deal with medical research concerning local municipalities should be established in the cities in the plains. It did not provide any scientific justification for locating the central laboratories in the hills, apart from “climatic considerations.”50 The GOI too planned a central bacteriological laboratory “for the systematic study diseases in India,” and in 1899 the Director General of the Indian Medical Service (DGIMS) drew up plans to establish a central laboratory supported by provincial laboratories for the study of local health problems. Initially, the plan was to establish the central research laboratory at Mukteswar, where Lingard had moved his veterinary research institute; the provincial labs would be located at Calcutta (for Bengal and Assam), Madras (for the Madras presidency), Bombay (for the Bombay presidency), Berar, Agra (for northwest provinces, Oudh, and central provinces), and Lahore (for Punjab and Sind).51 Following the establishment of the Pasteur Institute in Kasauli, the GOI decided that the central research institute should be established in Kasauli and focus on diseases other than

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hydrophobia “for the scientific study of the etiology and nature of disease in this country.” The GOI planned for the research institute to be the center for bacteriological study of tropical diseases, so that “it should be no longer be necessary for officers to go from India to Europe to study the bacteriology and parasitology of tropical diseases, and . . . workers from Europe will seek Indian laboratories to avail themselves under competent direction of the unrivalled material for study which the diseases of this country afford.”52 The Central Research Institute (CRI) was established at Kasauli in 1905, with Semple as the director. The establishment of the CRI led to a reorganization of laboratory research in India. The CRI became the center for research in all “diseases of man” found in India and in the preparation of curative sera, and it provided training to scientific workers.53 The existing laboratories in the plains in Madras, Agra, Calcutta (D. D. Cunningham’s lab), and Bombay (Haffkine’s lab) were converted into provincial labs to provide expert assistance to the provincial medical and sanitary officers. The Pasteur institutes of Kasauli and Coonoor were to treat only patients suffering from rabies. Other Pasteur institutes were established at Rangoon (1916), Shillong (1917), and Calcutta (1924). These focused on rabies, but also researched diseases such as kala-azar (at Shillong, under H.  E. Shortt). When the two schools of tropical medicine were established in London and Liverpool, scientists in India argued for similar institutions in India as well. As the editorial in IMG insisted, “What we should like to see established in India is an Imperial School of Tropical Medicine. The material is here in India and not in London, Liverpool, Paris or anywhere in Europe or America.” It also stressed that postgraduate courses introduced in India, along with the “unrivalled clinical material available at any of the large Medical Colleges at Calcutta, Bombay or Madras” and the prospective research in the CRI, “should attract workers from Europe and from the Farther East.”54 Such a school of tropical medicine was not established in India until 1920, and the CRI served the purpose of the imperial bacteriological laboratory and tropical medicine in British India. It trained medical men in clinical bacteriology, including the use of the microscope; the preparation and use of various media in the cultivation of pathogenic microorganisms, methods of collecting pathogenic material for bacteriological examination, bacteriological investigations in enteric fever, Malta fever, tuberculosis, plague, anthrax, syphilis, leprosy, gonorrhea, etc.; and in serum diagnosis, prophylactic and therapeutic vaccines, and opsonic methods of treatment.55 Kasauli appeared as the location of choice for the CRI because of its climate and the existing facilities of the Pasteur Institute. Another advantage of Kasauli, as noted, was its proximity to Shimla, the summer capital of the Raj, where the office of the sanitary commissioner, who had administrative control of the CRI, was located.56 Thereby the central bacteriological laboratory was firmly situated within the administrative and social spaces of the Raj and at a safe distance from the Indian plains and the pathologies of the tropics.

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The debate around the site of the bacteriological research institutes in India reflected two different ideals of Pasteurism as practiced in the tropics. The French adhered to one fundamental feature of Pasteur’s method: its assertions of universality claimed by Pasteur himself in 1881, when he said that his vaccines were suitable for cultivation in any place and transferable “anywhere.”57 On the other hand, while introducing this new scientific principle to the tropics, the British adhered to a different set of conventions. They sought to retain the standards and conditions of Paris and Lille by trying to recreate them in Indian laboratories. This particular metropolitan orientation was a peculiarly British one, imposed on French methods. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the British had created idyllic replicas of English villages in the Indian mountains and moved the administrative headquarters of the Raj there. In a similar mode, they sought to replicate the environmental conditions of the European institutes for the Indian Pasteur institutes. While the French attempted to convert their institutes in the tropics into “tropical” ones, although remaining distinct, elitist, and hegemonic at the same time, the British sought to retain the structural distinctions of European laboratories in the tropics. While scientists in Europe and North America sought to create laboratory spaces distinct from the world outside, where they could control and manipulate nature to their advantage, British bacteriologists in colonial India situated their laboratories in the hills in opposition to the tropics. Yet neither the French urge to locate their institutes in colonial cities and to pasteurize their colonies, nor the British trend to move to the remote hills, was just a medical problematic. These locations reflected the distinct forms of colonialism that the two European nations had created. While the French colonial Pasteur institutes, firmly controlled from Paris and Lille, represented the civilizing mission and the centralizing tendencies of French imperialism under the Third Republic, the British Pasteur institutes were part the spatial and racial privileges of the Raj.58 In the process, the French colonial Pasteur institutes were laboratories of the republic and the Pasteur institutes in India became the laboratories of the Raj. In contrast to Europe, this spatial exclusivity of laboratory research in British India was not just for the sake of research or science, but also to retain the social privileges of the British in the tropics. Therefore, in subsequent decades, Indian nationalists questioned the hilltop laboratories as part of their larger political struggle against the privileges of the Raj. This political critique of hilltop laboratories went beyond challenges to Pasteurism in Europe, which were motivated by opposition to the ethics and morality of laboratory research. These colonial laboratories were manned by a different class of bacteriologists. The preeminence and the privilege of the colonial bacteriologists was not just due to their practice of a hegemonic new science and the powerful networks they built, as was the case in Europe, as described by Latour and others. Their authority in the colonies was embedded in the fact that they

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belonged to the ruling class that created distinct social spaces for the science they practiced. Their work within these laboratories, their demeanor and their social and cultural status within the empire and within the laboratories, provide an insight into the character of the colonial laboratories as well as the social history of colonial bacteriology.

The Colonial Bacteriologist “Doctor, Soldier, Scientist, and Shikari,” this was how Lieutenant Colonel Shortt, the colonial bacteriologist and member of the IMS, described himself in his memoirs.59 Shortt apparently handled the gun and the microscope with equal ease, and eliminated marauding tigers and the Leishmania donovani (the kalaazar parasite) of Assam with equal skill; he was also famed for his valor in the battlefields of the First World War and in the fight against diseases in the tropics.60 Colonial bacteriologists were indeed unique characters. They were soldiers in the true sense of the word: officers of the British Indian army, the establishment that defended the Indian empire. They indulged in colonial sports, shikar (hunting sport) and safari, which were an important aspect of British social life in the colonies in Asia and Africa. British residents and settlers widely indulged in hunting tigers, lions, elephants, foxes, or any form of wild animal in the tropical colonies, and the display of masculinity involved in the hunt formed an essential part of their colonial identity.61 British residents in India proudly displayed their hunting trophies in their drawing rooms.62 The third chapter will show that hunting and using animals for imperial logistical purposes shaped how animals were used in the laboratories. Members of the IMS also played the important paternalistic role of doctors, which added to their aura of courage and authority in the colonial society. The prospect of the conquest of germs and parasites in the tropics added a new dimension to the aura of the colonial physician, hitherto linked to ushering European ideas of sanitation and hygiene into tropical colonies. The colonial bacteriologist was far removed from the almost saintly and disinterested image that Pasteur and his fellow bacteriologists had acquired in Europe. Although bacteriology emerged as a critique of the older traditions of imperial medicine, bacteriologists in the colonies adopted the traditional imperial privilege, power, and prejudice. As Christoph Gradmann has shown, Koch the European laboratory scientist metamorphosed into a game hunter when he went to Africa.63 The hunt for microbes, parasites, and game went hand-in-hand. Hunting was an integral part of Koch’s sleeping sickness expedition of 1906–7 in Africa. Animals were shot and autopsied during the expedition, ostensibly to identify the animal hosts of Trypanosoma, but Koch in reality hunted any form of animal that he came across, such as herons, eagles, crocodiles, and hippopotamus. The German bacteriologist’s enthusiasm for conducting research in Africa and his

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Figure 2.3. H. E. Shortt. Reproduced with permission from the Wellcome Library, London.

fascination and fear of its natural world was reminiscent of the aggressive adventurism of European colonialism in that continent. Disease in Africa was seen as part of its repulsive and dangerous wilderness, both of which had to be eliminated with the same urgency. Colonial bacteriologists in India represented a confluence of the old and the new order in colonial medicine. On the one hand, they shared the existing imperial privileges and practices of the IMS, the nineteenth-century British imperial institution that ironically was once staunchly opposed to the ideas of Koch and Pasteur. On the other, the adoption of bacteriological research and the establishment of Pasteur institutes in India in the twentieth century added a new prestige to the profession. This changed colonial medicine as practiced in India and it changed the character of the IMS. In the twentieth century, bacteriological research and the laboratories became the sites of privilege in imperial medicine, which now attracted the most promising talents of the IMS cadres. Although many key bacteriologists in India in the early phase, including Haffkine, Hankin, Lingard, and even Semple (a Royal Army Medical Corps officer), were not members of the IMS, by 1910 almost all the bacteriologists in India came from that cadre. This monopoly was institutionalized by the formation of the Bacteriological Department in 1906. The GOI created the Bacteriological Department to regularize the appointment of medical researchers from the

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members of the IMS.64 Members of the IMS insisted that appointment of all the bacteriologists to the department and the CRI be from their cadre; J. T. W. Leslie, the sanitary commissioner for India, declared that all appointments “must be made from the Indian Medical Service.”65 Although John Morley, the secretary of state for India, was unwilling to do so, particularly since bacteriologists in Britain (who were not cadres of the IMS) wished to undertake research in India. By the 1920s, bacteriological appointments were the main attraction for prospective IMS cadres, which were otherwise relatively less prized than other colonial services such as the West African Medical Staff, the East African Medical Service, and the Medical Service in Malaya.66 In 1929, BMJ reported that the future of the IMS depended on medical research in India.67 During the financial crisis of the 1920s, when the Retrenchment Committee (1922–23)68 proposed the reduction in research expenses and in the numbers of recruitment for the department, John B. Smith (IMS, retired), medical advisor to the secretary of state for India, opposed the cuts and pointed out that research opportunities had become the new rationale for recruiting IMS cadres in the UK: “appointments in the Bacteriological Department are held out as an inducement to men entering the Indian Medical Service, and it is a breach of the promise made if the majority of these appointments are withdrawn.”69 This monopolization of bacteriological posts by IMS cadres went along with a demand for its autonomy from the administrative controls of the secretary of state. Instead, the IMS favored control of all future appointments and the overall coordination of research in India with its senior-most functionary, the sanitary commissioner of India.70 The IMS establishment viewed the office of the secretary of state as susceptible to pressures of the British parliament as well as the Indian nationalists. The office of the sanitary commissioner was considered to represent the interests of the IMS, and particularly its new investments in medical research. The Indian Research Fund Association (IRFA) was established in 1911; this further concentrated medical research and appointments under the IMS in India. The IRFA was created by Lukis, who planned it as an autonomous group of trained medical researchers with resources allocated to them without requiring the sanction of the secretary of state. The autonomous organization was responsible for coordinating and funding all medical research in India and played an important role, as we shall see, in shaping medical research the country.71 Under the IRFA, members of the IMS created a niche for themselves in colonial bacteriology in the interwar period.72 Like the IMS, the IRFA too had an imperial character. It had a scientific advisory board to advise on technical matters, but real control over research priorities and investment was vested in its governing body, initially consisting only of the DGIMS and the sanitary commissioner of India.73 The IRFA created a skewed financial distribution, as it contributed almost exclusively to government research institutes and projects and very little funds were invested in Indian universities.

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In the 1920s, political and administrative developments in India also made the monopolization of Indian bacteriological research within the IMS crucial. The Montague-Chelmsford reforms of 1919 introduced the concept of “diarchy,” as it transferred the charge of departments such as education, health, and agriculture to provincial services, while medical research, along with finance, revenue, and home affairs remained “reserved” as imperial, or central, services. Leonard Rogers, a prominent member of the IMS, believed that in this period, the bacteriological department had provided the IMS with a new role and a moral impetus in the practice of medicine in the colonies.74 Rogers wrote in his note on the IMS that the IRFA and the bacteriology department were the main attraction of the IMS among the British recruits in the 1930s.75 It was for the same reason that Rogers established the CSTM in 1921: to, as Helen Power described, “buttress the position of European members of the IMS as a vital part of the British Rule for years to come.”76 Such practices of monopoly in imperial medical research also had racial connotations, particularly when British medical researchers sought to keep the research jobs in their hands, at a time when Indians were training in bacteriological sciences. Prior to the First World War, IMS officers had staffed most of the elite medical research institutes and university professorships in India, apart from the military posts, while the Indian graduates occupied the subordinate posts. Even in the nongovernmental institutions like the CSTM, the initial recruitments for the professorial posts were all European IMS officers, while those for research were not all IMS officers, but were British.77 These policies ignored the aspirations of the educated Indian medical professionals who were trying to compete with the IMS cadre. When an attempt was made to appoint an Indian assistant surgeon at the CSTM, Rogers, the patriarchal figure in the institute, emphasized that it would put the future of the entire school in “grave danger.”78 Rogers was an influential IMS officer with a long medical career in India, a leading figure in tropical medicine, and the founder of the CSTM. He was also the staunchest critique of the Indianization of the IMS. After his retirement in 1921, he was appointed as a member of the India Office Medical Board in London and became its president in 1928. He held the collateral post of medical adviser to the secretary of state, a position he used along with his status as the Indian correspondent of the BMJ to resist any move by the government or Indians to provide concessions to non-IMS medical practitioners.79 He also participated in the Indian Roundtable Conference of 1931, where he staunchly resisted demands for the Indianization of the IMS.80 Rogers was apprehensive about the future of imperial medical research in India because with the emergence of popular nationalist politics in India, the Indian hill stations, their isolated imperial character, and more generally, the practices of imperial medicine and public health by the British were increasingly coming under the purview of political critique. In its attempts to create its own identities and spaces, Indian

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nationalism challenged some of the established traditions of imperial medicine that the British had carefully established and nurtured in India.

Tropical Research and Imperial Isolation From the early decades of the twentieth century, there was growing professional pressure from Indian university-based doctors, who formed the nongovernment (non-IMS) independent medical profession, to include more Indians in the colonial service. The imperial government desired the expansion of the independent medical profession, as it promised cheaper trained doctors, who were increasingly in demand in the empire. As early as 1899, George Hamilton, the secretary of state, urged the GOI to sponsor the independent medical profession in India for provincial civilian services. However, the plans were dropped because British residents of India were opposed to the replacement of white medical staff by Indians for their healthcare.81 The racial character of the IMS was reflected in the fact that until 1913 Indians comprised only 5 percent of its members, and by 1921 Indian membership rose to 6.25 percent.82 The steady rise in the number of Western-educated Indian doctors in the same period led to conflict between British and Indian physicians. The nonofficial Indian medical workers had formed their own organizations, like the Bombay Medical Union (BMU) and the Calcutta Medical Club. Their activities were mainly directed toward “enhancing the status and dignity of the Indian medical profession.”83 There was also a growing anxiety within the IMS about losing control of vital areas of India’s public health, as after 1919 the department of public health, hospitals, and the medical administration had passed over to provincial legislative control elected by a limited franchise. From the late nineteenth century, the BMU, in partnership with the Indian National Congress (INC), repeatedly protested against the monopoly of the IMS and put forward demands for greater inclusion of Indian doctors, even those who were educated in Indian universities.84 In 1913, BMU’s representation to the Royal Commission on the Public Services in India demanded equal status, privileges, and emoluments for the independent medical men, especially those in higher grades.85 The same year the IMG, which was published by the IMS cadres, complained about the political intervention and the subsequent decline in IMS recruitment in Britain: “The unrest in India, the treatment of that unrest by the authorities and the political developments of the present day, have made men hesitate before embarking on an Indian career.” The report suggested that the grand old days of the IMS were numbered: “civil practice is not what it was, little money can be made in many stations; moffussil [rural localities] life is less attractive than it used to be.”86 The same year that the BMU sent its representation to the Royal Commission, the British Medical Association (BMA),

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representing the IMS in Britain, sent a memorandum to the GOI deploring the conditions of the service. It suggested that the decreasing number of British men in the IMS posed an institutional as well as a “grave moral” question for the future welfare of India. The tone was distinctly paternalistic. To British medical men, this “unrest” and the attempted devolution of the privilege of the IMS posed as much of a medical crisis as a moral one—it tended to sacrifice the welfare of ordinary Indians that British medical men looked after. They interpreted the Indianization of medical practice as a disavowal of the “intimate” knowledge and understanding of India that British medical men had acquired over centuries. The BMA argued that India still needed British medical men: “Those who know the Indian most intimately, and who admire most intelligently his many excellent qualities as a profession man, cannot blind themselves to the fact that his standards are still far from being those of his British brother.” According to the BMA, the GOI had failed to restrict private medical practice by Indians and had succumbed to political pressure “from the educated Indians who have been trained in our colleges.” The situation also provoked the need for the centralization of the administration and activities of the IMS and a new division of responsibilities. The memorandum suggested the creation of a provincial medical service, which through its own (mostly Indian) medical officers could carry the “blessings” of Western medicine to the remote parts of India, leaving the IMS officers to concentrate on more central questions of public health policy and research in the imperial laboratories.87 All these changes culminated in making bacteriology and medical research an imperial prerogative, and the primary and coveted subject of imperial medicine in the 1920s and the Pasteur institutes and bacteriological laboratories once again figured prominently in imperial discourse. In 1927, J.  D. Graham, the public health commissioner (PHC) with the GOI, in his lecture on the “Medical and Sanitary Problems of India” at the Seventh Congress of the Far Eastern Association of Tropical Medicine, similarly urged the need to centralize imperial medical research in India under British management.88 In another lecture on “Medical Research and Organisation” at the same conference, Graham stressed the need for British control over medical research, particularly to keep the Bacteriological Department within imperial governmental control.89 Moreover, the problems faced by the British during World War I, particularly in terms of the inadequacies of the facilities of the CRI in supplying vaccines to the troops, led the GOI to look into investing more in medical research in India in the interwar period. The GOI developed plans for establishing a Central Medical Research Institute (CMRI). In 1920, the DGIMS declared that “it was a matter of urgency to establish an additional research institute in a central position, where opportunities for clinical investigations would be available.”90 The same year, Professor E. H. Starling of University College London sailed for India to advise the GOI on the location and infrastructure for a central medical research institute. BMJ reported that the IRFA was to fund the new institute,

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and Delhi, the imperial capital, was proposed as the site.91 Starling drew up a detailed plan for a medical research laboratory. He proposed the establishment of an all-India Medical Research Institute at Delhi.92 The GOI accepted the plan and the secretary of state for India sent his approval.93 However, following the recommendations made by the Indian Retrenchment Committee in 1923, the government postponed the plans indefinitely.94 In 1927, with the recovery of the imperial economy, British medical men raised the issue again, and this time Walter Fletcher, secretary of the Medical Research Council (MRC) of UK, was appointed as the head of another committee to look into the matter. Fletcher’s appointment to the Indian medical research committee was significant. Unlike Starling, who was a university figure, Fletcher belonged to a research organization. One of the staunchest advocates of the primacy of medical research in contemporary Britain, Fletcher had, as the secretary of the MRC from 1914 to 1933, played a crucial role in the organization of medical research in Britain.95 A distinguished laboratory physiologist, he became a prominent statesman and administrator in the interwar period. Fletcher stressed the need to base medicine as much on laboratory research as on clinical practice in hospital wards (24). In the interwar period in Britain, there was a struggle between scientists and medical practitioners over whether laboratory research or clinical practice was to be the chief factor in determining the nation’s medical policy. Fletcher was engaged in ensuring the supremacy of the MRC (29–31). Fletcher was also a keen advocate of autonomy in research and was responsible for putting the MRC on the same footing as the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), which was relatively free from governmental control (28–29). Fletcher’s agenda of maximum priority to and autonomy of medical research, which had shaped contemporary British clinical medicine, corresponded perfectly with the interests of the IMS officers in India, although for different reasons. Fletcher suggested some important modifications to Starling’s plans. The two main areas that his report focused on were location and personnel. For Fletcher, the question of location was fundamental for the autonomy of imperial medical research. The report stressed that seclusion of the laboratory was paramount and the need was to situate the CMRI in the hills.96 Fletcher’s idea of autonomy in research translated itself in the colony into an urge to retain control of research in British hands and to escape from the tropical heat, dust, and population. He did so by renewing the links between tropical climate and laboratory research that British medical men had asserted during the Pasteur movement. He pointed out, once again without elaborating, that “it is equally certain that basic research can best be done in a climate favorable to the energy and mental acuity of the workers, and, moreover, in a climate where delicate technical processes and procedures in the laboratory, as well as animal experiments, are not interfered with by extreme heat” (43). He rejected Delhi, which Starling had recommended, as it was “too hot” (44–45). His report rejected Bombay, as

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its climate appeared too hot as well, and because it already had a small provincial laboratory. In rejecting the other main cities, the report repeated the statements “What we have said about Bombay applies also to Calcutta” and “Our remarks on Bombay and Calcutta are applicable to Madras” (44–45). What was the nature of this imperial debate about climate, germs, and the isolation of the bacteriological laboratory? As we have seen, there was never any clear scientific rationale provided to explain how bacteriology or medical research in general were adversely affected by a tropical climate. The discourse reflected British imperial prejudices about the tropics that made new sense in the context of the popular unrest and the growing unease of the Raj in India in the 1920s. While Lingard sought to escape from the tropical dirt, heat, and bazaars, Fletcher wanted the laboratory to be away from sites of Indian political activity. The large Indian cities, such as Madras, Calcutta, and Delhi, that Fletcher rejected were now the centers of the nationalist movement, particularly during the Non-Cooperation Movement (1921–22), which, under Gandhi’s leadership, had shaken the imperial government.97 Fletcher’s choice was Dehra Dun, a small cantonment town located in the salubrious Garhwal foothills of northern India.98 The British had built the town as a site for imperial institutions such as the Imperial Forest Research Institute and the Geodetic Branch of the Survey of India, and Dehra Dun was the projected site for the Royal Indian Military College and the Railway Institute and Telegraph Headquarters. It was also a favored retirement site for colonial officials.99 According to the report, these institutions provided an ideal atmosphere for scientific discourse. Dehra Dun also had a “Leper Hospital for 80 beds,” which was considered adequate for providing clinical materials for the proposed CMRI.100 British tropical bacteriology now sought to escape from Indian towns, society, and politics, and not just from the heat, dust, and filth. Before arriving in India, Fletcher had little knowledge about the country. Before his departure from London, he met Rogers, who updated him about “Indian affairs.” Rogers also sent him a memorandum regarding what Fletcher was about to encounter in India. Following this Fletcher wrote to Rogers gratefully, “Thank you indeed for the confidential memorandum about Indian affairs that you have been good enough to send. . . . Now I hope you will pray for me in the very anxious task I see ahead, for which ignorance seems to be my only qualification.”101 This meeting and the memorandum shaped Fletcher’s ideas of bacteriological research in India. His main concern in India was to protect the laboratories from “Indian hands.” In December 1927, when Victor Heiser, the Rockefeller Foundation International Health Board’s director for the East, met Fletcher in a “confidential conference” in Calcutta during his trip to India, he found that Fletcher “fears greatly that the laboratory may soon pass into Indian hands unless special means are devised to change present tendencies.”102 In February 1928, in a private conference over dinner between another representative of the Rockefeller Foundation to India, W. S. Carter, and Fletcher and S. R. Christophers, the main point of discussion

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was on devising means to safeguard the IRFA, and in turn medical research, from political intervention. Carter wrote that “it is agreed by all that it is wise to safeguard the Indian Research Fund Association in every way possible and to make the funds at its disposal for research secure against any interference by politicians.” He added that this would be one of the main thrusts of Fletcher’s forthcoming report. “Sir Walter Fletcher will make every effort in that direction, so that the IRFA could not be abolished or injured by politicians.”103 Fletcher’s second priority, after the location of the CMRI in Dehra Dun, was the protection of the IRFA and its recruitment from Indian political interference. His report advised the appointment of a special recruitment committee, ostensibly to secure a closer liaison between medical research organizations in India and those in Britain. But in effect, it was an attempt to foster closer links between the medical establishments in the metropolis and in the colony by making the issue of recruitment an imperial one, superseding the political voices in India. The committee was to be comprised of a representative of the India Office, the Ministry of Health (UK), the MRC, and the Royal Society. It would also advise on general recruitment policy for Indian medical research workers. The report also recommended that twenty-three out of the thirty posts should be reserved for IMS officers.104 Fletcher’s report reflected an interesting convergence of contemporary metropolitan and imperial concerns on laboratory research. Colonial scientists saw in the contemporary debates for autonomy in research, and particularly in the role of the MRC, a model for conducting research in the colony. Colonial scientists like Rogers found strong parallels between the MRC and the IRFA, particularly in their political insulation. When there were demands to include more legislature and Indian members into the IRFA, Rogers countered by showing how the IRFA had been politicized and liberalized over the years, unlike the MRC.105 Rogers also wanted the MRC to play a more active role in funding imperial research in India and Africa.106 The Fletcher report gave a formal shape to such ambitions. The sentiments expressed were particularly strong and the general tone of the report was rather dogmatic, as it was conceived at a passing phase of imperial medicine in India. The 1890s marked a change of guard in colonial medicine that led to the introduction of bacteriology in the colonies, and the 1930s marked another shift when nationalist sentiments started to become more assertive in medicine. Fletcher’s plans faced staunch opposition from Indian medical men and nationalists, who declared in the 1930s that “the days of isolated hilltops are gone for ever.”107 Indian members of the legislative assemblies raised objections to various recommendations of the report.108 Moreover, the financial crisis of the 1930s made it untenable for the government to persist with the plans.109 As a result, the CMRI was never established in British India. When news of this abandonment of plans reached London, an irate Fletcher expressed his frustration with Indians and their politics to Rogers by referring

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to “the authentic chattering of the bandar-log.”110 Fletcher believed that the intrusion of Indian politics into matters of imperial medicine had made British involvement in matters of Indian healthcare and even British future existence in India untenable. He wrote that “it makes one doubt whether we have any business to be in India at all.”111 In his view, with the loss of such seclusion and privilege, medical research in India and in British medicine in general had lost its distinctive character. Indian independence (1947) led to other significant institutional changes. The IMS was abolished in postcolonial India and the IRFA was renamed the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) in 1949. The ICMR actively promoted research in medical colleges and universities, rather than at research institutes, in order to create closer links between the research workers and the public health problems facing the country. From 1953, with the help of Rockefeller Foundation fellowships, the ICMR funded research in medical colleges and established several research units at university colleges in Agra, Bombay, and Calcutta. A report by the ICMR declared in 1957 that a new chapter had been opened and medical research was no longer confined, as in the days of the Raj and the IRFA, to the research institutes in hill stations. “It has been brought to where it belongs—to centres of teaching and learning.”112 Despite such claims, postcolonial Indian nation building and its own medical research institutions also embraced the ethos of spatial exclusivity and privilege. The establishment of the first national medical research institute in India originated from the recommendations of the Bhore Committee. In 1943, the GOI set up the Health Survey and Development Committee under the leadership of Joseph Bhore, a member of IMS (known as the Bhore Committee). The Bhore Committee report, while critical of the British medical research initiatives and arguing for more widespread medical infrastructure in India, also supported the continuance of centralized research leading to the establishment of the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS, 1952) in Delhi.113 Medical infrastructure, despite substantial investment in rural sectors through the planned economy, has tended to remain urban oriented. Urban centers and metropolises became the sites of real privilege and power in postcolonial India.

Laboratories of the Raj Bacteriology in British India was at war not only with diseases and germs in the tropics, but also with the very idea of the tropics itself. The introduction of germ theory and bacteriology in India became part of a public movement with moral connotations; they appeared as a positive force in a largely negative climate. They offered the possibilities of a singular cure for the complex disease realities that the British encountered in this country. However, in the debates around climate, germs, and environment that appeared repeatedly in

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the establishment and running of Indian Pasteur institutes and bacteriological laboratories, a metamorphosis of Pasteurism had taken place in colonial India. Pasteur institutes and bacteriological laboratories in India became peculiarly British colonial institutions with their own distinct moral connotations of space and isolation. This divergence between the French and British practices of Pasteurism in the tropics implied that there was very little communication between British and French bacteriologists (even those working in Southeast Asia) working in their own respective Pasteur institutes. Climate, race, and spatial exclusivity were important concerns to the British in India. These concerns had driven them away from the Indian towns and bazaars to the salubrious hills, where they created replicas of English villages and their summer capitals. It was this concern for climate and spatial privilege that shaped the location and character of colonial laboratories in India. In seeking to avoid the heat and dust of tropical research, British bacteriologists established their laboratories in the hills. The hilltop laboratories, the IMS cadre, the IRFA, and the colonial bacteriologists represented the moral imperatives of tropical bacteriology. With the growth of nationalism in major Indian cities, marketplaces, and provincial towns, these ideas of space, germs, and race acquired a new urgency. In the debates around the nature and location of laboratories in the 1930s, when Indian nationalism had become an important consideration for the Raj, the older links between climate and research were revisited. In its institutionalization of these laboratories, nineteenth-century colonial medicine reinvented itself in twentieth-century laboratory medicine. There was also an irony here. In the Indian hill stations, which the British had created as conscientiously English spaces, the British scientists practiced bacteriology and animal and human experimentations, all of which had faced strong opposition in Britain itself. This led to a crisis, which the next chapter will elaborate on.

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Chapter Three

Imperial Laboratories and Animal Experiments Once bacteriological laboratories and Pasteur institutes began to be established, the ethics of laboratory research in India assumed critical proportions. The institutes required massive animal resources. To give one example, the production of a single (Semple antirabic) vaccine in one Pasteur institute required six thousand rabbits annually.1 The quaint, idyllic, and peaceful hills where the British established their bacteriological laboratories became the sites of extensive animal experimentation in India. The question is, how was this prodigious animal resource secured for scientific research in colonial India? In other words, how did bacteriology harness its beasts of burden in the empire? This chapter argues that animal experimentation in Indian laboratories has to be seen within a larger context in which Indian animals became subjects and resources of the colonial state. This was a complex process, because debates about animal experimentation in Indian laboratories were shaped both by late Victorian morality toward Indian animals and Indian, specifically Hindu, sensibilities that developed around the contemporary cow protection movement. British attitudes toward animals in India resembled their attitude toward lower-class Indians or “natives,” which was both romantic and authoritarian. British scientists and administrators legitimized and legalized animal experimentation in colonial India through two simultaneous processes. First, they assumed moral and political agency by representing Indians, especially of those castes and occupations who owned or worked with domestic animals, as cruel and childlike at the same time, a class of people who were unable by nature to care for their own animals. Second, on the other side of this humanitarian and paternalistic enterprise, the colonial state had made Indian animals resources of colonial economy, through policies that facilitated their use in the production of vaccines in colonial laboratories. No legislation that might supervise, restrain, or control animal experiments or the large-scale use of animals in laboratories was ever introduced in British India. This was despite strong sentiments expressed by both Indians and British antivivisectionists against cruelty to animals in India. More important, the antivivisection movement died out in twentieth-century India almost as rapidly as it had arisen, although sentimentality about animals remained strong and was always potentially volatile. The portrayal of bacteriology in late nineteenth-century India as a positive and benign science secured its immunity from alternative

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moral critiques of its methods and practices both within and outside the laboratory. This represented not just the introduction of the Pasteurian method in the colony but also the simultaneous and consensual making of a new moral paradigm around modern science. Science and animal rights have been fraught with debates, conflicts, and moral crises in Europe and America. In the late nineteenth century, public awareness about animal experimentation had reached a peak in both Britain and the United States. In England particularly, animal experimentation became a volatile issue at the time of the rise of laboratory medicine and the vaccine research of Pasteur. There was a strong and vociferous antivivisection movement committed to the protection of laboratory animals.2 In 1876, the first legislation was passed severely restricting animal experimentation in England.3 To these groups, Pasteur and his institutes represented unthinkable cruelty toward animals. So much so that British scientists failed to establish a Pasteur institute in Britain and settled instead for a rather innocuously named British Institute of Preventive Medicine in 1893. One way of explaining these sentiments is to see them as a reaction against the transformation of the animal body into a scientific object.4 Pasteur’s method of producing vaccines, attenuating the virus by passing it through a series of animals, turned animals more directly into productive resources for science rather than objects of isolated experiments, as was practiced previously. His experiments required an “industrial” manufacturing scheme involving animals.5 It is important to go beyond the animal body and the laboratory space to locate this process within a wider transformation of animals into resources of the modern state, of science, and of modernity in general, which was particularly evident in the colonies. It is necessary not to see Pasteur in isolation from the general processes at play in society within which his work was located. The history of science and its subjects: animals, women, prisoners, soldiers, etc., has to be studied as a social and political process of gain and loss of agency in modern society.6 As this chapter will show, the British legitimized animal experimentation in colonial India through complex assumptions of moral authority and social and political agency. The intricate social history that Pasteurian experimentations reflected is evident in the diverse nature of the opposition to Pasteur in Europe. His opponents were an eclectic group of humanitarians, antivaccinationists, Christians, and liberals who opposed, variously, industrialism, vaccination, harsh incarcerations, and cruelty toward women, children, and animals, and even colonialism.7 Reactions to Pasteur took place within an important modern dilemma in the West: seeing animals both as resources for human consumption and as recipients of human compassion. According to James Turner, the dual shocks of industrialization and urbanization helped to produce a deeper emotional identification with the natural world, particularly animals.8 Romanticism and sentimentality toward animals and the natural world in general have increased along with the rise of

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industrial levels of meat production and the growing popularity of hunting and fishing.9 Imperialism added a new complexity to the modern problematic of human-animal relationships, and it is necessary to understand animal experimentation in colonial India within this modern problematic.

Animals and the Empire Imperialism brought about an unprecedented need to manage resources and move goods, build rail and road networks, and carry supplies for armies in Asia and Africa. Many of these processes required unprecedented levels of use of domesticated animals; many also led to the careful conservation and husbandry of some species and the destruction of many others. Three trends were initiated by the colonial state in its relationship with animals. First, colonialism created a new urgency in the clearing of forests and the destruction of vermin for the expansion of capitalist agriculture and the increase of revenue.10 Second, it opened new arenas for engaging in animal sports. These included the reinventing of traditional Indian shikars as diplomatic and social events, as well as the introduction of British fish into the temperate Indian waters, for example, trout in Kashmir. The British journalist G. W. Steevens described India as “the most sporting country in the world,” following his hunting sprees with the maharajah of Jodhpur in the 1890s.11 Third, imperialism led to a romanticization of Oriental flora and fauna and the adoption of new moral values about the welfare of animals, in which the British also assumed the responsibility of preserving and caring for the welfare and protection of Indian animals. All these occurred within a specific political context in India, that is, the cow protection movement, in which animals figured centrally in Hindu politics. The use of animals for scientific research was therefore a multifaceted issue in the colonies. Historians have paid little attention toward understanding this intricate history of animals and science in the colonies. In the historiography of colonialism, animals have been studied mainly with respect to hunting, conservationism, and veterinary science.12 On the other hand, historians have studied how the human body became a subject both of science and of the colonial state. The colonized body was used as an object of scientific experimentation as well as a metaphorical entity for the assertions of governmentality by the colonial state through Western medicine.13 The native body was also central to colonial therapeutic regimes, which sought to transform the inmates of lunatic asylums into “docile, obedient and efficient Indians.”14 Historians have also explored the theme of physical violence as a means of colonial governance. Practices like the whipping of criminals were rationalized by the paternalistic attitudes of the British toward their unruly and “immature” Indian subjects.15 At the same time, the native body was configured in terms of crime and criminality.16 These studies carry important suggestions for the use of animals as objects of science as well,

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Figure 3.1. “Sport in India: Fox Hunting at Mustang, Bolan Pass,” The Graphic: An Illustrated Weekly Newspaper, February 7, 1880, 144–45. Reproduced with permission from Special Collections, Templeman Library, University of Kent, UK.

which involved a similar dualism of paternalism and violence by the colonial state. Nevertheless, the trajectory of animals and scientific experiments in the colonies needs to be situated within the distinct context of colonialism, colonial science, and imperial resources. Animal experimentation in colonial India did not begin with bacteriology. As British medical experts attempted to introduce various new chemical drugs into colonial India beginning in the 1860s, experiments on animals became necessary. In the 1880s, a debate about the use of chloroform as an anesthetic began between the Lancet and a few medical men based in India. The Lancet’s position was that chloroform was not safe, as it paralyzed the heart (leading to syncope); therefore the use of ether was preferred. Meanwhile, medical men from Edinburgh trained under James Syme and James Young Simpson argued that chloroform was in fact safer.17 Syme’s student Lawrie, who was the resident physician of the princely state18 of Hyderabad in India, believed that chloroform affected respiration (leading to asphyxia), not the heart, so if the patient was made to breathe it carefully it was a safe and effective anesthetic. The debate led to the formation of two Hyderabad chloroform commissions. During the first commission of 1888, Lawrie experimented on one hundred and forty-one animals and reported to the government of India, “I have killed scores of dogs with chloroform . . . and I have never seen syncope or failure of the heart’s action produced by it.”19 The first commission, however,

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proved indecisive. The Lancet dismissed the report as being “scanty statements of experiments” and demanded more proof, since the findings were contrary to those of the commission appointed by the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society and by the British Medical Association.20 This led to large-scale animal experimentation by the second Hyderabad commission. The Nizam (ruler) of Hyderabad offered £1,000 to the Lancet to send experts to observe the experiments in Hyderabad.21 In October 1889, Brunton came to Hyderabad as the Nizam’s guest.22 Experiments started in October and continued every day until December.23 The Lancet published Brunton’s telegram sent from Hyderabad: “Results most instructive. Danger from chloroform is asphyxia or overdose; none whatsoever heart.”24 In fifty-six days, around five hundred animals were killed, and clinical studies on the effects of chloroform were conducted on fifty-four Indians.25 Brunton was certainly impressed by the scale, as he later commented that “the amount of experimental work we did in three months was so great that it would really have taken a man his whole time for three years to work out all that was shown by the tracings.”26 All the dogs were subjected to painful experiments. The report described that experiments to test the effectiveness of anesthetics needed to be painful for animals, as they involved tests like “extractions of teeth, evulsion of nails, section of the muscles of the eye, snipping of the skin of the anus, &c. In many cases the operation was performed when the animal was merely stupefied by the chloroform and not fully insensible.”27 The Lancet now appreciated the scale of the operation, as it reported, “The Experiments of the Second Hyderabad Commission have supplied us with a mass of experimental data such as never been obtained before, and is not likely to be obtained again, at least for many years.”28 This extensive experimental scope and statistical triumph was not unusual in colonial research, particularly since large-scale animal experimentation could be undertaken in the colonies rather than in Britain. Following the British Cruelty to Animals Act in 1876, British medical men used Indian animals to conduct large-scale scientific experiments in India. For example, experiments on snake venom conducted by Brunton and Joseph Fayrer at the Physiological Laboratory of the London University by using rabbits and cats were hampered by the Act of 1876, as they could only use “small number of animals for which a license had been obtained.”29 In 1898, a frustrated Brunton wrote to William Welch, a leading pathologist at Johns Hopkins University, cautioning him about a similar movement developing in America to prevent animal experimentation, I regret extremely to hear that there is a movement in America to stop the progress of medicine by prohibiting experimentation upon animals. It is through experimentation on animals that medicine and surgery have made such enormous strides of recent years. . . . It is a want of conception of the importance of experimentation in increasing the power of the medical man to relieve pain and prevent death that causes sentimentalists to oppose it.30

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Vincent Richards resumed Brunton’s research when he came to India in 1883.31 Leonard Rogers arrived in India in 1893 and resumed Fayrer and Brunton’s research, as he could conduct experiments more freely.32 Even before this post-1876 phase, in 1872, the Indian Snake Venom Commission, in order to verify the length of time for which those bitten by snakes could be kept alive by artificial respiration, conducted experiments very similar to those of the Chloroform Commission on two hundred dogs either forcibly bitten by cobras in captivity or hypodermically injected with the venom.33 These experiments coexisted with another aspect of colonialism: the moral ascendancy and paternalism that the British assumed in India. As the envoys and disseminators of both modernity and morality in colonial India, the British were present at both ends of the moral debate around science and animals; they were both the experimenter on animals and thereby the prophets of modern science as well as the custodians of the welfare of Indian animals.

Fear of the Pariah: Anxiety, Empathy, and Animals in the Empire Along with using animals as subjects of science and as resources of the colonial state, the British in India expressed strong compassion for Indian animals. British residents and the colonial government cared for and adopted the wretched draught and street animals with the same utilitarian ethic with which they empathized with millions of “poor” and laboring classes of Indians. In Viceroy Curzon’s words, the Raj stood for “the Indian poor, the Indian peasant, the patient, humble, silent millions.”34 In 1861, Colesworthy Grant (1813–80), a British painter and resident of Calcutta, established the first Indian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty against Animals (SPCA).35 This in fact preceded similar developments in the United States, where Henry Bergh organized the first American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in New York City in 1866.36 Grant’s main concern was the suffering street and draught animals that he saw in Calcutta. In his morning walks, he noticed “the hideous wounds, galls, dislocations, and mutilations” that cattle and horses were often subjected to by their keepers.37 The Calcutta SPCA focused on ameliorating the conditions of these “labouring and domestic animals.”38 The complex and often contradictory nature of the imperial outlook toward Indian animals is reflected in British attitudes toward Indian mongrel dogs. The exploration of imperial attitudes toward native dogs allows us to understand the complexity of imperial policies toward Indian animals and, as R. J. Gordon suggests, the social history of colonialism itself.39 Throughout the nineteenth century, while Indian mongrels received compassion from the British, they were at the same time feared and subjected to harsh treatments.

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Figure 3.2. “Outcastes” in J. L. Kipling, Beast and Man in India. Reproduced with permission from the Wellcome Library, London.

The adoption of the term “pariah” to describe the Indian mongrels by the British is an example of this imperial empathy toward Indian animals. “Pariah,” which originally referred to a low-caste community of South India, was used by the British to describe the mongrel street dogs of India, which were believed to consist of similar “outcastes.” These dogs were often kept and fed by Indian villagers, but to the British, as pariahs, they were the grim reminders of the realities of Indian society and its modes of ostracism. Yet at the same time the British had themselves condemned the pariahs to the status of outcastes. The British had brought with them to India their own breeds as pets, such as foxhounds for hunting sports; the British subalterns, privates, and civilians brought bulldogs, mastiffs, and terriers. Spaniels, retrievers, and greyhounds were imported for sports, and many Englishwomen carried with them Maltese, Dandie Dinmonts, and dachshunds.40 In cantonments for British troops and areas of predominantly white residence where European breeds were kept as pets, the British attempted to keep these isolated from the pariahs for fear of crossbreeding. Their attempts to keep the pariahs away from their European breeds reflected the complex racial fears of miscegenation that the British suffered from in India. During Curzon’s rule in India, when there was a large British settlement (civilian and military), maintaining racial separation between the whites and the Indians became a fundamental consideration for the preservation of the structures of power.41 One

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ex-cavalryman wrote about the “soldier’s dogs in India.” “Our dogs had a great dislike to the native dog or pariah, as he is called, forgetting that they had a deep strain of the pariah in their own breeding. Anyhow, the barrack dogs—that is to say, those mongrels of European origin—seem to glory in a good pariah dog hunt; and in this respect, we their masters, joined suit.”42 European soldiers often went on “pariah hunts” with their dogs, when they killed the dogs of the neighboring villagers. On one occasion when they shot the village dogs, the villagers came and attacked them in the cantonment.43 In 1890, in the face of growing public anxiety about rabies in India, the military establishment took drastic steps to keep British troops and British breeds of dogs safe by ordering the destruction of all pariah dogs found within one hundred yards of the bungalows in the regiment. A private wrote to the Civil & Military Gazette that the regiments own “valuable” [European breeds] dogs were spared.44 Indian vernacular newspapers complained against government orders to destroy the ownerless dogs, arguing that these “faithful animals,” which were being beaten to death in the streets by municipality workers, also acted as guard dogs in the native localities.45 With the spread of the news of Pasteur’s new vaccine, the pariahs acquired a new status of being outcastes among British residents of India. Around the same time that Anglo-Indian newspapers started to highlight the research of Pasteur, they also increasingly referred to the problem of pariah dogs in the Indian streets.46 While making a case for the Pasteur Institute in Punjab, the Civil & Military Gazette highlighted incidences of rabies in the province.47 Hydrophobia and its Indian “carrier,” the pariah dogs, appeared as the bane of British life in India. In the process, the pariah represented the tropical manifestation of the disease that was common in contemporary Europe. British residents complained regularly to Indian newspapers about the “menace” caused by the “multitudes of dogs” that infested the Indian cities.48 The Pioneer Mail wrote half-sympathetically in 1892, “The poor pariah is in worse repute than ever just now, when hydrophobia and Pasteur Institutes are such prominent topics.”49 The British directed their fear of pariahs toward Indians and their reluctance and inability to control the mongrels in their localities. In 1890, a British civil servant wrote to the editors of Pioneer Mail that a public protest against the threat of pariah dogs was needed. He also suggested that a dog tax might motivate Indians to control them more efficiently: “the native population will probably obey the sirkarka-hookum [the government’s order] if they can thus save their pockets.”50 Scientific journals like the IMG and IMR also increasingly carried news of problems caused by pariah dogs. Soon after the establishment of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, the IMG reported cases of hydrophobia in Bombay, Surat, and Punjab.51 It reported that in Surat the fear of the pariah was widely prevalent among the British residents in the city, where “an epidemic of rabies has broken out.” The municipality of the city passed orders to muzzle all dogs. Matters took an interesting turn as Indian residents of the city intervened. The paper reported that the Hindu banias [merchant communities] sent cages on wheels and men to seize all stray dogs before they could

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be destroyed by the municipality, “in their great zeal for saving life.” Therefore the rabid as well as healthy dogs were handled together and taken off to the Pinjrapole [traditional Indian animal shelter], and after a brief period, once the panic had subsided, were released back to the streets.52 An impatient British resident asked, “Why is nothing done in India to prevent the spread of the disease, to stamp it out?”53 The question was a difficult one, since pariahs posed a physical threat as well as a moral dilemma. The main concern was about the modes to be adopted to stop their growing population and the spread of rabies. Poisoning the pariahs often also killed “valuable” dogs owned by the British residents. In 1889, Major R.  K. Ridgeway complained that his dog was poisoned by strychnine that was kept near the main road to kill the pariahs. The Shimla municipality posted notices that anyone who left poison within the municipality area (British residential parts) would be punished.54 Clubbing the pariahs to death by municipality sweepers, which was the most common practice, was abhorred by the British residents.55 In cities like Calcutta, British residents complained about the pariahs being clubbed to death by “brutal sweepers.”56 A writer to the Pioneer Mail who signed himself “Lover of Animals” complained about the “brutal manner in which dogs are destroyed, beaten and stoned to death by natives.” He suggested that they should be shot.57 However, in the post-1857 era, when the British sought to disarm Indians for fear of another armed revolt, this was an impractical suggestion. The introduction of rabies vaccines beginning in 1900 helped to assuage some of the anxieties. However, the large-scale killing of dogs by electrocution rather than clubbing remained the main mode of dealing with the problem by municipal authorities in the major Indian towns. It was gradually replaced by sterilization and vaccination conducted by animal protection associations.58 The Indian SPCAs in the 1930s designed dog vans for capturing the pariahs in more humane ways.59 This complexity of imperial attitudes toward indigenous animals informed scientific research in the colonies. At a time when dogs became symbols of empathy toward animals in Britain, they became the prime objects of scientific experiments in India. While the Act of 1876 in Britain specifically forbade experiments on dogs and cats, British researchers in India preferred Indian pariah dogs that were abundant in the streets as experimental objects.60 In 1909, in a letter to the India Office, Brunton pointed out that for experiments in India pariah dogs were ideal, as they were “much commoner and less expensive.”61 Pariah dogs were also used as baits by British hunters, when necessary, as a cheap substitute for goats or cows.62 Imperial legislation enacted for Indian animals needs to be located within these contradictions.

Imperial Legislation and Cruelty toward Animals The most important part played by the Indian SPCAs was the introduction of the cruelty against animals legislation in India. The Calcutta SPCA had urged

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the Bengal government to pass the first act for the prevention of cruelty to animals for Bengal in 1869.63 A similar act was passed in Ceylon in 1862.64 Prior to these, two general laws were passed in 1861 in Calcutta to protect the street and draught animals from harsh treatment by the natives.65 At a time when the Pasteur movement was also gaining momentum, the 1869 act was extended to all of India in 1890–91.66 The acts only addressed draft and sport animals used by Indians and did not refer to the use of animals in research or those used in British sports or the army for logistical purposes. The Indian cruelty acts were not simple extensions of contemporary British legislation or concerns regarding the empathy for animals in India. They were also reflections of contemporary British perceptions of Oriental nature and society. As some scholars have argued, the British engagement with cruelty in India or in Indian habits and character was largely a post-1857 development.67 The revolt led to the public outpour of rage and of fear among the British at the supposed atrocities and cruelties committed by the Indian sepoys. Patrick Brantlinger has shown how the “well at Cawnpore” drove public opinion in Britain and led to a polarization between good and evil, innocence and guilt, justice and injustice, civilization and barbarism.68 This distrust was expressed particularly toward uneducated Indians, who comprised the mutinous and supposedly cruel sepoys and peasants, and who thereby rejected the benefits and benevolence of British rule. At the time of the revolt, Grant, the founder of the Calcutta SPCA, wrote to the British public in the Durham Advertiser that the origin of the “mutiny” was in fact the “character of the mass of people in this country”: “The uneducated Asiatic is characterized by two extremes, —that of simplicity and childishness in his ordinary and better moments . . . and in his excited and worse mood, by that cunning, treachery, and cruelty (to a degree, alas! we did not know till now).”69 This idea of the cruel yet childlike Indian reinforced the paternalism of colonial legislation against cruelty. The cruelty acts in India were marked by a paradoxical relationship of romanticism and authoritarianism with which the British had approached the issue of saving the wretched Indian animals. The acts were essentially directed to check cruel native practices. To that extent, they not only addressed cruelty toward animals but also introduced a legal and rational paradigm within the perceived irrationality of the human-animal relationship in Indian society. The acts were passed at the time of British attempts at introducing a unified legal code and structure in Indian society by the enactment of the Indian Penal Code in 1862.70 This mix of romanticism and authoritarianism in the British attitude toward Indians and their animals is reflected in the work of John Lockwood Kipling,71 who as a British artist and animal sympathizer in India was in these respects a successor of Grant. He wrote Beast and Man in India just after the cruelty act of 1890 was passed. In the book, he addressed readers in Britain who had wondered why such an act was necessary in India. Kipling suggested that a study of domesticated Indian animals, toward whom the 1890 act was directed, provided

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a unique insight into Indian society itself. “An elementary study of Indian animals, their treatment and usage, and the popular estimates and sayings current about them . . . opens a side door into Indian life, thought, and character, the threshold of which is still unworn.”72 According to him, ignorance and irrationality, which he described as characteristic of the Oriental mind, was at the heart of the human-animal relationship in Indian society. “First-hand observation and accurate statement of fact seem almost impossible to the Oriental, and education has not hitherto availed to help him” (14–15). The ignorant Indian also enjoyed a strange resemblance to their animals. The “Indian cultivator is very much like his ox. He is patient, and bears all that drought, flood, storm, and murrain can do with the same equanimity with which the ox bears blows, when the oxen chew the cud and their masters take their nooning, the jaws of man and beast move in exactly the same manner. . . . Like the peasant, too, the ox is indifferent and devoid of curiosity” (152–53). His book catalogued the “curious intimacy with animals that exists in India among those who have charge of them” (330). He reproduced the assortment of humans and animals in Islamic and Hindu iconography, described the proximity of mahouts to their elephants and the bed sharing of hunting cheetahs with their trainers, and also narrated the most famous instance of such closeness: the wolf boy of Lucknow, chronicled as Mowgli by his son Rudyard Kipling in the Jungle Book, whose pictures he painted (330).73 In J. L. Kipling’s view, this intimacy with animals did not make Indians their masters. The man who trained his cheetah to hunt for him was not an animal trainer, as the animal “is merely let loose to perform an act he learned in a wild state” (331–21). An inept master could also be a cruel master who controlled his animals only through “starvation and the stick” (332). He contrasted these with animals trained by the British, suggesting that the fetch-and-carry tricks of an English spaniel or retriever were looked at “with astonishment” in India and that “you are listened to with polite incredulity” when the acts of a collie with sheep were described (335). J. L. Kipling concluded, “No, the Oriental is not a firstrate [sic] animal trainer. With almost boundless patience, he has no steadfastness of aim, nor has he sufficient firmness of hand and will to secure confidence and obedience” (336). This is where the imperial legislation secured its moral legitimacy. The cruelty acts of India were driven by the same utilitarian urge that had prompted the Raj to promote firm and impartial rule of law in India.74 This empathy toward Indian animals developed parallel to the activities of the antivivisectionists and the RSPCA in Britain. What is distinctive in the imperial context is that here the notion of care for animals was concomitant with the idiom of rule. The rationale of empathy, as promoted by British residents, was ultimately a rationale of the “benevolent” colonial state. This was totally different from the European experience, where pro-animal activism developed as a movement that was often directed against the institutions of the state. The British in India celebrated the Indian Cruelty Act of 1890 as a

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great symbol of the progressive and civilizing aspects of British rule in India.75 The act was also adopted in other British colonies such as Zanzibar.76 Viceroy Lord Elgin (Victor Alexander Bruce, 1849–1917), in his speech to the annual meeting of the Calcutta SPCA in 1893, commended the 1890 Indian Cruelty Act for its strong utilitarian ethic: “I am furthering a movement which has the goodwill of all who are not thoughtless and indifferent, and who believe that a share of the compassion and sympathy which we feel for our fellow human creatures is also due to those other fellow-creatures whom we regard as occupying a lower position than ourselves in the animal kingdom.”77 European sentiments and political movements around animals were carried over to India in areas beyond imperial utilitarianism. Concern for animal welfare also reflected the expansion of the moral universe of twentieth-century bourgeois politics. Twentieth-century politics and the pursuit of human rights had represented animals as both the metaphors of and the recipients of humanitarianism. It was within this context that Hindu politics adopted animals as symbols within its own moral, cultural, and social universe and identity. This created yet another dimension in the Indian engagement with Pasteur and scientific experimentation.

Animals in Hindu and Nationalist Politics Animals figured in mainstream colonial Indian politics much more significantly than they did in Europe. In the late nineteenth century, there was an escalation of the cow protection movement in north India. In the 1890s, a movement developed in north India to identify and assert a unified and national Hindu identity in India. The Arya Samaj, which was at the forefront of the movement, adopted the cow both as a symbol of Hindu compassion toward other life forms and as an icon of the unification of the Hindu community in response to colonial rule. It demanded a ban on the slaughter of cows, which it projected as sacred to Hindus. The political edge of the movement was directed against the British and the Muslims, both depicted as “outsiders” to the Hindu identity and morality, as they consumed beef. Subsequently, Hindu-Muslim conflicts over cow slaughter escalated, especially in north India. Riots took place in the United Provinces, Bombay, Rangoon, and also in the princely states.78 These Hindu groups also created institutional links and matched their moral ethos with the animal protection movement sponsored by the Indian SPCAs, leading to a rise in the numbers of animal shelters. One of the consequences of the Cruelty Act of 1890 was that it increased the demand for animal shelters for rescued animals.79 This expanded the role of the traditional animal sanctuaries called the pinjrapoles, maintained essentially by Hindus. Local traders, for instance, founded the Madras Pinjrapole in 1908, in response to a plea from the Madras SPCA.80 This increase in humanitarian attitudes toward animals and the

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growth of pinjrapoles also led to the establishment of several veterinary institutions by prominent Indians. The first veterinary institution was established in Calcutta in 1892, funded by a Parsi businessman, D. M. Petit.81 There was also empathy based on the presumption of a common moral purpose between the two movements launched by the antivivisectionists and the cow protectionists. Isabel Burton (1831–96), a prominent animal lover and antivivisectionist in London, wrote about her experience of a visit to a pinjrapole in India. I should think it far better to put a bullet through their heads [the suffering and lame animals]; but I admire a religion that believes in animals having a kind of soul, and future, and that prompts their having a refuge where, at least, no one can hurt them, and where they get some kind of food, drink, and shelter.82

With the establishment of Pasteur institutes in India, both the cow protectionists and the SPCAs were faced with the prospect of large-scale animal experimentation in India, which served to unite them against a common enemy. Pasteur and vaccines provoked opposition first in England. Rumors floated widely in England about Haffkine’s inoculation campaigns in India. It was reported in the British parliament that two animals were “flayed alive” by Haffkine during a public demonstration of his cholera vaccine in Calcutta.83 The Antivivisectionist Society of Britain sent petitions to the GOI and the secretary of state for India against the plans for an Indian Pasteur institute. They also addressed the British residents in India and Indian elites who were raising funds for the Indian Pasteur institute. In 1892, Frances Cobbe wrote to the Pioneer Mail of Allahabad, “I most earnestly hope that neither my brave countrymen in India (where my father fought at Assaye), nor yet native gentlemen . . . will be bamboozled . . . to give their money, or to countenance in any way the proposal to erect a Pasteur Institute in our Queen’s dominions.”84 Cobbe also confronted the criticism by detractors that by protesting against animal experimentations of vital medicines, she was shown to care more for animals than for humans. She insisted that her opposition to animal experimentation was based on a deeper and more fundamental humanitarianism than that endorsed by the scientists, It is not because we are “callous” to human suffering that we desire to protect animals; but because we dread that deprecate beyond any other form of human suffering that universal misery which must follow the practice and public sanction of cruelty, with the consequent hardening of men’s hearts and consciences, and the obliteration of those sentiments of justice and tenderness for the weak on which civilisation itself has been built up through all the slow ages of the past progress of our race.85

This critique of animal experimentation was not necessarily an antimodern or a regressive point of view; it was a different understanding of progress,

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morality, and humanitarianism from that projected by those supporting animal experimentation for developing new vaccines and drugs. It also reflected the Victorian dilemma about scientific and moral progress. Antivivisectionists in England pointed out that experiments on animals could be extended to humans.86 By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, antivivisectionist movements had formed important links with the suffrage movement.87 These debates were reported widely in the Indian newspapers. Benjamin Bryan, another activist in England, wrote to Indian newspapers about cases in Paris where patients had died of the “poison” of Pasteur from “intentional inoculation with M. Pasteur’s ‘laboratory rabies.’”88 Antivivisectionists from Victoria Street wrote to Indian newspapers urging them to summon Hindu kindness and tolerance toward animals and reject Pasteur’s methods. Some Indian nationalist newspapers interpreted this in terms of a distinction between the materialist West and the spiritual East, a distinction that had been a common theme in Indian writings on Western science around the turn of the century.89 “The Western world of thought has not been, however, yet influenced to any appreciable degree by the sublime teaching of Buddha to refrain from doing conscious injury to God’s less favoured creatures. Science with her seductive tongue has been blinding the moral eye-sight of the materialistic West.”90 Early protests against the establishment of a Pasteur institute sent by Indians to the GOI blended British antivivisectionist and Hindu religious sentiments. Gulal Chand, secretary of the Antivivisection Society of Calcutta, wrote to the government about “the disastrous failures which have constantly attended the Pasteur Institute at Paris and in England, and the most horrible cruelty involved therein of the painful experiments and the cultivation of rabbies [sic] and inoculation is so much shocking to the hearts specially of the Jains who as well form a part of Her Majesty’s most loyal and peaceful subjects.”91 Such convergences of British and Hindu sentiments around animals had limitations in developing as a joint movement against animal experimentation in India. Hindu supporters of pinjrapole and the cow protection movements had little sympathy for the antivivisectionist cause. To begin with, they had distinct and unique religious motivations. The antivivisectionist movement was driven by the late Victorian Christian revulsion toward vivisection and Darwinian evolutionary science.92 The RSPCA in England had declared itself to be “conducted exclusively on Christian principles.”93 Even in the Indian SPCAs, the local clergy were its most active members. Colesworthy Grant, a devout Christian, had established and run the Calcutta SPCA, in his words, by God’s call to him “as a Christian.” He added, “my work in connection with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals is my work for Him—I feel called by God to do it.”94 The cow protection movement, on the other hand, was a particular expression of Hindu nationalism. To these Hindus, the threat was perceived not from modern science, but from the “others,” the Muslims and the British and their cultural practices. The cow became an exclusive political icon in such a Hindu move-

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ment, and by the early twentieth century the pinjrapoles changed their character to become shelters almost exclusively for cows.95 The main contrast, however, was in the different attitudes toward Pasteur in Britain and in colonial India. The Pasteur movement, led by British residents and Indian elites, had much greater social legitimacy in India than had Pasteur and bacteriology in England. As argued in the first chapter, modern experimental science was absorbed within Indian nationalism as a progressive movement, and laboratories were central to Indian thinking around science. Most of the native newspapers in India, which were sensitive about cow protection, supported the establishment of the Pasteur institutes, the emblematic target of antivivisection protest in the West. Hindu Marwari and Jain businessmen were members of and made financial contributions to the Pasteur committees, many of whom would otherwise have been sympathetic to the cow protection movement.96 Many of the Indian princes who were otherwise enthusiastic about all aspects of modern science banned cow slaughter in their own principalities.97 The few antivivisectionist groups that were established in India in the 1890s soon disappeared because of the lack of any real political or social motive. The identification of scientific research with moral and material progress in colonial India was particularly evident in the case of the Hyderabad Chloroform Commission, with which we began the discussion on animal experiments in India. Hyderabad was one of the princely states in British Raj, which were domains of indirect rule under British paramountcy by Indian rulers. Often caricatured either as pawns of the British or as indolent Oriental despots, these rulers were placed in a peculiar status of sovereignty and legitimacy within the British Empire.98 One of the ways in which they could reenact a vestige of their authority and sovereignty was by adopting “progressive” modes of administration and by demonstrating their loyalty to the empire.99 Throughout the period leading up to the Chloroform commissions, Nizam Mahbub Ali Khan, and his then prime minister, Salar Jung, were involved in a difficult relationship of conflict with the British paramountcy over the Berar territories.100 In 1885, a few years before the establishment of the commission, the Nizam had offered to send troops to aid the British government in Egypt and in the Afghan frontier. In 1887, on Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee year, he sent a letter to the viceroy of India offering twenty lakhs of rupees annually from the state of Hyderabad to the imperial government for three years, for the exclusive purpose of Indian frontier defense.101 Following the experiments of the commissions, the Nizam was celebrated as a great patron of science and a trusted ally of the British. In 1891, Pioneer Mail carried a long piece on the commission, congratulating the Nizam. “Probably no other ruling Prince of the world would have incurred the expense which the Nizam has in this case, and in few other countries could experiments on such large a scale be conducted.”102 Lawrie expressed his gratitude toward the Nizam “for the opportunity of scientific progress which his unbound liberality has afforded,” adding, “Nothing could show better the beneficent nature of the solid and friendly tie which binds together the

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British and Nizam’s Governments than the remarkable and cosmopolitan interest which His Highness the Nizam and his officials, one and all, have taken in bringing the question of the safety of chloroform to the proof.”103 The Hyderabad commissions have been inscribed as a glorious chapter of experimental science in modern Indian history.104 The commission’s centenary was celebrated in 1989 in Hyderabad. In 1897 several princes including the Nizam offered to start a Pasteur institute to celebrate the queen’s diamond jubilee year.105 In these circumstances, even movements that were radically antiscience in Britain assumed very different characteristics when transposed to the Indian social and political context. For example, the Humanitarian League, a Londonbased radical socialist group opposed to vivisection, compulsory vaccination, ill-treatment or killing of animals, and free trade, while opening its branches in India in 1905 sought to establish antivivisection as its main area of focus, along with reforming criminal law and the prison system.106 However, it rapidly became a politically conservative establishment in India; its branches focused entirely on vegetarianism and cow protection.107 This vegetarianism and religious conservatism used the platform of animal cruelty and the humanitarian movement to assert Brahmanical hegemony over lower caste practices as well. In 1914, Lallubhai Gulabchand Jhaveri, honorary manager of the Bombay branch of the Shri Jiva Daya Gnan Prasarak Fund [Fund for the Propagation of Compassion toward Animals], wrote to the Indian Medical Record against the custom of animal sacrifice by devotees of the goddess Kali in western India, particularly among the lower castes. He declared that his organization had passed resolutions for stopping the “butchery of animals in the sacred name of Religion.”108 His plea was to the “humanitarians” to support the movement to stop animal sacrifice among lower castes. This reflected both the Sanskritization process among the tribal and lower castes in western India, who adopted Brahmanical habits and practices.109 The publication of the letter in a medical journal such as the IMR shows that this brand of “humanitarianism” had also gained acceptance within the medical discourse in India, which was otherwise opposed to animal rights activists. This was part of the larger trajectory in India in which modern science came to coexist with Hindu Brahmanical sentiments. The contingent and pragmatic nature of the Indian nationalist adoption of European sentiments toward animals in the wake of Victorian liberalism was evident in the views of the greatest proponent of animal rights in twentiethcentury India, M. K. Gandhi. Gandhi sought to bridge the gap between Hindus and Muslims, which the cow protection movement had created, while at the same time remain true to his Hinduism and vegetarianism. In the process he recast the cow as a venerated symbol of all “dumb” and ill-treated creatures, and not necessarily a symbol for the Hindus to be adopted specifically against the Muslims. He therefore deftly transformed the issue of the prevention of the slaughter of cows from a communal to an inclusive, humanitarian one, positing it against modern industrialism and thereby partially secularizing the

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icon.110 In Gandhi’s worldview the cow became similar to the antivivisectionists’ adoption of the dog in England as a motif of animal suffering.111 However, Gandhi was not equally generous to other animals such as monkeys and dogs. He did sanction the killing of monkeys that destroyed crops. For the stray dogs who carried the threat of rabies, he initially recommended destruction and later suggested not feeding them.112 This curious and selective absorption of late Victorian animal ethics within contemporary Indian politics led to an early and important failure of nationalist political thought: its inability to generate a critique of or even a debate around the practices of laboratory science. This was part of a wider process: the nationalist critique of modern science in colonial India was limited to an essentialized cultural domain that designated modern science as “Western” and therefore searched for its “Eastern” roots and counterparts without examining the methodological and experimental methods of modern science.113 The rhetoric about animal welfare in colonial India also evaded the issue of the use of animals in Indian laboratories. While the Indian SPCAs sought to protect domestic animals from their Indian handlers, the Hindus sought to protect the cow from being slaughtered by Christians and Muslims. The pariahs, rabbits, and other animals meanwhile were subjected to experiments in the laboratories. Transcending the political and moral critique, the laboratories producing these vaccines became symbols of scientific progress in colonial India.

Animal Experimentation and Colonial Legislation The formal marginalization of the ethics of animal experimentation in India was facilitated by the machinations of the colonial state, achieved through a negotiation between antivivisectionist sentiments in Britain and Pasteurian assertions in India. The Hyderabad Chloroform Commission had attracted strong criticism from antivivisectionists in England. Herbert J. Reid, secretary of the London Antivivisection Society, protested against experiments on helpless animals in India. He also spoke of the moral responsibility the English carried in India: “The responsibility the English nation has assumed in India is a grave one, whether, political, social, scientific or religious and our actions should not decry our doctrines.”114 Faced with this sentiment, the secretary of state for India in London, Lord Marquis, wrote to the governor general in India about the possibility of introducing the 1876 Act against vivisection in India.115 This was the time when the Pasteur movement was gaining momentum in India, and an immediate reaction from colonial scientists and officials highlighted the moral ascendancy of Pasteurism in the colony. The Civil & Military Gazette, which was at the forefront of the Pasteur movement, regarded the proposed act as “a piece of legislation which is being thrust on the Government of India by the Secretary of State.”116 Even before the act was proposed, the Pioneer Mail had questioned the “moral courage” of the

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imperial government, which had shown hesitancy in the face of antivivisectionist protests in England in establishing a Pasteur institute in India: “The nation which vaunts her position as at the head of civilisation is trying [sic, tying] the hands of her scientific inquirers in obedience to the clamours of a small section, yet profiting by that which she has not the moral courage to adopt.”117 Lawrie, who conducted the Hyderabad chloroform commissions, also opposed the propositions of the secretary of state and applauded the use of animals as resources for science in India: “the Commission was in a sense a fortunate thing for them [the pariah dogs], because otherwise, in the usual course of things, they would have had to be killed as a nuisance by strychnine, which is an unpleasant death, without the satisfaction of having been of any use to the world.”118 Indian animals needed to be sacrificed for a larger humanitarian cause. “There is no country in the world where experiments upon animals are so singularly necessary and so sure to benefit mankind and animals also as India.”119 W. A. C. Roe, civil surgeon at Sialkot and the honorary secretary of the Pasteur Committee, suggested that the introduction of such an act at a time when the cow protection movement was going on would be a “grave mistake,” as it could turn the wrath of the Hindus toward the British government. He thought that the government should only be involved in the “progressive” task of encouraging research.120 The principal of Grant Medical College of Bombay reiterated, “Encouragement of scientific work, rather than repression of it, is wanted in this country.”121 According to J.  M. Campbell, collector of Bombay, the 1876 Act had robbed the “manliness” of the English and their position in the “front rank of medical discoverers.” In the colonies, there was the need and the scope, he argued, to reassert the lost masculine virtues of Englishmen.122 For others like Justice Starling of the Bombay bar, a debate on the morality of science was misplaced in India, where according to him there was a general lack of scientific aptitude among its people.123 British officials and scientists in India consistently projected Indian social and economic practices, rather than laboratories, as the practical sites of cruelty to animals, even when confronted with evidence of cruelty in animal experimentation. T. D. Beighton, district judge in Bengal, reported that an Englishman had carried out operations “in a scientific manner” on living monkeys at the Zoological Gardens of Calcutta. He also added that other experiments that were about to be conducted on behalf of the Ganja Commission on living animals could appear shocking to those in England. “The present practice of allowing painful experiments on living animals to be performed by medical men, and even by irresponsible individuals without the restrictions imposed by any Vivisection Act, would undoubtedly and justly shock public opinion in England.” Yet for him the main problem of cruelty to animals was in Indian practices which he thought should be banned by legislation.124 Even the Indian SPCAs, the bastions of existing legislation against animal cruelty in India, opposed the proposed legislation. John F. Norris, president of the Calcutta SPCA, regarded the draft

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bill with “horror” and “detestation.” He thought that rather than banning it, the bill would legalize the infliction of the most “hideous and exquisite” torture on animals.125 Due to their dual status in colonial India as representatives of both British humanitarianism and imperial power, the Indian SPCAs remained oblivious to the problems of scientific experimentation in India. For them, too, the crux of the moral problem was defined by the perceived ills within Indian society. Benjamin Bryan rejected the need for new legislation and stressed that instead the 1890 Indian Cruelty Act was to remain the moral paradigm for India. He asked his imperial brethren to “Remember your own Act of 1890; allow its motives still to guide you, and continue to be in India the protectors of those who cannot plead for themselves. Let not the threatened disgrace and danger of this Act fall upon the noble Empire of India.”126 Another reason for this pessimism about new legislation was that contemporary animal activists in Britain were confronted with a difficult situation about such legislation. The RSPCA was less radical than the antivivisectionist groups and often did not agitate for legal strictures against animal experimentation. At the time of the 1876 legislation, the antivivisectionists wanted a total ban on animal experimentation, but the RSPCA acted cautiously, particularly because it depended heavily on support from aristocratic lovers of field sports.127 In the post-1876 era in Britain, while the antivivisectionists took up a radical position toward total abolition of animal experimentation, the RSPCA continued to press for stricter regulations. The 1876 Act had also demonstrated that a total ban through legal measures was untenable, as scientists with licenses could continue research. That may have been why the Indian SPCAs opposed the proposed act for India.128 In England skepticism about legal intervention had given way to a widespread popular and often radical movement against animal experimentation. In the 1890s the antivivisectionists in Britain had led a popular movement against the establishment of the British Institute of Preventive Medicine. The scientists who supported the institute faced strong public opposition and preferred to maintain a low profile; the institute often did not respond to public criticism or produce a public defense of its position. It instead practiced secrecy, sometimes even resorting to spying on the antivivisectionists.129 In India, by contrast, scientists were at the forefront of public and social debate in favor of Pasteur and bacteriology and on the offensive against antivivisectionists. Harvey, surgeon-general of Bengal and the secretary of the Bengal branch of the Pasteur Committee, spoke in his presidential address to the first Indian Medical Congress on “The Pasteur Institute and Vivisection,” where he denounced the role of Frances Cobbe and the antivivisectionists of Britain who were attempting to instigate similar sentiments in India.130 Hankin, the imperial chemical examiner based in Agra, led the strongest protest against the proposed act. He declared that he had found the 1876 Act “banal” when he conducted experiments in Britain.131 Like other British officials, he too believed that such legal measures should instead target Indian customs, which were much crueler than experiments in the laboratory. Scientific experiment by

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the English in colonial India was a matter for their own conscience: “so far as Englishmen of science are concerned the prevention of wanton or unnecessary cruelty to animals might safely be left to their good taste and good feeling.”132 Taking into account popular British scientific and medical opinion in India, Viceroy Lord Elgin wrote to the secretary of state that legislation on vivisection in India was “unnecessary and undesirable.”133 The matter, however, did not end here, as the secretary of state, perhaps also feeling the heat of the antivivisectionist movements at home, suggested that some “Draft Rules” could be designed to regulate the practice of animal experiments in India.134 This too was resisted vigorously by the colonial scientists.135 Elgin wrote to the new secretary of state, George Francis Hamilton, against even draft rules. He cited two reasons: first, very few experiments were conducted on living animals in Indian laboratories; and second, any such regulation could arouse antigovernment sentiments especially because the political climate was volatile already.136 Hamilton accepted the rationale and pragmatism of the GOI.137 These opinions reflected the same sentiments that had led to the drafting of cruelty against animal acts in India in 1869 and 1890: cruelty was predominantly an Indian social problem.138 H. E. M. James, the commissioner of Sind, articulated this clearly: there seems no reason why, in the absence of evidence that vivisection is performed with unnecessary cruelty in India, the brief time which Government can devote to legislation should be taken up by an Act, of the need of which there is no evidence. . . . Legislation against Indian evils, such as hook-swinging, seems more urgent.139

Hook swinging, the Hindu ritual practice in which devotees are suspended from a pillar by hooks piercing the flesh on their back and swung, along with Sati, was condemned by the British throughout the nineteenth century and by upper-caste Hindus in the late nineteenth century as cruel and savage native practices, and were prohibited by legislation. Colonial officials such as James had equated these practices with the overloading of draught animals by Indians. As Nicholas Dirks has pointed out, these humanitarian gestures and policies were “born directly out of the colonial project of ruling India.”140 On the one hand, the reforms were always introduced as a justification for the presence of the “enlightened” British government. On the other, they concealed another history of torture that was inflicted by the colonial state on the poor of India through its harsh revenue demands and extraction policies.

Cruelty and the Colonial State This paternalistic and authoritarian posturing toward Indian animals and the simultaneous allusions to cruelties in Indian social and everyday practices by

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the British in India concealed a denial and a repression. British activism and legislation around animals in colonial India were confined to addressing native practices. The role of the colonial state and its institutions in exploiting animal resources remained outside its purview. Precisely when animals had become symbols of nationalist politics and subjects of imperial empathy, they also comprised a great resource for the colonial state. Animals were used in massive numbers in colonial enterprises in the nineteenth century: in the timber industry, the army and in hunting sports.141 In most of these cases, the British themselves did not handle the animals; the animals were under the charge of their Indian subordinates, who often bore the blame for cruelty. Meanwhile, the colonial state exterminated wild animals in order to extend agricultural lands. From the 1850s to the 1920s, state-sponsored projects were undertaken to eliminate wild animals in India.142 Throughout the late nineteenth century there were reports about the declining numbers of wild animals and forestlands.143 British animal sympathizers did not acknowledge this link between the colonial state, animal resources, and cruelty. Some vernacular Indian newspapers raised the issue. In 1902, the Banaras-based Bharat Jiwan noted that the Punjab legislative assembly wanted to legalize the impressments of local cattle and camels into military service in times of war. It pointed out that such impressments were common in times of war, but if a bill was passed to regularize it, then “the tyranny and oppression exercised in this connection will be considered legal and justifiable.”144 More notably, during the Second Afghan War (1878–80), when the British army suffered disastrous losses, thousands of elephants, horses, ponies, mules, and around fifty thousand camels were killed in a few months. J. L. Kipling suggested that the camels died in such massive numbers because their native owners deliberately left them to die, as they were guaranteed compensation for their losses.145 There is little evidence to support this claim.146 Torick Ameer Ali, a judge and the son of the Indian lawyer and reformer Syed Ameer Ali, suggested that this huge animal sacrifice haunted the conscience of J. L. Kipling, an animal lover, and he perhaps wrote such a disclaimer to ease his conscience. It is here that we find a moral dilemma, to use J. L. Kipling’s own words, a “side door” in fact into the imperial mindset, and in Ali’s words, a “lurking innuendo.”147 The cruelty acts (1869 and 1890) were part of a larger process whereby the British had sought to introduce a rational and legal paradigm within the Indian society and landscape, which appeared so intertwined with cruelty, criminality, and wilderness. There is an important continuum here: Grant, the founder of the Calcutta SPCA, as an artist had sketched the detailed physiognomic characteristics of different “Oriental heads,” particularly “thugs” and “dacoits,” giving distinct physicality to the so-called criminal tribes.148 The Thuggee and Dacoity Department was formed to identify and eliminate social criminality in India around the same time. The Criminal Tribes Act was passed in 1871, closely following the Bengal animal cruelty act of 1869. During the state-sponsored elimination of the large carnivores of India in the 1880s, Joseph Fayrer used the Thuggee Department

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as a model for similar extermination of unwanted elements.149 Such legislation remained oblivious to the practices of the colonial state.

Pasteur in India: Colonial Compromises Pasteurian science entered India through an institutional and moral compromise. The British opposition to Pasteur had made the GOI wary of establishing a Pasteur institute in India despite the support in favor of it. The government was unwilling to associate itself closely with the project. From the very early days, even before the establishment of the Pasteur institutes of India, there was a concern in official circles about the protests from the antivivisectionists, both in Europe and India. The Pasteurian methods had already encountered great hostility from antivivisectionists in Europe. To tackle the prospective opposition, the governor of Punjab, Dennis Fitzpatrick, advised the government to adopt a policy of inaction, “to decide nothing.”150 There were even suggestions that the government medical staff appointed at the bacteriological institutes should be called “Special Health Officer, instead of Bacteriologist” for fear of the British antivivisectionists.151 Elgin suggested to Hamilton, the secretary of state, that he would prefer to call it a bacteriological institute: “I should avoid Pasteur’s name.”152 While formally forwarding the plans for establishing a Pasteur institute in India to the secretary of state in 1897, Lord Elgin stressed the fear of protests from antivivisectionists at home and suggested that the government should not be directly involved with the procedures and should instead provide support in terms of personnel and funds from outside.153 Lord Hamilton accepted the view, noted the “real public desire for the establishment of a Pasteur Institute in India,” and that “there would be no serious objection on the part of any important section of the Indian community to the establishment of such an Institute, so long as it is not directly maintained by the State.”154 Throughout this period, the secretary of state for India himself faced questions in the British parliament about the Pasteur movement in India. In 1896, Samuel Smith (1836–1906, politician and philanthropist) demanded to know whether “the Government of India are officially promoting” the foundation of the institute. The secretary assured Smith and the British parliament that the establishment of the Pasteur institute in India was through “private effort” with no official engagement on the part of the government.155 The situation in India was almost the opposite. The Civil & Military Gazette, on the other hand, ridiculed the antivivisectionists of England. “Since the anti-Pasteurists in England have developed a sudden, mischievous activity, on hearing that it is proposed to establish a Pasteur Institute in India, and are simply flooding this country with pamphlets.” The article went on to say that “fortunately this deluge hasn’t done much harm in India.”156 In this status of criticism in Britain and support in India, the first Pasteur Institute was established formally in Kasauli in 1900 as a private institution managed

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by a central Pasteur committee with private subscription and government aid.157 This reflected a distancing similar to the evasions practiced by the colonial state in matters of the exploitation of animals as resources in the army, government, and industry. Some government officials were keen to see a more direct involvement with the iconic Pasteur institutes. In 1903, the colonial official W. S. Morris complained about the “body of persons who . . . exercise an influence on English politics out of all proportion to their numbers or the justice of their cause.”158 He added, “The primary reason in short for dissociating Government from a direct relationship to the Institute was the apprehension that antivivisectionists at home might put pressure on the Secretary of State to disallow such connection.”159 He also pointed out that the initial government apprehension about public reaction in India against vivisection was not justified. Treatment of rabies through Pasteurian vaccine gained immediate public support in India, and the governor of Punjab, Mackworth Young, wrote to Curzon, “Major Semple tells me that several of his patients have gone away, declaring that they are quite converted, and will do all they can to combat the prejudice which exists among their friends; and he is quite confident that time and patience will do all that is required.”160 The Pioneer Mail reported that the success of the Kasauli institute should “silence once and for all the few faddists who continue to raise protest against the institution.”161 Support for the Pasteur Institute came from unexpected quarters as well. The Bishop of Calcutta, James Welldon, visited Kasauli and saw the operations and confirmed that the medical procedures were marked by the most “thoughtful and scrupulous humanity.” He even urged the people, particularly those in England, not to condemn a medical therapy that “cured so many with so little pain to animals.”162 Yet the policy of the noninvolvement of the colonial state in the Pasteur Institute was not abandoned, even when the second Pasteur Institute was established in Coonoor in 1907. Here Curzon’s conservative attitude toward government involvement in bacteriological research laboratories becomes evident, precisely at a time when he publicly rejected laissez faire policies and pushed for the involvement of the state in encouraging economic and institutional enterprise in India.163 Curzon arrived in India in 1899; by then the movement for Pasteur institutes had already reached a mature phase and had little role to play in encouraging the establishment of the Pasteur Institute of India.164 Soon after his arrival he wrote to the secretary of state for India, George Hamilton, that he was unenthusiastic about the scheme of the Pasteur Institute as proposed by the Maharana of Dholpur. “Unless advised in the contrary I shall do nothing about the scheme, and shall leave it to die.” He showed enthusiasm only when he noticed the general support for the scheme. “President of the [Indian] Congress at its recent sitting declared strongly in favour of the Government undertaking a Health Institute itself. . . . This admission may be useful later.”165 Even in 1907, when the first Pasteur Institute had been successfully running and attracting a large number of patients for antirabic treatment and the second one at Coonoor

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was being established, Curzon remained conservative about its future. That year, Risley, the officiating secretary to the GOI, urged that the Indian Pasteur institutes should be made proper government institutions. “We can discount all of the arguments against assuming control ourselves except that arising from the pressure which the antivivisectionists can put on the Secretary of State and that has necessarily less force when directed against an institution which has been in existence for several years and has attained marked success.”166 Risley also noted a significant shift in the nationalist temperament about Pasteur following the establishment of the first institute. “When a native paper wants to criticize the Pasteur Institute now it tries to show that it is an institution conducted only for the benefit of the Europeans. It does not protest against the inoculation practised on animals.” D. C. J. Ibbetson, a member of Curzon’s executive council and the governor of Punjab, agreed with Risley. “I think all the fear of agitation in India is over, and that the only opposition to be feared [is] in England.”167 However, Curzon remained wary of any change of status: I am afraid that I do not agree with this advice. No one is more strongly convinced than I am of the absurdity and ignorance of the anti-Pasteur agitation; and one cannot help reading the nervous apprehensions of Lord Elgin’s Council without a smile. At the same time the Government of India then adopted and put forward a definite policy; it was accepted by the Secretary of State; it has since been introduced, and, as far as I can see, acted upon with conspicuous success. Why then should we want to change it?168

Curzon’s apprehensions had some ground, as queries continued to be made from London regarding animal experiments in India. In 1907, the Indian Humanitarian Committee of London wrote to the secretary of state of India against the establishment of another Pasteur institute in India, which according to them was “peculiarly odious to the sentiments of the Indian people.”169 In 1906, the secretary of state asked about the restrictions enforced in India in experiments on living animals. The laboratories and the GOI unanimously replied that although there were no definite rules or restrictions, the principles of the 1876 Act were being followed.170 As with other matters of cruelty legislations, the issue of Englishmen and science had also become a matter of trust. The sanitary commissioner of India elaborated that simple instructions were adequate in India, where most medical men were members of the British army (as IMS officers) and “accustomed to obeying orders without question, [so] there is no reason to fear that they will transgress the instructions given to them.”171 One is reminded here of Hankin’s assurances about “Englishmen of science” and the treatment of the camels by the imperial army in Afghanistan. No animal experiment legislation was introduced in British India, and more important, the animal question never came up again in the research of colonial science. The matter was indeed left to “the good taste and good feeling” of the British and then later to the Indian scientists. Throughout the colonial period, Pasteur

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Figure 3.3. A rabbit under anaesthetic, being infected with rabies by injection in the spine, Pasteur Institute, Kasauli. Reproduced with permission from the Wellcome Library, London.

institutes of India were run as private institutions. At the same time, Indian laboratories became, particularly through the decades of the two world wars, important units for large-scale vaccine manufacture for the British army (in India, Africa, Mesopotamia, Palestine, and Egypt) and the colonial state, requiring extensive animal resources.172 Although Pasteur represented an ethical and moral dilemma in Britain, in the colony he promised political leverage. The imperial government could win over the support of the Indian middle class, which was eager to see institutions of modern science in India, as well as assuage the fears of the resident British population regarding outbreaks of plague, rabies, and cholera. By maintaining this strategic distance from the institute, the imperial government reaped the benefits of Pasteur’s success in the colony without facing criticism in Britain.

Colonial Laboratories and the “White Man’s Burden” The antivivisection cause became irrelevant in colonial India at a time when the Pasteur institutes and bacteriological research centers were being expanded there. In 1911, Khusru J. Tarachand, from London, as a correspondent of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, wrote a letter to the secretary of state for India protesting against the establishment of several Pasteur institutes in India.173 He reminded the secretary of the most traumatic episode of British rule in India, the Revolt of 1857, in which the British disregard for Indian

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sentiments toward animals had been critical, and added, “The deeds done at the Pasteur Institutes would be infinitely more revolting to the Indian mind than mere greasing of cartridges with the fat of the cow and the swine.”174 The secretary of state sent a very brief reply saying that he had dealt with the letter “as the expression of personal opinion on a subject of general interest, and decided that no action upon it was necessary.”175 To Tarachand’s vehement protest that this was in fact “the views of the whole Indian community,” the response was even terser. “His Lordship sees no advantage to the public service in prolonging this correspondence.”176 This was at the time when animal rights and antivivisectionist movements had reached their second peak in the United Kingdom and the Second Royal Commission on Animal Experimentation had produced its report in 1913 that introduced even stricter animal experiment legislation.177 Medical research conducted in Indian and other laboratories in the colonies was used by British scientists as a robust justification for conducting animal experimentation even in Britain, and as an offensive against the antivivisectionists. In 1907, Leonard Rogers was asked by Starling’s committee in Britain to give evidence before the commission about the needs of animal experimentation. Rogers drew from his experiences of veterinary research in India and Africa to point out that the preventive serums that were developed there by animal experiments had saved “hundreds of thousands (now millions) of cattle yearly in the British Empire from severe and prolonged suffering.” He added that these serums could not be developed in Britain because of the legal restriction.178 After his return to England, Rogers became a prominent member of the Research Defence Society (RDS). The RDS was formed in 1908 as the scientists’ forum in support of animal experimentation. In the next decade, Rogers played an active role in the RDS in denouncing the antivivisectionists and emphasizing the role of research in the colonies. “It is therefore the medical and veterinary scientists, and not the anti-vivisectionists, who are the true friends of animals.”179 During World War II, Rogers became the secretary of the RDS and launched a stifling attack on the antivivisectionists, writing regularly to the government against them, once even challenging their organizational status as a charity and initiating a tax prosecution against them.180 In general, imperial medical research in Asia and Africa provided a strong motive and moral force for the RDS against the antivivisectionists. Along with Rogers’s veterinary research, the RDS presented David Bruce’s investigations on trypanosomiasis in Uganda, which involved large-scale animal experimentation and culling, to rationalize the use of animals in scientific research in Britain and its colonies.181 Animal experiments in the colonies also became a justification of the beneficial character of imperial medicine. In the 1910 meeting of the RDS, the British physician Mary Scharlieb (1845–1930), who had served in India, reflected the mood of the members when she declared that the antivivisectionists in their opposition to conducting animal experiments in the colonies were preventing British scientific workers from taking up “the white man’s burden.”182

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What is distinctive in this history of colonial India and bacteriological research is how an extremely volatile situation was mitigated into a moral and political resolution. This chapter has studied an interesting encounter, or rather the lack of it, between the most significant British contributions to modern India—the rule of law, modern science, utilitarianism—and humanitarianism. Science, particularly bacteriology and its laboratories, appeared as the moral force in India and thereby secured immunity from the alternative moral critique of its methods. Therefore, while laboratory methods traveled to India, their critique did not. Moreover, at a time when sympathies toward animals were so devoutly expressed in the empire both by Europeans and Indians, animals were also becoming the resources of the colonial state and were used and sacrificed in the pursuit of revenue, land, and imperial expansion. This entire phenomenon had remained outside the purview of animal empathy in the empire as expressed by both British residents and Hindus. The entry of Indian animals into the laboratories was facilitated through this oversight, and Indian laboratories became sites of imperial experiment and research.183

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Chapter Four

“A Land Full of Wild Animals” Snakes, Venoms, and Imperial Antidotes As the Pasteur institutes and bacteriological laboratories were established in India, rabies became an important concern for British physicians and residents. This was common in the French colonies as well, where the colonial Pasteur institutes often “actively sought” cases of rabies to popularize the antirabic vaccine.1 As referred to earlier, in India rabies and the pariah street dogs captured increasing medical attention beginning in the 1890s. This was a relatively recent preoccupation and it overshadowed another and different British tradition in India beginning in the eighteenth century of studying injury and death caused by the bites of animals. Historically, the focus was on snakebites, which was a much greater problem in India; many more people died from snakebites than from hydrophobia throughout the nineteenth century. Consequently, British naturalists from the eighteenth century engaged in the extensive collection and study of Indian snakes and venoms and in experimentation with indigenous treatments for them. This was part of an Orientalist and romantic interest in tropical nature and fauna, which developed alongside the colonial policies of wildlife destruction and forest clearing to increase agricultural revenue. By the middle of the nineteenth century, a third development took place in pharmacological research on Indian snake venoms. This tradition was overshadowed by the preoccupation with rabies in the late nineteenth century. Then by the early twentieth century, the advent of the Pasteurian antivenene marginalized the British engagement with Indian snakes and venoms in colonial India. Albert Calmette’s research on venoms and his antivenene received official sanction and endorsement in India for its Pasteurian connection, and the earlier British tradition was overlooked. Soon his serum, which was prepared from venom supplied from India, was imported from France to India. Yet while the Pasteurian tradition proclaimed a new research paradigm, it was also embedded within these existing medical traditions around tropical wilderness and wild animals. This chapter will trace the trajectories of snakebite and venom research in India from the late eighteenth to the twentieth century, which unfolds in a complex progression of colonial science that includes aspects of Orientalism, imperialism, tropical wilderness, laboratory medicine, and cultural nationalism. It will show

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Figure 4.1. Comparative mortality rates of snakebite and hydrophobia. Punjab, 1880–1935. Compiled from Report on the Sanitary Administration of the Punjab, 1887–1921; and Report on the Public Health Administration of the Punjab, 1922–35. Report on the Public Health administration of the Punjab, Lahore, Government Press, 1922–1935.

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that the introduction of Pasteurian vaccine research into snake venom research transformed this colonial enterprise into an effort to find a singular antidote to the multifarious problems of wilderness and disease in the tropics. This chapter will depict the overlapping narratives of Indian snake venom research and, in the process, highlight how bacteriological research, while creating its own identity within India, also redefined the traditional Orientalist/British engagement with the Indian natural world. It will then analyze the emergence of yet another tradition in Indian venom research beginning in the 1930s. With the rise of Indian nationalism,  Indian scientists like Ram Nath Chopra revived research into snake venoms as well as indigenous remedies against snakebites as part of a new tradition of identifying the true Indian indigenous pharmacopeia. This nationalist tradition also marked a return to the earlier Orientalist trends of studying classical Indian medicinal texts within the parameters of modern pharmacology and laboratory research. This chapter will finally highlight the limits of such enterprises in terms of conceptualizing maladies, identifying singular antidotes, and defining therapeutic practices in the tropics. There were four different phases of British engagement with venomous snakes in India. The first phase was between 1780 and 1850, when studies of snakes and venoms developed as part of British zoological and Orientalist studies of tropical flora and fauna. The second phase was between 1850 and 1900, when a more systematic analysis and experiments on venoms were undertaken. This period also marked the beginning of scientific toxicology. The third phase was the period of Pasteurian antivenin between 1900 and 1920, when the Pasteurian research paradigm influenced Indian venom research and moved it to the Indian Pasteur institutes. The last phase was the post-Pasteurian venom research and toxicology undertaken in Indian laboratories from the 1920s onward.

Snakes, Venoms, and Colonial Medicine When the first Pasteur institute was proposed in Punjab in 1893, the provincial government did not show much enthusiasm for it. One reason was that deaths from hydrophobia were not a great concern; the inspector general of Punjab hospitals wrote, “The Punjab Government is really not vitally interested in the matter, as during the past five years the total deaths reported from hydrophobia were only 522.”2 Compared to this, 915 people had died from snakebites in Punjab alone in 1889.3 This number was consistent in the previous decades as well, when the death rates from snakebites were almost ten times that of hydrophobia. In 1875, 723 people died from snakebites in Punjab, and in 1876 the number was 666.4 In the 1880s, a British civil officer pointed out that, compared to the snake problem, hydrophobia was “a preventable evil, requiring only resolute and unremitting action.”5 Even after the establishment of the Pasteur Institute in Kasauli

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in 1900, Hugh W. Acton and Robert Knowles, who belonged to the institute, referred to rabies as an “insignificant disease” compared to snakebite deaths. They referred to the “craze” for antirabic treatment in India, which they claimed had been “conjured” by the press. Compared to that, mortality from snakebites was a real problem. We believe the total mortality per annum from rabies in India, including both treated and untreated cases, amongst a population of almost 400 millions to be, at the most, 3 or 4 cases among Europeans and 500 for the Indian population. According to the mortality returns the number of deaths annually from snake-bites due to the cobra, Russell’s viper, krait, etc., averages between 20,000 and 25,000. We have seen persons dying from both causes and are of opinion that death from snake-bite is even more painful and dramatic than death from hydrophobia. The demand for an efficient and reliable cure for snake-bite is not less than for a cure for rabies.6

British naturalists and surgeons were involved in the quest for such an “efficient and reliable” cure for snakebites throughout the nineteenth century. In the decades preceding the discovery of the rabies vaccine, snakes and snakebite mortalities dominated the official and popular discourse in British India. Snakes formed an important part of the British imagination of Indian tropical wilderness. They were part of the colonial fascination and fear with life in the Orient and tropical wildlife. Even in England, the predominant image of India was of its wilderness. In Rudyard Kipling’s short story “Yoked with an Unbeliever,” Miss Agnes Laiter of London cried as her lover left for India because “India, as every one knows, is divided equally between jungle, tigers, cobras, cholera, and sepoys.”7 In “Nursery Rhymes for Little Anglo-Indians,” British children living in India were warned: “And Death is in the Garden, Awaiting till we pass, For the Krait is in the drain-pipe, The Cobra in the grass!”8 Thus, snakes and venoms dominated British scientific interest in the nineteenth century. From the eighteenth century onward, British surgeons were engaged in the extensive collection and study of Indian snakes and venoms as well as in the recording of indigenous modes of treatments.9 Patrick Russell, who came to India as a botanist of the East India Company in 1785, drew up a preliminary memoir on the poisonous snakes of the Coromandel Coast. On his return to England in 1796 he published, at the cost of the company, the first fascicle of his Account of Indian Serpents Collected on the Coast of Coromandel in folio with fortysix plates, forty-four of which were colored. It was the first publication on this branch of Indian zoology—the product of a huge collaborative enterprise in which Russell enlisted the help of other company servants. Russell examined the snakes closely: their teeth, the nature of the bites, and the distinctions between venomous and nonvenomous snakes.10 Russell described a particular venomous snake known as the Katuka rekula poda in the local Telugu language, whose venom he showed was as lethal as that of the cobra. The snake was later named

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as Vipera russelli or Russell’s viper.11 Russell also relied heavily on local Indian knowledge and indigenous medicines against snakebites, which he subjected to experiments in London. Russell’s Account of Indian Serpents became highly popular and sought after by naturalists in Europe. Many of the snake specimens were also sent to Britain, which gradually led to the rise of interest in tropical snakes and venoms. A second fascicle comprising twenty-two colored plates was published in 1801–2, and another with twenty-four plates was published in 1804. The third fascicle was published in 1807 and the fourth in 1809; the latter reprinted two papers by Russell from the Philosophical Transactions of 1804. These were part of the wider Orientalist interest in tropical nature and Indian venoms and poisons, subjects on which the Asiatick Researches regularly published. Another English surgeon who was based in Bengal, John Thomas, experimented with indigenous remedies and poisons in the early nineteenth century. He consulted Indian alchemical texts and studied traditional medicines derived from the poison of the “Allad” snake against snakebites.12 A parallel history of venom research unfolded in Australia and the Pacific Islands, as part of a similar colonial exploration of local fauna and aboriginal practices, although at a slightly later period. Joseph Banks was the first to report on the snakes of Australia in his Pacific expedition journal.13 He recorded the various poisonous snakes, spiders, and ants of Australia. Walter Edmund Roth documented the aboriginal medical practices for snakebites.14 This was the period when the British tried various Indian indigenous remedies such as the Tanjore pills and the tabasheer. The tabasheer, which was an extract of a species of bamboo, came to be referred to as the “madstone” in the late nineteenth century for its reputation to cure snakebites and rabies. These indigenous remedies were also subjected to laboratory analysis both in India and in Britain. Although the remedies struggled to gain acceptance among the medical and scientific community in Europe, they continued to be used in India throughout the nineteenth century.15 British laboratory research on snake venoms, which developed from the middle of the nineteenth century, drew from the early interest and experiments with various local remedies. From the middle of the nineteenth century, several prominent British chemists, pharmacologists, and physicians experimented with Indian snakes and venoms simultaneously in India and Britain. Their work focused on the various species of snakes, their habitats, and their venoms. Their research combined eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Orientalist interest in tropical flora and fauna with the emerging specialization of late nineteenth-century laboratory-based pharmacological research. While scientists and naturalists explored and collected Indian snakes in the tropical forests with the help of local assistants and produced colorful lithographs of different species of Indian snakes, the same individuals also undertook pharmacological research in the laboratories and analyzed the chemical components of snake venoms and their actions on living animals. Their collection of snake specimens continued to be displayed

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and discussed at the Museum of the Asiatic Society of Calcutta as well as the Natural History Museum, London.16 Calcutta was the center of colonial snake venom research for two reasons. Bengal was the province most affected by snakebite mortalities as recorded by the British beginning in the eighteenth century. Calcutta was also the site for the first snake venom investigation undertaken by the colonial government. In 1874, the government formed a snake commission under H.  H. Armstrong to investigate snakebite mortalities and possible antidotes.17 Moreover, Calcutta was also the city where the Asiatic Society of Bengal was established by William Jones in 1784 as an institution to study, in Jones’s own words, the Asiatic “MAN and NATURE, whatever is performed by the one, or produced by the other.”18 This proclamation reflected the dual character of the intellectual pursuit of the new society. “Man” represented Oriental culture, language, tradition, and law, and “Nature” represented the tropical Asiatic flora, fauna, geology, climate, etc.19 The Presidency College in Calcutta was equipped with a small laboratory where most of these experiments took place. Therefore, the imperial city of Calcutta provided the scientists an intellectual atmosphere to discuss the different species of snakes and their venoms, and its neighboring regions provided easy access to snakes as specimens. Joseph Fayrer was the most prominent British scientist to study Indian snakes and venoms in the mid-nineteenth century. He came to India in 1850 as an assistant surgeon and became the professor of surgery at the Medical College of Bengal. As a physician his attention was soon directed toward snakes, as he found “whole villages were at times completely depopulated, public roads and thoroughfares rendered literally inapproachable by human beings” due to the fear of snakes.20 In his lecture to the Royal Society for Arts on “Destruction of Life by Wild Animals and Venomous Snakes” in 1878, Fayrer described these deaths as “appalling.”21 While his work originated from this humanitarian and medical concern, he had also developed an aesthetic interest in these reptiles in Calcutta. Around the same time that Fayrer started working on snakes and venoms, he was also drawn toward the activities of the Asiatic Society. He joined the society in 1861 and became its president in 1867. His main work on Indian snakes carried imprints of these scientific and cultural interests. His The Thanatophidia of India (1872) is a classic contribution to the literature of Indian snakes and snakebites and the most significant one after Russell’s work. Like Russell’s Account of Indian Serpents, Fayrer’s Thanatophidia also contained several illustrated and colored plates drawn from live snakes, in Fayrer’s work by artists in the Calcutta School of Art.22 The book also provided details of his analyses of the chemical compositions of venoms and their action on animals. Another prominent British scientist, Alexander Pedler, arrived in Calcutta in 1873 to take up the inaugural chair of chemistry at the Presidency College. He too started working on cobra poison, as his attention “was strongly directed to the enormous number of deaths, annually resulting from the bites of poisonous

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snakes.”23 Like Fayrer, he too presented his work on cobra poison in his lectures to the Asiatic Society.24 Thomas Fraser was the other prominent British scientist to work on the cobra venom. Fraser was born in Calcutta, but he grew up in Scotland and conducted his pharmacological research on cobra venom at the Pharmacological Laboratory of the University of Edinburgh. His researches in preparing an antivenom developed parallel to that of Calmette, which we shall return to later. Alfred John Wall and Lawrence Augustine Waddell, both professors at Calcutta Medical College, carried out the first sustained research on Indian snake venoms in the 1880s. Wall and Waddell started the systematic analysis of snakes and snake venoms and its effect on the blood in causing death.25 Waddell was also an Orientalist; he worked on Buddhism and Tibetan history and culture and became Professor of Tibetan at University College London. Frank Wall, another British civil servant who worked in India and Ceylon, wrote widely on Indian snakes in the Journal of the Bombay Natural Society, particularly on sea and land snakes of India and Ceylon. His specimens were exhibited at the Natural History Museum, London.26 Along with studying Indian snakes and venoms, British scientists and physicians also studied local remedies commonly used for snakebites. Since no European antidote was available against snakebites, British administrators and physicians continued to use indigenous remedies, while at the same time remaining dubious about their efficacy.27 In 1873, Brunton and Fayrer, during their research on Indian venomous snakes, noticed that the Tanjore pills enjoyed a “large amount of popular confidence.”28 The Tanjore pills, as they were popularly known, were a preparation of Siddha medicine (a Tamil medical tradition influenced by Ayurvedic and alchemical traditions), and were widely available along the Coromandel Coast. They enjoyed a great reputation among Europeans for their use in snake and dog bites in the eighteenth century. They were, however, condemned later by British physicians for their arsenic content. Brunton and Fayrer were quick to add that “when brought to the test of carefully conducted experiment, [Tanjore pills] failed, as might have been expected, to give any favourable result.”29 Throughout the nineteenth century, the British continued to straddle the two different worlds of Orientalist interest and modern science and explored Indian jungles with the help of local informants in search of antidotes. British forest officers and administrators considered plants like the Notonia corymbosa as valuable antidotes; however, their scientific validity always remained in question.30 These antidotes were also subjected to various chemical experiments. Laboratory research on Indian venoms developed within this context.

British Scientists and Indian Snake Venoms British experiments with Indian snakes and venoms in the late nineteenth century had two main features. As mentioned above, the tradition of snake venom

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Figure 4.2. Indian cobra (Naja tripudians). Fayrer, Thanatophidia of India, plate 3. Reproduced with permission from the Wellcome Library, London.

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Figure 4.3. Vipera Russelli (Daboia Russelli). Fayrer, Thanatophidia of India, plate 10. Reproduced with permission from the Wellcome Library, London.

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research and modern toxicology, which started under Pedler, Fayrer, Brunton, Wall, and Waddell, was in the confluence of modern laboratory research and Orientalist interest in tropical culture and nature. The other feature of this venom research was its strong metropolitan character, despite a strong colonial preoccupation with snakes. While snakebite mortality was a problem for the colonies, investments in venom research in terms of laboratories and appointment of scientists by the imperial government were made predominantly in Britain. The research conducted in Calcutta was often without government funding and was sporadic and subsidiary to the research projects in Britain. For example, the secretary of state for India appointed R.  H. Elliot at the Pharmacological Laboratory of the University of Edinburgh under Thomas Fraser to investigate the pharmacology of Indian cobra poison.31 Snake venom research often originated in the colony, but was carried out in Britain. Medical officers in India were mainly involved in collecting snakes, venoms, and different local antidotes and sending them to Britain. Toxicological experiments in Britain were conducted on venoms sent from India to scientists like Alfredo A. Kanthack, for example, who conducted experiments on snake venoms at the Pathological Laboratory in Cambridge and required a regular supply of venom from India.32 In 1890, an eminent Bengali, Govind Chandra Laha, launched a public movement to establish a Bengal snake laboratory in Calcutta; he provided the Committee of the Zoological Garden of Calcutta with a fund of fifteen thousand rupees to set up the first establishment into research in snake poison in India.33 The government, however, showed little interest, and Pioneer Mail reported, “The Government of India look on passively while their subjects are cut off by snake-bite at the rate of some 20,000 a year.”34 Despite the apathy, the laboratory was established in 1892 within the premises of the Calcutta Zoological Garden. A separate snake house was built to facilitate experiments with snake poisons. D. D. Cunningham was appointed to supervise the project. The laboratory was also to be open for use of European scientists who came to India to experiment with their own antidotes. The laboratory would also conduct research on the properties of snake poison and thereby become the center for venom research in the colony. The hope expressed by Pioneer Mail was that scientists from Europe “will look with interest to the Calcutta Laboratory for an answer to the problem [of snake poison].”35 The advantage of this Bengal Snake Laboratory seemed obvious, with a “practically unlimited supply of snakes and snake-venom can be had, and other normal conditions.”36 This is where Cunningham, who had researched cholera, conducted research on snake poison.37 He experimented with animals most probably from the Calcutta Zoological Garden. He also referred to the works of Fayrer, Brunton, and Wall, from which he had drawn inspiration for his own research.38 However, very little else is known about this laboratory. A laboratory established in the 1890s in India without either Pasteurian sanction or imperial assistance and sanction had little chance of success. The Bengal Snake Laboratory did not survive, as it neither had the scientific aura of

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bacteriology of the Pasteur institutes nor enjoyed the research facilities of the laboratories of Edinburgh and London. The Bengal Snake Laboratory, though uniquely privileged by location and scientific tradition, ceased to exist, starved of public and scientific interest. While the Bengal Snake Laboratory struggled to gain prominence, some research on venoms started and continued in the laboratory of the Presidency College of Calcutta. Here Wall, for the first time in the 1880s, indicated that daboia or viper venoms were different from cobra venoms and acted differently in the human body to cause death.39 Wall and Waddell also started work on using snake venoms as antidotes for snakebites, a tradition that was later taken up by Calmette. But unlike Calmette, most British scientists and surgeons in India believed that venoms of different species of snakes acted differently and could provide protection only against bites of the snakes of the same family. This was an important distinction that, as we shall see, shaped the future of antivenom research. In 1870 the surgeon Edward Nicholson suggested that the immunity of Indian snake charmers from snakebites was due to their practice of inoculation with snake venoms and pointed out the possibility of inoculation with the poison of a snake against the effects of a bite from a snake “of the same family.” Nicholson did not undertake the research, as he had a “great dislike to anything like cruelty to animals” and also did not wish to perform any experiments on himself.40 Fayrer had earlier indicated that venomous snakes appeared to resist the action of large doses of venom injected into them, while nonvenomous snakes succumbed to large doses.41 Wall and Waddell advanced this research to investigate how snakes were protected from their own bites and whether immunity could be secured by repeated injection of small doses of the poison. These experiments were published in Waddell’s 1889 paper, “Are Venomous Snakes Auto-toxic?”42 They indicated the need for a series of experiments to show if snake poisons could be used as antidotes, but the Indian government took little interest in it. A scientist pointed out that “the Indian Government appear to have taken no action in that matter,” and their investigations remained incomplete.43 Later Fraser in Edinburgh and Calmette in Paris and Lille performed the experiments suggested by Waddell and Wall in Calcutta and established that the repeated introduction of gradually increased doses of venom into the bodies of animals did protect these animals from snakebites. Brunton, Fayrer, and later Leonard Rogers undertook one of the most significant projects in British research on venom and antidote for over forty years. A paper written jointly by Brunton, Fayrer, and Rogers and read before the Royal Society in 1904 narrated the longest tradition of venom research by British scientists. Their work had originated in India in the 1860s under Fayrer on the cobra venom.44 Fayrer continued these experiments in England, when he returned there in 1871, at the Physiological Laboratory of London University with Brunton using rabbits and cats.45 Here they observed the physiological action of Naja

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naja (cobra) venom in detail and found that the respiratory paralysis from the venom was caused by a curare-like blockade of the neuromuscular junction. They found that a large dose of cobra venom induced tetanic contraction of the heart both in vivo and in vitro. Their research was, however, hampered by the Act of 1876, which restricted the use of animals in experiments. Rogers resumed the research beginning in the 1890s in India where he could work with fresh venoms and a large number of experimental animals.46 Rogers commenced his research in Calcutta, where Fayrer had started his original experiments two decades back. Despite the facilities for research in Calcutta, Rogers was faced with other challenges of a scientific career in India: the uncertainty of his job as a medical officer and the apathy of the GOI toward research. He was soon transferred from Calcutta, which prevented him from carrying out his research.47 Nineteenth-century snake venom research in India undertaken by British scientists reflected the characteristics of colonial science defined by the metropolis and the periphery. Although the scope and material of research was abundant in the colony, it was not the site of scientific capital and remained the site of procurement and supply of venoms for laboratory research in Britain and France. Occasionally, Calcutta was also the site of antidote trials developed in Europe. The only large-scale experiment undertaken in Calcutta around this time was conducted by the Indian Snake Poison Commission under the directorship of Joseph Ewart, with Dr. S. Coull Mackenzie and Vincent Richards as the other members.48 The object of the commission was to try the antidotes developed in London by Brunton and Fraser on animals in India (116). The scientists conducted the experiments on several animals in the inhospitable settings of the colonial laboratory, in the “Stench of pariah dogs, and plenty of mosquitoes” (123–24). The experiments failed to establish the efficacies of the antidotes developed in London, and Richards ended his report with an important question that had recurred throughout the nineteenth century in India, “Where shall we find the antidote?” (appendix, 4).

Destruction of Snakes in India Having failed to find an effective antidote in his long-term research in London, Fayrer concluded that safety and precautions were to be the paramount options in tackling the snake problem of India. In his speech at the Royal Society of Arts, the scientist indicated that the solution was outside the laboratory in the destruction of snakes in India. “The most obvious mode of dealing with this national evil (the death from snakebites) is prevention, and the adoption of a rational mode of treatment, and though comparatively little may be expected from the latter, much may be anticipated from the former.”49 According to him the destruction of snakes also required educating local people about the venomous snakes and the modes of destruction. “Organized

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measures should be taken and carried out steadily and continuously in all districts where they abound, until this be done there will probably not be any great diminution in the mortality from this cause.”50 Fayrer was not proposing something unique. Large-scale destruction of wild animals had been adopted by the colonial government throughout the nineteenth century as the main means of dealing with the problem caused by them to human lives, as well as to clear forestlands to expand agriculture. His declaration at the Royal Society of Arts indicated that British science was faced with an impasse and the need to return to established colonial policies. Fayrer supported the reward scheme in which villagers were rewarded for the number of snakes they could show evidence of having killed; he even suggested an increase in the amount of money, as he believed that there was a great degree of prejudice among Indians against killing snakes.51 He added that large-scale organized programs were needed both at central and local levels to carry out the destruction of snakes. In this advocacy of the decimation of snakes in India lies an interesting duality of Anglo-Indian attitude toward Indian snakes and tropical wilderness in general. Fayrer was in fact one of the main advocates of the destruction of Indian wild animals in general, and his work was a key example of the ambiguity among colonial scientists.52 Why did Fayrer, who took such care to describe the snakes of India and to represent them authentically and aesthetically in his memorable Thanatophidia, also advocate their destruction? Fayrer’s interest in Indian wildlife was extensive. While in India, he proposed a scheme for a zoological society and gardens in Calcutta, which was finally carried out in 1875. Apart from snakes he also studied the Bengal tiger (in a book tellingly titled The Royal Tiger of Bengal, His Life and Death), one of the principal animals that were being exterminated by the wildlife destruction program.53 This is an important aspect of imperial engagement with tropical nature. The appreciation of tropical nature did not necessarily imply its preservation. While the tropical world, its nature, its fecundity, and its alluring beauty was cherished, romanticized, and chronicled, it was also simultaneously conquered, amassed, and ordered in the colonizing process. Destruction of snakes in India as advocated by Fayrer was not a new undertaking. It was part of an existing trend. While research and experiments continued in the laboratories of Europe, the main emphasis of the colonial government with respect to snakebites in India throughout the second half of the nineteenth century was on the destruction of snakes. This also formed a part of the wider policy of destruction of wild animals and clearing of forests undertaken by the colonial government in India. During 1889 in Punjab alone, 68,501 snakes were destroyed. The number was much higher in former years: 85,715 snakes were killed in 1886, 177,080 in 1887, and 108,312 snakes were killed in 1888. This was chiefly done under the reward scheme, by which villagers were rewarded for the number of snakes they killed.54 At the same time, there were regular reports of dwindling wildlife of India, including snakes and tigers.55

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There was another aspect to the destruction of wild animals in India that indicates a different kind of paradox in British attitudes toward Indian wilderness. The predominant perception among the British, particularly among those who lived in Britain, was that Indian wilderness was perilous, uncontrollable, and all pervading.56 The Lancet once described India as “a land full of wild animals.”57 At the same time, there were others who served in Indian villages, towns, and forests who had a different understanding of the threat posed by Indian wildlife. A report written in 1880 by an ex-commissioner of the Bombay presidency provides an insight into the official attitudes toward Indian wildlife.58 According to him, the idea of the scary wilderness of India was a construct of those who did not know the land and its people well enough. “The vast majority of the people of England know absolutely nothing about the people of India, and, therefore, do not care, as they do not care about the people of any other country of which they know nothing” (69). According to the ex-commissioner, these people felt “paralysed” by Indian wildness and adopted a “do-nothing policy” (x–xi). On the other hand there were those who served in the districts and in the jungles and saw and cared for a different land. What was the nature of that appreciation? Their “great yearning for India” was for the colonial ideals of work, sports, and service: “for the official labour, the hunting, the people” (69). Within this everyday idea of Indian life these men in their provincial settings needed to adopt practical steps to address the problems of tropical wildlife, disease, and climate. Similar sentiments were expressed by another civil servant, Donald Butter, inspector-general of hospitals in Bengal, who served as an IMS officer during 1821–59. While in England after retirement, he wrote a letter to the Times protesting against reports by its Indian correspondent about the “alarming” deaths from snakebites, which overlooked successful measures adopted by him and others in India.59 This provided colonial officials who worked and served in India with a sense of agency and purpose in controlling and administering the huge geographical and demographic social entity that India posed before them. It was within this perspective that the destruction of Indian wildlife was normalized and undertaken. Therefore, in the pre-Pasteurian era, most colonial officials believed that destruction of snakes was the only effective and feasible measure to combat the problem of snakes in India. Thus, although it embodied a rich and enduring tradition, laboratory research on snake venoms in this period lacked motive and purpose. According to official statistics, in places like Ratnagiri in western India where the destruction of snakes was carried out successfully, mortality rates had declined (Ex-Commissioner, 3). The destruction of snakes did raise religious hackles, as certain Indian communities worshiped snakes. But according to official reports the problem was not insurmountable. While some castes considered killing animals objectionable, several other tribes like the Bhils and Bendurs had no scruples in killing snakes (61). The ex-commissioner described the almost customary nature of a snake-destroying operation in India in 1857.

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The natives used to bring in the snakes to head-quarters every evening, and they were counted and chopped up to prevent the reward being claimed a second time for the same snake . . . to the best of my recollection there used to be from twenty to thirty baskets, containing altogether several hundred snakes of various species, including the foorsa and the cobra. (63–64)

While destruction of snakes was being carried out in India, research on their venoms continued in Europe. The Pasteurian intervention in venom research started in the 1890s with Albert Calmette’s discovery of the antivenene. It soon became a Pasteurian emblem and symbolized a panacea against a tropical scourge.60 It also superseded the long tradition of venom research carried out by British scientists. Although as an antidote antivenene appeared as a breakthrough in terms of venom research, Calmette’s work was, as I will argue, part of a composite research tradition that had developed over the course of the nineteenth century. To that extent, the making of Calmette’s antivenene was a unique episode in Pasteurian vaccine research.

Albert Calmette and the Pasteurian Intervention Scientists were divided about the possibilities of using bacteriological principles for the cure of snakebites. In the wake of Pasteur’s and Koch’s research in bacteriology in the 1880s, scientists like George B. Halford in Australia suggested that snake venom needed to be treated like bacteria, which others like Wall in India opposed.61 In the popular imagination, though, bacteriology provided fresh hope for treating snakebites as well. In 1891, J.  L. Kipling wrote that “Snakebite seems likely to remain incurable until some more fortunate Dr Koch of the future discovers a fluid which on injection will counteract the horrible decomposition of the blood that snake-poison causes.”62 Calmette seemingly fulfilled that dream. Compared to the British-Indian tradition, Calmette’s Pasteurian intervention in snakebite research was recent. His research was devoid of the prehistory that characterized British pharmacological research: the engagement with tropical flora and fauna. Calmette’s decision to engage with snake venom research was occasioned by the GOI’s announcement of an award for discovering a new treatment against snake poisoning.63 Calmette was also looking for a new field of research in which Pasteurian science could mark a breakthrough and earn him recognition among the international scientific community.64 While in Saigon between 1891 and 1893, Calmette noticed the problem of snakebite mortality and began his research on snake venoms. After two years of intensive research, he failed to produce an effective antiserum. He returned to France and in Paris he joined Emile Roux’s laboratory, where he continued to look for ways of preparing an anticobra serum for therapeutic use. He then discovered that the

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serum of the body of an animal when artificially immunized by snake venom possessed antidotal power against snake poison, a conclusion very similar to that arrived at by Wall and Waddell in Calcutta a few decades earlier. Calmette used this principle to produce his anti-Naja (cobra) serum in 1895 at the Pasteur Institute in Lille, which he named the “antivenene.”65 Calmette’s work on snake venoms received high official and scientific recognition in Britain for its Pasteurian connection. In 1896 he was invited by the Royal College of Physicians in London, where he demonstrated the potential of antivenomous serotherapy to treat snakebites.66 It indeed appeared revolutionary, since it was the first antivenom prepared for clinical use. To many scientists in Britain his discovery of a singular specific cure for snakebites promised the breakthrough long awaited in India and they declared that it was “to become of paramount importance to our fellow-subjects in India.”67 It was through these metropolitan corridors of scientific recognition that antivenene entered India. Members of the IMS who were on furlough to study bacteriology in Europe visited Calmette’s laboratory to learn about his new technique, just as they visited Pasteur’s antirabic laboratory. In February 1899, R.  W.  S. Lyons (IMS) visited Calmette’s laboratory at Lille and sent his report on the experiments on the action of the antivenene.68 He too recommended its immediate introduction in India.69 In the wake of Calmette’s discovery, newspapers in India that were campaigning for the establishment of a Pasteur institute for rabies rapidly took note of the snakebite problem in India as well. In doing so, they placed snake venom research in India firmly within the new Pasteurian tradition. The antidotal feature of snake poisons that Calmette’s antivenene represented helped to align it with bacteriology, also represented in India as a science that converted, as elaborated in the first chapter, the “perilous stuff” into “a sweet oblivious antidote.” The newspapers were enthused by the very fact that a Pasteurian scientist had started work on venoms. Around the time that Calmette started his research in Paris, Pioneer Mail published a piece titled “Snake Bite and Pasteurism,” which described how scientists in Paris had devised modes of “rendering the bite of the most deadly serpent harmless by inoculation.” It highlighted the Pasteurian lineage of attenuating poisons to form their vaccines. “The poisonous principle in all may be, according to this theory, of the same nature.”70 The report also proposed a change in the plans for the future Indian Pasteur Institute, predicting that it would become the site of snake venom research as well: “it [the Indian Pasteur institute] will include a laboratory for the study of bacteriological science with special reference to the peculiar requirements of the country; and it would seem that profitable study might be made of the virus of snakes.”71 The Pasteurian antivenene also brought about a new optimism about the problem of snakebites in India, and attention shifted from destruction of snakes to vaccination. The newspapers now viewed the official policy of destruction as not viable. They linked it with the religious prejudices of Indians, which supposedly

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inhibited them from killing animals. The Civil & Military Gazette reported that as long as Indians looked upon snakes with “religious outlooks no real decrease in snake numbers was possible.”72 This was despite the fact that the government had carried out a sustained destruction program beginning in the 1860s without protests from religious groups. Civil & Military Gazette also blamed the “general apathy” of Indians in supporting any measure that was overtly for their own benefit. Indians, the editorial claimed, would “do little or nothing to help themselves.” The solution now appeared to be a drastic vaccination program.73 Calmette himself played a part in this propaganda in favor of his vaccine in India. In a paper read at the British Medical Association in 1896, he reminded his audience of the great mortality from snakebite in India and urged the BMA to advise the GOI to involve the Pasteur institutes and public bacteriological laboratories in supplying the necessary appliances for preparing and distributing the antitoxic serum.74 When Paul-Louis Simond was about to leave for India for trials with his antiplague vaccine, Calmette wrote to him: “I am going to send you 100 doses to carry with you to India. . . . If you can make some experiments in Calcutta and Madras before a commission of military and civil doctors, I would be very happy. . . . It will perhaps be useful to facilitate the spread (of the serum) by officially distributing it to Indian hospitals.”75 In 1898, Calmette enthusiastically wrote to the BMJ about the success of his serum in Asia, Africa, and America. “It is now nearly two years since the use of my antivenomous serum was introduced in India, in Algeria, in Egypt, on the West Coast of Africa, in America, in the West Indies, Antilles, &c. It has been very often used for men and domestic animals (dogs, horses, oxen), and up to now none of those that have received an injection of serum have succumbed. A great number of observations have been communicated to me, and not one of them refers to a case of failure.”76 The GOI soon imported Calmette’s serum to India and sent it to the provinces.77 Pioneer Mail published reports of its use in different parts of the country.78 The antivenene was sent to India through an interesting exchange program, a model of colonial scientific exchange: a barter of raw materials and finished products. In the nineteenth century, science in the colonies was focused mainly on indentifying and securing raw materials consisting of vegetable and animal products and minerals for trials and experiments in European laboratories or for the industrial-scale manufacturing of pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and chemicals in Europe that were then exported back to the colonies. Snake venom research and the production of antivenom followed the same trajectory. As his antivenene became popular, Calmette became anxious to find his supply of venom from India.79 The GOI arranged that eight doses of Calmette’s antivenene would be imported in exchange for three grams of dry snake venom supplied from India.80 Haffkine, who was familiar with the Paris and Lille Pasteur Institutes, played a leading role in securing this arrangement with Calmette. The antivenene was imported into India and distributed under his supervision, and his laboratory in Bombay was used as a depot for receiving, testing, and distributing the doses. Within this

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new medical paradigm for snake-venom research, Bombay became the new site for antivenom research in India due to its early Pasteurian connection through Haffkine, making the Calcutta laboratory redundant. The government sent orders to the provincial governments and medical departments of Madras, Bombay, Bengal, United Provinces, Punjab, Burma, Central Provinces, Assam, and Coorg both for the collection of samples of venom, dispatching them to Bombay, and for the distribution of the antivenene to the various provincial centers.81 The Bombay laboratory employed Indian assistants, even professional snake charmers, to collect snakes and extract venoms.82 The laboratory soon changed its character from a primarily plague research institute. A few years later, W. B. Bannerman, who was in charge of the Bombay laboratory after Lamb had moved to Kasauli, wrote that “in this laboratory are kept multitudes of poisonous snakes which have to be handled daily for the purpose of extracting the venom from their poisonous glands.”83 An interesting development took place as part of this exchange of venom and antivenene. The collection of venom by the Indian establishment led to a deluge of venom in Lille, far more than Calmette could use. An alarmed Calmette wrote to the laboratory in Bombay, I am frightened by the great amount of venom which you are going to send me! You tell me that there are still 50 to 60 grammes to be sent every month. Now I am quite unable to use all this poison, as my six immunised horses require about two grammes each per month. I ask you to stop sending me your consignments for several months.84

In the middle of all this hectic activity in the Bombay laboratory, Lamb was bitten by a cobra while handling it.85 Despite the propaganda and wide distribution, Calmette’s antivenene was not a great success in India. The acceptance of Calmette’s antivenene was qualified, particularly among the physicians working in India, who were accustomed to the erstwhile policy of destruction. The first question was that of efficacy. A few of them claimed that D.  D. Cunningham’s work undertaken in the small Calcutta laboratory had greater advantages over that of Calmette, who conducted his experiments in France with small quantities of venom that had been stored for many months and were often of doubtful potency. The antidote was also yet to be tried in actual cases of snakebites. Cunningham demonstrated in Calcutta that Calmette’s serum did not contain the universal antidotal elements that he claimed. He showed (carrying on from Wall’s earlier conclusions) that the venom of cobras worked completely differently from that of vipers, so Calmette’s claims to have found a universal cure was baseless. A correspondent to the Indian Medical Record cautioned that Calmette should be more careful in promoting his antivenene, as it was essentially a poison and potentially dangerous.86 More significantly, the correspondent pointed out that a universal cure was yet to be achieved; despite Calmette’s claims to the contrary, “the anti-venomous serum must remain a scientific curiosity rather than a practical remedy for snake-bite.”87

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The other issue was that of priority in scientific discovery. Thomas Fraser’s discovery of the antivenom, which was prepared from cobra venom in Edinburgh, was contemporary and on similar lines to that of Calmette.88 Fraser in fact researched on the lines suggested by Waddell—that snakes were protected from their own poison—and developed his research independent of Calmette’s.89 However, it failed to receive attention in the official or public discourse in Britain and in India, which had been focused toward Pasteurian discoveries. Fraser neither promoted his discovery on the same scale as Calmette nor did he have the support of the Pasteurian network of scientists to put his antivenom to trial. His work also lacked the Pasteurian aura of discovering universal antidotes for all diseases that Calmette’s antivenene enjoyed, and therefore remained obscure. In fact, his research on snake venom and antivenom does not even find mention in the entry on him in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.90 He, however, graciously acknowledged Calmette’s work in his letter to BMJ. “I entertain a high opinion of his work.”91 He confirmed Calmette’s results, developing a monovalent antiserum (or antivenene) of high potency against Naja naja venom and of low potency against the venoms of Crotalus horridus, Sepedon haemachatus, and an Australian snake, Diemenia.92 One problem that medical officers in India faced while using the antivenene was that it did not prove to be the universal panacea that it had promised to be. It did not work for different types of snakebites. Medical officers were also not familiar with its use and correct dosage. The other problem was the cost and logistics of using the antivenene, which had to be imported from France and then distributed all over the country. The medical store keeper of the Punjab government, P. W. O’Gorman, wrote in 1902 that the “most extensive ignorance prevails on correct dosage of those antitoxins” being imported into India. He also doubted if Calmette’s antivenene was truly the universal antidote that could be used for all poisonous snakes. He also found it to be very expensive, and the cost deterred extensive usage.93 The IMG reported in the same year that despite the introduction of Calmette’s antivenene, the number of deaths from snakesbites in the Central Provinces in 1902 was 1,304, which was the highest figure ever reported, while death from other wild animals was only 513. The journal added that although Calmette’s antivenene was reported to have been used successfully in some cases, no conclusive proof of its efficacy was yet available.94 These concerns of cost, efficacy, and suitability of an imported vaccine prompted a new phase of venom research in India within its own Pasteur institutes, which had by 1903 successfully started their own antivenom research and treatment program.

Scientific Traditions of Venom Research in Indian Pasteur Institutes Indian Pasteur institutes brought venom research back to India, which by the late nineteenth century had been conducted mostly in London, Edinburgh, and Cambridge. Within its Pasteur institutes snake-venom research in India

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Figure 4.4. “Taking venom from a Russell’s viper.” Souvenir, the Indian Empire, Being a Brief Description of the Chief Features of India and Its Medical and Sanitary Problems, plate 4. Reproduced with permission from the Wellcome Library, London.

found a place subsidiary to their main research into the cure of hydrophobia. In 1900, when the first Pasteur institute was opened, the governor of Punjab, W. Mackworth, wrote that Semple, the director, was “specially anxious to develop the manufacture and distribution throughout India of antivenene, the antidote for snakebite.”95 After Semple was transferred to the CRI as the director, George Lamb was placed in charge of the Pasteur Institute at Kasauli. He transferred his entire venom research laboratory, including experimental animals, venoms, and apparatus for manufacturing antivenene, from Bombay to Kasauli. The

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government too realized the advantages of manufacturing antivenene in India. “It has now been decided that the Pasteur Institute at Kasauli should manufacture antivenine [sic].”96 Soon, Kasauli, not Parel, became the site for the research in and manufacture of Indian antivenom.97 The first use of Lamb’s own antivenin produced in Kasauli was an eventful one. A Russell’s viper bit Sultan Chand, the laboratory “snakeman,” on his left forefinger while he was manipulating it. Lamb promptly administered the antivenin he had prepared, and although Sultan Chand lost the finger because of gangrene, his life was saved. This was believed to be the first case in which a man bitten by a Russell’s viper had been treated with the new specific antivenin.98 Lamb’s researches in the Indian Pasteur Institute diverged from that of Calmette’s. By 1905, antivenins developed in Kasauli were distributed to government institutions for trial. However, there were two antivenins now: one was a specific only against cobra bite and the other against the daboia (viper).99 Lamb had moved away from the Pasteurian search for a singular panacea to produce two different antivenins for two different species of snakes. In doing so, he had in fact followed a trajectory that had been developed by British scientists in India and Britain. Lamb derived his antivenin from the long scientific tradition under British scientists, which had closely investigated the distinct actions of different venoms on the human body rather than the production of a singular antidote as Calmette had done. There were two trajectories of research on snake venom in the British tradition: one carried out by Fayrer and then Rogers, the latter working at the same time as Lamb. The second was by Wall, Waddell, D. D. Cunningham, and then continued by Lamb, first in Bombay and then in Kasauli. The essential difference between the two traditions was about the possibilities of developing a universal antidote that would work against both cobra and viper poison. Wall, Waddell, and then D.  D. Cunningham and Lamb believed that the two poisons acted very differently on the human body in causing death. The cobra poison, unlike the viperine one, acted fatally on the blood and not on the nervous system, as believed by Fayrer and Rogers.100 In his 1903 paper that he wrote while working in Calcutta, Rogers proposed that it was essentially the nervous system that was affected in the case of both cobra and viper bites. This meant that a common antidote for both kinds of snakebites could be developed (491). Nonetheless Rogers did not support Calmette’s “universal” antidote. He in fact rejected it as “not a specific against all kinds of snake venom, as he [Calmette] claimed” (495). Rogers sought to develop a truly universal antidote, which he claimed had eluded Calmette, as Calmette did not study the action of different venoms on the human body. Although borrowed from the older British tradition, Roger’s quest engendered the essential Pasteurian dream that “no antidote would be of any practical value unless it was equally potent against all the genera and species” (495). He commenced his research in Calcutta. But like several other medical officials in the colony he had little time and government support for research, and his experiments stopped when

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Figure 4.5. Extracting the venom from a Naia bungarus. Pasteur Institute, Kasauli. Acton and Knowles, “Studies on the Treatment of Snake-Bite: Part II,” plate 20. © The British Library Board, London. Reproduced with permission.

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he was transferred from Calcutta to Assam. In the meantime, following his move to Kasauli, Lamb developed his anti-Naja serum in 1904 and his anti-Daboia serum in 1905.101 Nevertheless, the search for a universal antidote for snakebites remained elusive. By 1913, scientists reported that Lamb’s Daboia antivenom was not effective against the venom of the Phoosra, the commonest viper in India.102 In 1914–15, Acton and Knowles pointed out that “the confusion that now exists in the mind of the lay public, and even amongst the medical profession, with regard to the subject of snake-bite cures is almost incredible.”103 In 1915, Lukis (DGIMS) found that the antivenin was hardly used in the district stations.104 In Kasauli scientists continued to work in order to standardize antivenins; however, as an Australian delegate pointed out at the League of Nations conference on biological standardization in 1935, the wide variation in the snake fauna made standardization extremely difficult, even impossible.105 Current research on snake venoms has remained trapped in this problematic. A single antiserum, which is effective against all venoms, has remained difficult to develop because of the great immunological differences in the venoms of different snakes. With the limited success achieved in producing the antivenom, and despite the substantial ideological and institutional investments made in the process, the GOI reverted to the policy of destruction of snakes in the 1920s. In 1929, when the GOI felt once again the need to destroy snakes as a policy, Fayrer’s Thanatophidia found new relevance. The government decided to distribute copies of the plates from the book to different parts of the country for officers to identify venomous snakes and destroy them.106 Apart from the destruction of snakes and use of antivenins, permanganate of potash was widely used in India for the local treatment of bite wounds. Alexander Wynter Blyth (1844–1921), chief medical officer and public analyst in England, who published the journal The Analyst, first recommended it for snakebites in 1877.107 Brunton then advocated it for India.108 Since antivenin syringes were very expensive and were rarely at hand when needed in the districts, Brunton designed a snake poison lancet to facilitate the use of the permanganate potash for snakebites. The lancet appeared as a combination of vaccination and the localized sterilization method. In 1904, when Lamb was engaged in developing his antivenin vaccine in Kasauli, Fayrer wrote to the secretary of state for India, advising that the “very simple instrument” designed by Brunton should be “sold at every post office in India,” “in the same way as packets of quinine are sold.”109 The GOI rejected the suggestion, as it did not consider it as effective a remedy as quinine.110 The lancet was used in India sporadically. It was distributed through village constables and other minor officials to the villagers.111 Later, when Brunton’s lancet and the permanganate laboratory investigations by Bannerman, Acton, and Knowles failed to substantiate the claims made by Brunton for its use in the field as the ideal method to treat snakebite wounds in India, the lancet fell into disuse in the 1930s.112

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Figure 4.6. An artist’s rendering of the snake poison lancet designed by Brunton. Based on a reproduction from the Wellcome Library, London, and the Directorate of Archives, Government of Maharashtra, Mumbai, India.

With the failure to produce an antidote that was effective for all kinds of bites in India, the focus of laboratory research in the 1930s returned to studying venoms and their impact on the human body. Some research continued at the Calcutta Presidency College laboratory in the traditions of Wall and Waddell.113 This return was marked by a new era in venom research, reinforced by modern toxicology and pharmacology. In India, this new phase of venom research from the 1920s included another new, dynamic component: the cultural and political influence of Indian nationalism.

Nationalism and Venom Research in India R.  N. Chopra undertook the most significant work on venoms in the 1920s in India at the Calcutta School of Tropical Medicine. Chopra’s work differed from that of his contemporaries like Knowles and Acton in a particular way. His nationalism facilitated a new interest in indigenous remedies to snakebites and indigenous methods of the use of venoms as medicine. Chopra had impeccable credentials as a scientist. He obtained his MD for his work on experimental pharmacology at Cambridge University in 1908, after which he returned to India to take up a medical career. He was appointed the first professor of pharmacology at the newly established CSTM in 1921, while simultaneously heading the Department of Pharmacology at the Calcutta Medical College. Around the same time, Chopra started to work on Indian herbal remedies, subjecting them for the first time to laboratory experiments. The results of his extensive experiments at CSTM were compiled in the Indigenous Drugs of India (1933). He was also instrumental in publishing the first Pharmacopoeia of India in 1955.114 Why did Chopra study indigenous remedies for snakebites in the 1920s in his laboratory? It is important to raise this question because this scientific trajectory did not follow the direction of contemporary toxicology and pharmacology or that of general medical research. Moreover, in the 1920s, Chopra was a young scientist who had graduated from Cambridge and was at the threshold of a promising career as a pharmacologist in India. This was also

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the time when medicine and pharmacology were being transformed in Europe and the United States by modern chemical research and the industrial scale of pharmaceutical production. At this onset of a new era in modern pharmaceuticals, experiment on indigenous drugs was neither a popular trend in Europe or America, nor did the scientific community look on it favorably. Heiser of the Rockefeller Foundation visited India in the 1930s to survey the state of medical research in the country. When he visited the CSTM, he was unimpressed by what he termed Chopra’s “nationalistic enthusiasm,” which, according to him, “clouds weighing the value of his researches.” Heiser claimed that he found that none of the medicines that Chopra was working on had much therapeutic value.115 He repeated these sentiments about Chopra’s project at CSTM later in his autobiography: “Colonel Chopra . . . has spent thousands of pounds in the endeavour to determine whether it [Ayurveda] possessed anything of value. So far the results have been meager.”116 The reasons for Chopra’s interest in indigenous medicine were political and cultural. Chopra wanted to establish what he referred to as Indian pharmacology, a modern medical tradition combining laboratory research with classical Indian materia medica. This had important financial connotations at a time when modern pharmaceutical drugs were very popular in India and the Indian pharmaceutical market was dominated by multinational companies. Chopra’s quest was to find cheaper indigenous alternatives. There was, indeed, a wider trend among Indian physicians and chemists to identify cheaper and easily accessible indigenous drugs. Sahib S. Sokhey and Prafulla C. Ray were simultaneously engaged in similar searches for indigenous alternatives to European pharmaceuticals.117 This quest for cheaper indigenous alternatives was formulated within a wider consciousness of Indian national identity among contemporary Indian scientists. The rise of nationalism from the end of the nineteenth century led to two primary developments in science and medicine in India. One was a revival in interest in indigenous drugs, pharmacopoeias, and plants.118 The other was the interest in writing the history of Indian science and medicine, the foremost example of which is Ray’s two-volume History of Hindu Chemistry. Ray too was a prominent chemist and had been a student of Pedler at the Presidency College. Both these trends drew inspiration from the previous late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Orientalist studies by members of the Asiatic Society, who had initiated translations, transcriptions, and annotations of classical Sanskrit, Tamil, and Persian texts. This was part of the Orientalist process of identifying a supposedly lost Indian antiquity while simultaneously ascribing it with a modern scientific identity.119 Chopra’s methodology of establishing an Indian tradition of pharmacology by combining indigenous medicine with modern chemical research emulated the tradition initiated by the British in the late nineteenth century and early eighteenth century.120 His project therefore represented a return to the tradition of studying Indian drugs, venoms, and poisons in classical texts. In his Indigenous Drugs of India, Chopra paid tribute to the “rich mine of knowledge” he had

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found in the works of William Jones, Nathaniel Wallich, and John F. Royle, who had initiated several projects in the study of Indian drugs and plants.121 Chopra sought to provide new and, in some respects, stronger legitimacy to the project, aided by his pharmacological laboratory research and sustained by his nationalist quest for an Indian pharmacopeia. Another interesting aspect of Chopra’s research on snake venoms and snake poisoning was that it was based at the CSTM, and Calcutta once again became the center of venom research in India. His experiments combined toxicological research with the study of indigenous drugs. His research followed two trajectories. The first was the toxicological investigation of snake venoms to identify their chemical composition and therapeutics virtues. The second was the trial of these indigenous remedies for the cure for snake poisoning. He studied the paralytic action and toxic properties of the venoms of Indians snakes like the daboia and Echis carinata.122 He then analyzed indigenous poisons and antivenom drugs. At the CSTM Chopra was also simultaneously involved in bacteriological research, particularly on cholera. As a pharmacologist, his interest in bacteriology was in bacterial toxins.123 On the one hand, Chopra’s project revived the earlier British investigations with Indian remedies. On the other, under him the bacteriological laboratory in India initiated a hybrid research tradition, combing indigenous drugs with modern toxicology. Chopra’s article “Snake Venoms in Pharmacology and Therapeutics,” published in the IMG in 1935 (written jointly with his assistant at CSTM, J. S. Chowan), marked the beginning of this hybrid research tradition in India.124 Along with the nationalist interest in reviving indigenous drugs, it combined the two stages of British engagement with Indian snake venoms and antidotes, the late eighteenth-century Orientalist interest in Indian remedies against snakebites and uses of venom and poison as medicines, and the late nineteenthcentury pharmacological research on venoms. Their research moved constantly between these different fields. Chopra and Chowan first studied, following the earlier British research tradition, the action of different venoms on rats, monkeys, and humans (445). At the next stage they tried indigenous drugs that used snake venoms as a cure for snakebites, since “snakes and their venoms have been regarded as of great medicinal value in India. Snake venom is called ‘sarap visha’ in Hindi and ‘garala’ in Sanskrit.” They also described how “Hindu physicians” prepared medicines from venom by making the reptile bite a piece of wood and collecting the poison that trickled out in a plantain leaf. It was preserved by drying or by rubbing it with a little mustard oil and spreading it on the leaf. They provided a list of indigenous drugs that used snake poison and even body parts of snakes to prepare drugs (448). At the same time they referred to Whitelaw Ainslie’s early nineteenth-century study of Tamil texts, where he had mentioned the use of dried flesh of snakes for the cure of leprosy and epilepsy. Moreover, they referred to practices in Unani medicine where snake blood along with arsenic was used as a cure against leucoderma (448–49). Finally, Chopra and

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Chowan returned once again to the laboratory to investigate the “rationale of application of venom in therapy” on these drugs and found that venom of cobra in graduated doses was effective as an antihistamine and in asthma.125 In different publications, Chopra referred to the several Indian drugs that used cobra and viper venoms as ingredients.126 In these discussions, he regularly referred to the Indian practices of using sarpa visha, and maintained that modern toxicological research had confirmed the ancient principles that snake poison in small doses had a stimulating action on the heart.127 Chopra’s own researches with the venom showed that it was useful as a neurotoxin for analgesic functions.128 Chopra’s other principal interest was in reviving indigenous plant-based drugs by subjecting them to laboratory experiments and producing modern drugs. He focused particularly on those remedies like the Rouwolafia serpentine, recommended in classical texts, that “from ancient times” had been used for the treatment of snake and insect bites.129 However, despite several investigations on various plants, he could not establish any antivenin quality in them.130 In spite of this failure, by starting this research enterprise Chopra provided a new scientific edge to the nationalist cultural interest in indigenous drugs by subjecting them to laboratory research. As he later wrote, “I never deviated far from my central interest and first love in the development of pharmacological researches on Indian indigenous drugs.”131 This provided new possibilities for the revival of indigenous drugs in modern India. Chopra’s interest in indigenous drugs was different from that of the British scientists and naturalists in India in the early nineteenth century. While the British physicians had studied indigenous drugs, they did not actively seek to introduce them to modern therapeutics. Their interest in Indian drugs was either antiquarian or comprised a part of a utilitarian search for local remedies (bazaar medicines) for use in the districts and towns when European drugs failed or were simply unavailable. Chopra’s nationalism inspired him to make the presence and rationale of indigenous drugs more explicit within modern therapeutics. In venom research specifically, Chopra sought to introduce indigenous medicine within laboratory research and toxicology. The nationalism that sustained Chopra’s interest in indigenous medicine carried significant cultural underpinnings. Chopra’s work was located within the wider nationalist trend in the early twentieth century of identifying Ayurveda as the essential Indian/Hindu traditional medicine. Although Chopra had studied various types of indigenous drugs from multiple medical traditions and systems including Ayurvedic, Unani, and Siddha at the time of his early interest in snake venom in the 1930s, later in the 1950s he focused primarily on Ayurvedic medicines in Hindu Sanskrit texts. Ayurveda dominated the nationalist conceptualization of indigenous Indian medicine and was utilized by Hindu nationalists in the formation of a particular Hindu national identity.132 In Chopra’s work, there was a similar collapse of the indigenous into Ayurveda. Between 1940 and 1960 he focused on subjecting only Ayurvedic drugs to laboratory research, and

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in the process establish a medical and cultural synthesis. In 1948, he headed a committee on indigenous drugs that recommended laboratory research for the validation of Ayurveda. The objective was a synthesis of indigenous and Western medicine to initiate a medical culture ideal for India.133 His later work is recognized chiefly for leading to the revival of Ayurveda in the twentieth century.134 His pharmacological research on venoms and his experiments with indigenous remedies, which straddled over more hybrid and multifarious scientific traditions, has remained relatively obscure. Although Chopra too failed to find an antidote for snakebites, his research enterprise helped in the revival of Ayurvedic medicine as a modern medical tradition, which established itself in the twentieth century as a mainstream medical culture and industry with a global market. Meanwhile many marginalized and poverty-stricken people in different parts of South Asia continue to depend on local and marginalized remedies for treating snakebites.135

Liminalities of Colonial Medicine Research in snake venoms did not strictly belong to the familiar tradition of clinical bacteriology, in terms of its “hunt for microbes.” However, snake venom research was indistinguishable from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century bacteriology. First, in terms of scientific categories, research on snake venom was research on toxins, and antivenins were essentially antitoxins, an element that shaped vaccine research in plague, diphtheria, typhoid, and cholera as well. To that extent, antivenom research reflected the broader convergence between bacteriology and pharmacology evident from the mid-twentieth century. It was partly within this tradition that Chopra’s project at CSTM too was located; he resorted to Indian antiquity in a search of the indigene as well as to renew modern links between poisons and potions. Since snakes, venoms, and poisons evoked strong imageries of the tropics and of the Orient, there was an early British investigation in snakes and venoms, as well as Chopra’s later nationalist project of trying Indian snake remedies. This composite research tradition unfolded as a Pasteurian dream; it raised the possibilities of finding a universal cure, prepared in turn from the poison itself. It once again helped to establish bacteriology as a universal panacea against a local scourge. Calmette’s antivenene was therefore iconically Pasteurian. Yet in colonial India, the Pasteurian tradition was also situated within a typically British medical tradition that unfolded from the eighteenth century. The new optimism that Pasteurism brought to India helped to bridge the institutional and cultural hiatus between the older traditions of venom research in India and the new Pasteurian method. It is precisely because Calmette’s antivenene could appear so revolutionary in a field that had a long and rich history outside the French laboratory tradition that the antivenene demonstrates the power of

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bacteriology in the early twentieth century as a new medical paradigm. This chapter has shown how bacteriology had captured popular and scientific imagination about life and death in the tropics by the early twentieth century. At the end of a history of labyrinths of different scientific traditions, it is important to ask the question: how did these researches really affect the lives of the people in the tropics? Indian snakes and their venoms had attracted British medical and cultural attention from the eighteenth century. Snakes and their venoms were subjected to various investigations and experiments in Calcutta, Bombay, Edinburgh, London, Paris, Lille, and Kasauli. Snakes were also killed and their habitats systematically destroyed under government initiatives. By the 1940s, deaths from snakebites were less than those from dog bites in India, a trend that continues today.136 In contemporary India, around thirty thousand people continue to die from rabies every year and the figure for snakebite varies from eleven thousand to twenty-four thousand.137 This decline in mortality from snakebites is not due to effective snake venom research and treatment. According to David Warrell, snakebite research is “the most neglected area of tropical medicine.”138 Moreover, the production of antivenom has remained low because demand had fallen in wealthier countries and profits dropped in recent decades.139 The reason for the shift in numbers between rabies and snakebite mortalities in India is the large-scale reduction in the number of snakes and of forests in general. Meanwhile the number of stray dogs has increased with the growth of the human population. Even in the 1920s, it was evident that sustained destruction of wild animals had reduced the threat of wildlife in general. A colonial civil servant, J. A. Shillidy, reported in 1928 that the reward system was no longer necessary since “there are too many persons only too eager and willing to descend on any part of the country where big game can be found.”140 In the same year the government discontinued the submission of annual reports of the destruction of wild animals.141 While bacteriology was established in the tropics, indigenous medicine was revived in India, new institutions were created, venoms were exchanged between Europe and Asia, and several scientific careers received prominence around venom research, snakes and their victims in the tropics remained entangled in a poisoned embrace of doom. As is evident in Rudyard Kipling’s “Poison of Asps,” the British were not entirely unaware of this tragedy: Poison of asps is under our lips? Why do you wrench them apart? To learn how the venom makes and drips And works its way to the heart? It is unjust that when we have done All that a serpent should, You gather our poisons, one by one, And thin them out to your good.142

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Chapter Five

Pasteurian Paradigm and Vaccine Research in India Decomposition of vaccines in a tropical climate was an important concern for colonial bacteriologists. This apprehension coexisted with a fear of the virulence of viruses in the tropics. In studying a particular vaccine research program over three decades, this chapter shows how these two fears shaped laboratory research in British India. The development of the Semple antirabic vaccine was a unique but little known research program undertaken in colonial India between 1910 and 1935. Originally developed by David Semple at the CRI in Kasauli in 1911, it was the most commonly used antirabic vaccine throughout the world in the twentieth century. Until 2000 it was the main rabies vaccine used in developing countries, where rabies is widespread. Rabies is an acute encephalitis caused by a virus that kills by attacking the central nervous system. Rabies was also the disease in which Pasteurian science made early and crucial breakthroughs. In 1885, Pasteur identified the nervous system as the main target for the experimental reproduction of the rabies virus. He and his collaborators attenuated the virus by repeated passages through rabbits. Strips of fresh spinal cord material taken from rabbits that had died from rabies were exposed to dry, sterile air for various lengths of time. This tissue was then ground up and suspended in a sterilized broth. This solution was used as a vaccine.1 The vaccine was premised on the Pasteurian principle of using live attenuated vaccines. Early Pasteurists believed that live vaccines offered more potency and better protection against diseases compared to the dead ones, which were considered safer. In India the assumption that attenuated live vaccines were more potent than dead ones assumed particular significance. Scientists there were faced with severe bite injuries and more virulent forms of rabies for which they preferred to use live vaccines. At the same time they believed that live vaccines decomposed more easily in tropical climates than dead ones. There was a duality in the engagement with live and dead vaccines in Europe and India. In Europe, the debates around vaccine research were shaped by concerns of safety and side effects, but in India they were shaped by concerns of the virulence of viruses and the decomposition of vaccines in the tropics. This chapter explores the tensions and divergences in Pasteurian science in Europe and the tropics and between the universal and the local. The Pasteurian ideology of using live vaccines was readjusted in tropical vaccine research, which

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initiated its own debates around dead and live vaccines. Semple developed the “dead” carbolized vaccine as ideal for preservation in tropical heat. However, John Cunningham, who worked on the same vaccine at the Pasteur Institute in Kasauli in the 1920s, returned to the logic of using a more potent live vaccine to treat rabies in tropical conditions where the disease appeared, he believed, in more virulent forms. This debate was crucial in the development of the Semple vaccine and its application in the antirabic vaccination campaigns in Asia and Africa. It has remained critical in shaping contemporary vaccine research and vaccination in India in diseases like polio. This chapter studies the morality of using dead and live vaccines, laboratory experiments on poor Indian patients, the determination of the strength of vaccines, as well as domestic and international public health factors, all of which defined the final configurations of the Semple vaccine. Semple had introduced a peculiarly British medical approach within this Pasteurian tradition by using carbolized dead virus, a method he adopted from his tutor Wright’s work on opsonins and vaccine therapy. By studying the history of the making of this vaccine, this chapter captures the location of Pasteurian bacteriology within the ideological, political, and ethical history of bacteriology and vaccination policy in colonial India. A close study of the Semple vaccine and the debates around live and dead vaccines associated with it also has important historiographical implications on Pasteurian science. Bruno Latour, in his critique of Pasteur’s engagement with microbes, has argued that by creating a controlled condition of life in his pasteurization process, Pasteur assumed a position of power. To challenge Pasteur’s authoritative “control” of the microbes, Latour attributed life to the inanimate microbes.2 However, this hylozoism does not address the essential problematic of Pasteurian bacteriology.3 As this chapter will show, the terms “life” and “living” formed the core of Pasteur’s engagements with microbes and vaccines. Rather than question Pasteur’s role in creating such divides between live and dead microbes, Latour sought to provide the same lifelike agency to these organisms, which essentially is an extension of the Pasteurian project rather than its critique. Latour’s position here is identical to that of the twentieth-century bacteriologists who too were divided by ideas of heroic live vaccines and sterilized dead ones. The viruses themselves, alive or dead, had little agency in the matter. In these debates and laboratory experiments around the potency and safety of vaccines, categories like “live” and “dead” were often used as ideological and moral categories rather than scientific ones. Historians who have studied Pasteur’s experiments and the history of vaccine research have tended to accept these categories without interrogating the ideological foundations of this divide. They have often associated categories like “heroic” with live vaccines and “sterile” with dead vaccines unproblematically. Historians have also linked “laboratory rabies” with live vaccines by adopting the categories used by the anti-Pasteurists. Laboratory rabies or rage du laboratoire was a volatile political theme in Pasteur’s time and a powerful tool in the hands of Pasteur’s opponents. It has also been

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an important factor in the historical critique of Pasteur’s research.4 This has not only led to the crystallization of such categories, but has also led to a misunderstanding of the side effects often associated with vaccines. As this chapter will show, a study of vaccine research based on these debates in the tropics exposes the fact that the categories were often moral and ideological constructs. The debates around using live and dead vaccines refer to the two most important concerns of vaccine research, not just in rabies but in other diseases as well like polio, HIV, and typhoid: that of potency and safety.5 On the one hand was the idea of the heroic potency of the live, and on the other, the sterilized safety of the dead. In the tropics, where there was greater fear of decomposition and of the virulence of viruses, these debates became more acute in terms of both vaccine research and vaccination policies.

Pasteur and the World of the Living From 1854 Pasteur was concerned with the role of living organisms in causing fermentation (“Fermentation is an act correlated with the life and organisation of the yeast cells, not with the death or putrefaction of the cells”), leading to his famous assertion that there was “no fermentation without life.”6 He then applied this idea to disease theory to assert that diseases, caused by living organisms, could be treated by the same living organisms in an attenuated form as vaccines. Attenuation of living forms was fundamental to the Pasteurian method, or pasteurization. This method was distinct to the British tradition of attempts at preventing putrefaction with antiseptics, which was developed in the eighteenth century by John Pringle and James Lind and then in the late nineteenth century in the works of Pasteur’s contemporary, Lister.7 Pasteur asserted that his method of partial sterilization without killing the virus was successful because of the control he exercised over living forms. “I have kept from them [the microbes], and am still keeping from them, that one thing which is above the power of man to make . . . I have kept from them life.”8 To Pasteur, live vaccines appeared both heroic and ubiquitously potent, an image associated with the vaccination campaigns of the late nineteenth century and that became a Pasteurian dogma.9 In 1881, Pasteur proclaimed that his anthrax vaccine could “protect against death, without being themselves mortal. They are living vaccines, suitable for cultivation, transferable anywhere without being altered.”10 Pasteur and his pupils used live attenuated virus to prepare antirabic and other vaccines. Albert Calmette and Camille Guérin developed the live tuberculosis vaccine in 1908. Contemporary scientists believed that live vaccines provided higher potency than dead ones. Bacteriologists who came to India at the end of the nineteenth century almost exclusively preferred live vaccines, as they believed that they provided better immunity that was necessary in the tropics.

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In 1892, Haffkine developed his live cholera vaccine at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. During his journey from Paris to India by sea, Haffkine killed the vaccine with carbolic acid to preserve it, and in the ship he even vaccinated an IMS officer with the dead vaccine.11 But once in India, he adhered to the Pasteurian notion and reverted to using live vaccines, which, as historians have remarked, gave his vaccination campaigns “heroic” and “adventurous” qualities.12 He experimented widely with live vaccine in India from 1893 to 1896.13 Hankin, another Pasteurist working in India who helped Haffkine in the production of and inoculation with the cholera vaccine in Agra, wrote that Haffkine experimented with a heat-sterilized cholera vaccine but found that although they produced fewer side effects, the immunity produced was not of as “permanent character as that produced by the living microbe.”14 Although Jaime Ferran had claimed in 1885 that dead cholera vaccines were equally effective, Haffkine preferred live vaccines, as he believed that they produced the higher immunity needed in India, the “home” of cholera.15 In 1893, when he commenced his cholera vaccination in India, he showed little regard for dead vaccines, despite being urged otherwise by Gamaleya and Georgi Tamamcheff. Since he wanted to demonstrate spectacular success with his vaccine to convince the skeptical British officials, Haffkine relied on only the live ones.16 This was despite the fact that Haffkine faced logistic challenges in using live vaccines in remote parts of India, as he felt the need to pass these constantly through animals to retain their potency. He once remarked, “I could not carry with me a laboratory.”17 He prepared his vaccine twice every day during his vaccinations in Calcutta.18 These difficulties, the makeshift laboratories and the vaccination campaigns that Pasteur’s followers undertook in different parts of the world with live vaccines, reflected how vaccines were seen during this time: heroic, dramatic, and radical preventive interventions with the same live virus that infected the human body. Alongside this Pasteurian faith in the live vaccine that shaped vaccination in the tropics in the early phase, there was another emerging tradition, a predominantly British one, under Wright, that drew from the Listerian tradition of antiseptics and used mainly dead vaccines. This tradition too acquired a peculiar significance in the tropics.

Tropics, Race, and Killed Vaccines Wright was the professor of pathology at the Army Medical School at Netley, Hampshire, where he established a highly successful and productive research group between 1892 and 1902. This group had strong colonial connections, as most of his students, like Semple, Lamb, W. F. Harvey, and Lyle Cummins, were either training to join the IMS or the bacteriological department of the GOI. They conducted significant research in the development, testing, and introduction of antityphoid inoculation by using vaccines made of killed bacteria. Wright

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broke away from the Pasteurian practice of using attenuated virus as he found that killed vaccines were particularly useful for inducing the formation of antibodies.19 His work was informed by Richard Pfeiffer’s research at the Institute for Infectious Diseases in Berlin, where Pfeiffer obtained a specific immune response in a man inoculated with a heat-killed culture of bacilli.20 Wright claimed that such a vaccine carried fewer risks and was easier to standardize than attenuated live cultures.21 The War Office, however, rejected his plan of compulsory inoculation of soldiers, and following their reluctance to adopt his vaccine Wright left Netley in 1902 to take up the position of pathologist at St Mary’s Hospital, London.22 Pasteurists like Roux too had tried using dead cultures to produce immunity, as these appeared safer, but they considered the fluid to be the immunizing agent instead of the bacteria itself. Wright was the first to use dead bacteria as the active constituent of his typhoid vaccine. Working with Semple in July 1896, Wright inoculated himself and his volunteers with different dilutions of heated cultures of typhoid bacilli and used agglutination tests to measure any enhanced immunity that was produced. When he came to India as the chair of the Plague Commission in 1897, he got the opportunity to try this vaccine in some of the garrisons.23 During World War I, heat-killed antityphoid vaccines prepared by Wright, Pfeiffer, and Wilhelm Kolle were regarded as safe and dependable.24 However, Wright had adopted dead vaccines not just for safety concerns. With his move to St Mary’s Hospital in 1902, he started his work on vaccine therapy, which was based on the idea that vaccines could be used to stimulate the natural resistance of the individual body, and not just as a prophylactic agent.25 His new vaccine program was thus more for curative purposes than prophylactic.26 The premise of this was Wright’s theory of opsonisation, which proposed that a patient who suffered from a particular infection had an abnormally low opsonic index.27 Wright believed that his killed vaccines could be used to stimulate the natural resistance of the individual body, as it could enhance the production of opsonins and the patients could fight their infection more effectively.28 According to him, dead vaccines could cure as well as prevent the disease.29 By 1910, vaccine therapy became a common practice in England and Germany in treating tuberculosis and gonorrhea, and in the years before World War I it came to be known as the “rational therapy.”30 According to some scholars, it was only the advent of penicillin and antibiotics in the 1940s that eclipsed vaccine therapy.31 Wright’s vaccines, like those of Pasteur, acquired new meanings in the colonies. In the tropics Wright’s ideas of opsonic index and vaccine therapy developed a racial perspective. While applying vaccine therapy and opsonic index in Africa, Wright and his colleagues investigated whether the blood of different races of people had different capacities to combat disease infection following vaccine therapy. In 1913–14, the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association invited Wright to South Africa to investigate the problem of pneumonia among the black mine workers. He went to South Africa with other British scientists

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like Parry Morgan, R.  W. Dodgson, and L. Colebrook and established a laboratory in the Johannesburg General Hospital. He started extensive trials with his pneumonia vaccine among the black workers in the Rand mine.32 His vaccine showed limited success, and Wright suggested that the problem was not with the vaccine but with the bactericidal power of the blood serum of Africans, “the serum of the natives does not acquire any appreciable bactericidal power under the influence of either natural infection or inoculation.”33 He insisted that the “power of the blood” of the blacks in killing the pneumococcus and in its “immunising response” was “very inferior to that of the European.”34 He even found differences in the opsonic power of the blood of Europeans and Africans, which according to him reflected racial “differences in blood.” Wright insisted that “there was no longer any possibility of doubt” that owing to the “differences between native and European bloods,” the “native is far behind the European.”35 To rationalize the failure of his vaccine, Wright condemned the African flesh and blood as peculiarly susceptible to the pneumococcus germ, and in the process condemned Africans in general for their illnesses, “we have in the defect of pneumo-phagocyto-bactericidal power to which attention was called above a native character which stands in the direct causal relation to the ravages which the pneumococcus makes among them.”36 He proposed a global theory of this racial categorization of immunity and suggested that a similar deficiency existed among blacks working in the Panama Canal, in Rhodesia, in the French African colonies, and in the Sudan.37 In this period questions of immunity had been linked to ideas of race and climate in the tropics in diverse ways. While Wright suggested that different races had different degrees of immunity, his students believed that dead vaccines offered better immunity in tropical climates. Wright’s students, such as Leishman, Semple, Glen Liston, Rogers, Robert McCarrison, and Mackie, took up his methods in India and inaugurated a new phase in vaccine therapy research in the tropics. Semple in particular followed Wright in his own work on vaccine therapy and the opsonic index for his research on enteric fever in Kasauli. Following Wright, he sought to develop vaccines that could be both prophylactic as well as therapeutic.38 He sterilized his vaccines with 0.5 percent carbolic acid. It was from this tradition that the Semple antirabic vaccine was produced in colonial India.

The Semple Antirabic Vaccine Semple’s choice of carbolic acid for killing his antirabic vaccine was culturally significant. An antiseptic derived from coal, carbolic acid had a peculiarly British legacy and reflected an industrial machismo toward germs. Lister, who “championed” it,39 saw it being used as a disinfectant in the coal mine town of Carlisle for the treatment of sewage.40 He suggested that it could be used

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to kill germs before they got a footing in the body or in the wound. With this Lister created the link between the British tradition of using antiseptics and that of bacteriology, stressing that the decomposition in injured parts might be avoided without excluding the air (the anaerobic method of Pasteur), by applying antiseptics as a dressing.41 Wright adopted the acid to kill the viruses for his vaccines, and Semple had developed his own carbolized dead vaccines for enteric fever.42 Carbolic acid appeared particularly potent in killing germs in the tropics, and Semple adopted this agent for his research on germs and vaccines in India. In 1903, Semple recommended the use of carbolic acid as a “firstaide” for the cauterization of dog bite wounds.43 He used the same principle for developing his antirabic vaccines in 1911. Semple started his work on rabies from Wright’s assumptions of the opsonic stress on blood and vaccine therapy, using the blood of an animal infected with rabies to produce an antirabic serum to protect other animals against the disease.44 During 1903–4, Semple treated two hundred patients in the Pasteur Institute in Kasauli with antirabic serums as a preliminary to the usual vaccine treatment. He found good results with it, although it was not clear whether the results were due to the serum treatment or the conventional vaccines.45 However, by 1911, Semple had given up serum therapy and began research on a more conventional prophylactic antirabic vaccine. This was perhaps because he discovered that serum therapy did not work on its own and opted for a simpler single treatment method with conventional vaccines.46 However, he combined the two and used carbolic acid to produce a dead prophylactic vaccine, which he considered ideal for the tropics. In 1911 at the CRI Semple produced his carbolized antirabic vaccine from the brains of rabbits deliberately infected (28). Semple’s carbolized antirabic vaccine brought about a confluence of Pasteurian and British research on germs. Yet at the same time, in search of an ideal vaccine for the tropics, it broke away from either tradition. In India, Semple’s research in antirabic vaccine departed from the Pasteurian paradigm of producing dry-cord attenuated antirabic vaccines. At the same time, he used his carbolized vaccine no longer for Wright’s principles of opsonins, immunity in blood, or vaccine therapy, but for the easy transportability and preservation of vaccines in a country like India. Semple highlighted three advantages of his vaccine in India: First, it was safe and durable (“Knowing that it is a dead vaccine we can dismiss any doubts as to the possibility of its producing the disease which it is intended to prevent”) (31). Second, it could be sent to distant places in the Indian empire without reducing its efficiency (29). Semple, as we saw in his debate with King in the second chapter, was skeptical about vaccine research in the hot tropical plans. The carbolized vaccine gave him new hope of conducting vaccination in the tropics. Third, the antirabic inoculation in different Pasteur and bacteriological institutes could be standardized, as it could be produced at a central Pasteur institute and then sent to the different vaccination centers (4).47 With this new antirabic vaccine, Semple asserted that the Pasteurian live vaccine

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was outdated. “No person would be justified in using a living staphylococcus, or a living streptococcus vaccine, when dead vaccines prepared from these germs answer every purpose” (1). William Joseph Webster (assistant director of the CRI) later observed that in India Semple’s vaccine, when issued in hermetically sealed ampoules, could be transported to and stored in distant places without affecting its quality.48 Since dead vaccines appeared particularly suitable to be transferred over long distances in tropical climates, they also offered the potential to serve an important medical and political contingency in India, namely, the decentralization of vaccine treatment. The Pasteurian logic of the ubiquity of live vaccines was now reversed in the tropics. It was dead vaccines that appeared to be suitable for sending to different places without losing their potency. Semple was not alone in using dead vaccines in the tropics at this time. By 1897, Haffkine too had started believing in the advantages of using a dead vaccine for his antiplague inoculations in India. He suggested that although these conferred “a lesser degree of immunity” than live ones, they could be handled as chemical drugs, preserved and supplied to distant places.49 Haffkine killed his plague vaccine by heat in 1897.50 In his initial trials on humans at the Grant Medical College and the Byculla jail in Bombay, he found the dead vaccine to be particularly safe.51 His heat-killed plague vaccine acquired a reputation for durability and transferability, and medical officers in different parts of India felt emboldened to introduce their own modifications to it, sometimes with bizarre consequences. Lawrie, the resident surgeon of Hyderabad, devised his own modes of carrying and using Haffkine’s dead vaccine more easily. He reduced the prophylactic fluid by heating it further at 65 degrees to one-third of its original volume so that a dose of 2.5 minims instead of the recommended 75 minims could be administered. He used the reduced vaccine for preventive inoculation among villagers of Hyderabad and claimed that it also caused less pain and irritation.52 When an alarmed Bannerman, who had sent the vaccine from Bombay, protested that the fluid would be decomposed by the application of further heat, a confident Lawrie advised Bannerman, “You would be much wiser to adopt our method, which does not in the least detract from the credit due to you, but on the other hand tends to enhance it.” Lawrie was ultimately restrained by order of the GOI.53 Some of the French Pasteurian scientists working in the tropical colonies had also started using dead vaccines, but unlike Semple they considered it a compromise for the sake of safety, as they felt the dead vaccine to be weaker. Charles Nicolle, working on typhus in the Pasteur Institute in Tunisia around the same time as Semple, considered dead cultures safer but felt that they conferred weaker immunity and inoculations often had to be repeated.54 During World War I, carbolized vaccines appeared as the perfect tropical vaccine; both TAB and cholera vaccines were carbolized for military use.55 Devitalized cholera and plague vaccines were later prepared (following the researches by Pfeifer, Friedberger, and R. Strong) in the Bombay Bacteriological Laboratory, Manila

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Biological Lab, and the Plague Laboratory in Pianosa, Italy, and also by Dr. Kolle (only cholera vaccine) and Japanese bacteriologists.56 Preservation of vaccines in India had indeed become a major concern leading to many experiments, particularly in chloroformed glycerinated lymph for smallpox vaccinations or with lanoline. However, in hot weather these vaccines tended to lose their potency. During the 1920s there was also a search for new types of smallpox vaccine that would be more effective in the subcontinental climate, such as the use of dried vaccine lymph as well as egg-culture-based and “rabbit neuro” vaccines. The experiments with dried lymph lasted the longest, as the new vaccine could be transported without refrigeration. However, the research was abandoned by the late 1920s after attempts to preserve this vaccine in ordinary room temperature failed. There were also attempts at preserving the potency and purity of lymph through more effective attenuation.57 In Semple’s hand, in a tropical country where bacteriological research was deemed ideal by British scientists only in the salubrious climate of the hills, the carbolized dead vaccine opened up new possibilities of vaccine research and vaccination campaigns. It had broken out of Wright’s ideas of opsonisation of the blood as well as from the Pasteurian faith in live vaccines. It had generated a new rationale for and possibility of prophylactic practices in the tropics. Semple’s antirabic vaccine became popular and highly acclaimed among British colonial medical officers. Lukis, the DGIMS, claimed, “The Pasteur treatment of this disease [rabies], so far as India is concerned, has been revolutionised during the past few years by Semple’s discovery.”58 The Lancet praised Semple’s vaccine as “safe and efficient” and ideal for India, as it could be sent to different parts of the country.59

Killed Vaccines and Decentralization of Vaccination in India The history of the Semple vaccine needs to be situated within the wider context of the decentralization of vaccination in India, which had become an important medical and political concern. One problem that bacteriologists faced in India with the pre-Semple antirabic treatment, often highlighted in the annual reports of the Pasteur institutes, was the delay in treating patients. Patients often had to travel from the distant plains to the hills, which led to several cases of mortality. Already by 1910, there were plans made by the Pasteur Institute of Coonoor to carry out antirabic vaccinations in the city of Madras instead of patients having to travel to Coonoor.60 Yet the decentralization of vaccination in India was shaped less by medical factors or discoveries and more by political pressure. Although with the Semple vaccine the apparently ideal vaccine was available for vaccination in different parts of the country, there was little intent shown by the GOI in conducting vaccinations in the cities and district towns. Bacteriologists like Semple continued to conduct antirabic vaccination exclusively in the Pasteur

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institutes in the hill stations. By the 1920s the lack of decentralized vaccination became an important political critique by Indian nationalists of the medical policies of the colonial government and of the imperial Pasteur institutes. In 1924 the editorial Calcutta Medical Journal (a nationalist medical journal) wrote: It has all along been a matter of curiosity and astonishment to many in the profession why in these days, one should have to travel for over 24 hours, in order to get to the medical place for the treatment of Rabies. It is well-known that it is essential to keep the attenuated virus in a cold dark room and it is not difficult to-day, to get both these conditions satisfied in any institute that may be started in the plains. . . .61

One development from this pressure was the movement to establish new branches of the Pasteur institutes in the plains and in major cities like Calcutta. In 1920, A. C. Ukil, an Indian physician who trained in the laboratories in Europe, including the Pasteur Institute in Paris, wrote a letter to the editors of the Calcutta Medical Journal stressing the need for a “Pasteur Institute in Calcutta.” He drew from his experience in Europe to argue that Pasteur laboratories need to be in the major cities. “After having seen the work of some of the Pasteur Institutes in Europe, I am of opinion that such an institute can without any detriment to the value of the treatment administered, very well be established in Calcutta at a moderate cost” (586). He suggested this as part of the necessary indigenization of Pasteur institutes in India, which had remained confined to the remote and imperial hill stations. “In course of time, such an institute may become the nucleus of indigenous research work in this part of the country” (589). According to him, by being confined to the hill stations the Pasteur institutes had remained isolated institutions: “In many parts of India, the term ‘Pasteur Institute’ conveys a wrong impression. In France and her colonies, such institutes, have always grown up in connection with bacteriological research institutes, where the best intellects of the nation try to resolve the nature of the various diseases which afflict mankind. Would Calcutta have such an institute in future?” (589). The Calcutta Pasteur Institute was established in 1924 as part of these campaigns and to provide vaccination against rabies in the city. As seen in chapter 2, despite the new institutes that opened in the cities, the critique of the “extravagant” and isolated Pasteur institutes in the hilltops had become part of the larger nationalist critique of imperial medical practices. In 1927 Ukil (by then professor of bacteriology, National Medical Institute, and visiting physician, Chittaranjan Hospital, Calcutta) wrote again that he was in favor of the French model of Pasteur institutes, which was based on the idea that they should be situated in major cities and cater to local diseases other than rabies. “Pasteur Institutes in France and her colonies mean much—they are well-equipped institutes where a large number of men carry on researches on various subjects and where the treatment of hydrophobia is only a fragment of the daily work. We

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wish Pasteur Institutes in Indian were like that.”62 Thus decentralization had remained an important theme in Indian bacteriological research in the 1920s. The other trajectory was the response from the colonial government, which opened several vaccination centers throughout the country in the 1920s. Semple’s carbolized vaccine played an important role in this new move. In north India, the railway vaccine center at Allahabad was opened in 1924 as the first outcenter supplied with vaccines from Kasauli for antirabic treatment, and similar centers at Lahore and Rawalpindi were opened a year later.63 In western India in 1923, J. Morrison (assistant director, Bombay Bacteriological Laboratory) announced that the government had adopted the policy of “bringing antirabic treatment nearer the home of those who need it.” He declared that the Bombay Laboratory was ready to send vaccines to all district headquarters in Ahmedabad, Poona, Belgaum, Karachi, Nasik, and Rajkot.64 Decentralization also had an impact on the awareness of rabies and on antirabic vaccination among Indians. Between 1922 and 1924, the Pasteur Institute at Coonoor in southern India noted a sudden increase in mortality rates, which it attributed to the attention attracted to rabies by the issue of antirabic vaccines to district headquarter hospitals.65 By 1923 carbolized antirabic vaccine was issued to various centers in north and south India. In 1925 the Pasteur Institute of Coonoor reported a decrease in the number of deaths from rabies from the previous year. The number of patients vaccinated at the local centers also increased.66 However, this inclination toward dead antirabic vaccines was not just an Indian or a tropical phenomenon. A similar shift took place in Europe as well, but for a very different rationale. Here the main reason for the move to a dead vaccine was that Pasteur’s live vaccine was linked to a peculiar but dreaded disease, “laboratory rabies” or rage du laboratoire. It was a form of rabies apparently produced from the live vaccine itself in the laboratory. Since the days of Joseph Meister, a group of scientists and antivaccinationists strongly opposed Pasteur’s antirabic methods and claimed that his vaccines actually introduced rabies among his patients and killed more people than it cured.67 Scientists also questioned the statistical basis of Pasteur’s claims. Professor von Frisch of Vienna argued that many of the patients who were supposed to have been cured were bitten by dogs that were not rabid.68 Joseph Drzewiecki of Warsaw argued that Pasteur’s method was unscientific and should be “condemned in the interest of humanity and science.”69 Arthur Barclay, an IMS officer who visited Paris to observe Pasteur’s antirabic treatment in the 1890s, believed that the vaccines had an “intrinsic” danger, as many of those who were vaccinated died from what he called “paralytic hydrophobia.”70 In 1886, Professor Michel Peter provided a clear image of “laboratory rabies” to the scientific world. He presented to the Academy of Medicine in Paris details of eleven cases in which patients died of the “poison” of Pasteur (in other words Pasteur’s live vaccines themselves carried rabies), famously labeling the process as “intentional inoculation with M. Pasteur’s ‘laboratory rabies.’”71 Ever since, the term “laboratory rabies” has been

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used by scientists as well as historians to refer to patients who had died with signs of paralysis after receiving the Pasteur treatment.72 Laboratory rabies was associated with live vaccines, the keystone of Pasteur’s method. The association appeared natural. Despite Pasteur’s claims, scientists argued that living cells could not be controlled, and therefore could not be trusted. Semple believed that a problem associated with live vaccines was that they tended to multiply in the body.73 This was considered particularly undesirable in rabies, where “the multiplication of a living rabies virus intended as a prophylactic vaccine would mean hydrophobia and death to the person inoculated.”74 The concern about live vaccines was particularly evident in rabies, as it contained nerve cells that could lead to neurological complications.75 These concerns about inoculating with live nerve cells and the fear of introducing “laboratory rabies” took center stage at a very important forum, the First International Rabies Conference held in Paris in 1927. The conference was held in April at Pasteur’s old residence, where directors of all major antirabies institutes attended. Colonel J. Taylor (director of the Pasteur Institute in Rangoon, Burma), who was on leave in England, represented India.76 The main discussion in Paris was around the various methods of treatment used worldwide and accidents from antirabic treatment.77 It was around this time, in 1926, that British medical men like J.  W. Cornwall argued that the Semple vaccine was safer, not just because it was dead but also because of the use of carbolic acid as the attenuating agent, which reduced the toxic elements from the infected nerve cells, making them free from paralytic accidents.78 The dead carbolized vaccine now seemed the new hope for Europe, and carbolic acid gathered a new reputation.

Fear of the Live Vaccine in Paris The conference was the finest hour for Semple’s vaccine. Most of the scientific interest was centered on the carbolized dead vaccine used in India over the last fifteen years.79 India had become a special place for experiments with rabies vaccines both for the abundance of rabies cases that it presented and also for the use of the unique carbolized vaccine that had been initiated there. Taylor showed statistics from all the Indian Pasteur institutes, around 170,000 cases in his presentation, which easily outnumbered those of any other country. In India, the cases of bites were also much more severe. Most important, Taylor showed that paralytic accidents almost did not occur with the carbolized dead vaccines, a major concern in the conference.80 The Indian antirabic experiments in Kasauli and Coonoor received high commendation even from the French Pasteurian group. A. C. Marie, professor at the Pasteur Institute, Paris, found the results obtained by Semple’s method to be “most significant.”81 Paul Remlinger, director of the Pasteur Institute in

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2.5

Cases of paralysis in %

2

1.5

1

0.5 .5

0

Semple

Dried and Dried cord glycerinated cord

Hogyes

Dried and etherised cord

US hygiene laboratory treatment

Various

Ether

Different vaccines used worldwide

Figure 5.1. Worldwide antirabic vaccine paralysis data, Paris Conference (1927). Compiled from Marie, Remlinger, and Vallée, International Rabies Conference Held at the Pasteur Institute, Paris, from April 25 to 29, 1927, 83–84.

Morocco, who had analyzed postvaccinal paralytic cases using various methods employed by all the Pasteur institutes around the world, found Semple’s method the safest and considered that “the elucidation of this fact appears to us to be the most important lesson provided by the Conference.”82 The conference concluded that the dead carbolized and etherized vaccines were best suited for large-scale projects, given the growing popularity of antirabic vaccination throughout the world.83 The resolutions passed at the conference favored dead vaccines: carbolized following Semple’s method and etherized as done more recently by Adolf Hempt.84 It also resolved that comparative tests on a large scale should be carried out in certain selected institutes with the two vaccines. Kasauli was one of the sites for such experiments.85 Taylor returned to London feeling triumphant, and in his report to the India Office he claimed that “the value of the carbolised vaccine received very strong support from unexpected quarters.”86 The undersecretary of state for India, E. J. Turner, received the report warmly and forwarded it to Delhi, suggesting that the GOI should publish a summary of it in Indian medical journals.87 At this moment of high praise for the Semple vaccine internationally, matters in India seemed to be on a different note. In the face of enthusiasm for dead carbolized vaccine in London and Paris, the PHC of India, J. D. Graham, wrote to the India Office (London) recommending “against [the] immediate publication of Taylor’s report . . . in view of certain local factors.”88 In his following note, Graham elaborated that despite the sanction from Europe the carbolized dead vaccine was not considered the ideal vaccine in India. In Kasauli, the director of the Pasteur Institute, John Cunningham, had been carrying out comparative

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tests with etherized and carbolized vaccines, which was recommended by the Paris conference. However, as Graham elaborated, Cunningham was in fact experimenting with live vaccines attenuated by ether, contrary to the Paris conference resolutions, which recommended using dead vaccines, etherized or carbolized. The rationale in Kasauli was different as well. John Cunningham had reinvoked the need for a live vaccine due to the severity of rabies cases in India. He stressed that since the Indian Pasteur institutes faced much greater numbers of severe cases of rabies than those in Europe, they required a more potent live vaccine.89 While doing so, he also asserted the autonomy of Indian scientific research from European trends. Tropical India needed its own distinct trajectory of vaccine research. “India must work out her own anti-rabic problem without too much slavish deference to European ideas.”90 Graham did not want Taylor’s report to be published, as it endorsed the carbolized vaccine and could put an end to his own experiments with etherized vaccines in Kasauli. Although the Paris resolutions had instructed experimentation on two types of dead vaccines, etherized or carbolized, Cunningham in Kasauli had created his own divide between the live and the dead vaccines, assuming the etherized vaccine as live and the carbolized vaccine as dead. This new development had immediate implications for the antirabic vaccination policy of the GOI. The ongoing decentralization of rabies treatment had to be stopped, as John Cunningham insisted that all patients needed to be sent to Kasauli to facilitate the experiments on a large scale.91 It also reflected the various local and metropolitan concerns involved in the vaccination policy in India. The India Office in London was keen to highlight the success of vaccine research and vaccination policy in India, internationally and to the British parliament, and opposed Cunningham’s suggestions for further experiments. As we have seen earlier, the India Office was also sensitive about the continuation of vaccine experimentation in India owing to the pressures of British antivivisectionists, who kept a keen eye on experiments conducted in Indian laboratories. The undersecretary of state, Arthur Hirtzel, wrote to the GOI that he failed to understand why scientists in Kasauli wanted to continue the experiments, keep vaccination centralized, and send all patients to the remote hills when a safe and acclaimed vaccine was available. This meant that those who could not travel would die without treatment; “the suggestion seems to me to confuse means & ends. After all, human life is something, even in India!”92 J. B. Smith, the medical advisor to the India Office, expressed concerns to Graham that he felt there was “something of the ‘laboratory animal’ point of view” about the decision to centralize treatment in Kasauli, despite having a suitable vaccine for decentralized vaccination.93 Scientific opinion in India too was firmly in favor of the Semple vaccine.94 Directors of other Pasteur institutes who had already made plans for decentralization and mass inoculation with the Semple vaccine were skeptical of John

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Cunningham’s new experiments in Kasauli. John Morrison, director of the Shillong Pasteur Institute, wrote to J.  B. Smith (the medical advisor in London) about the “human side” of the question; lack of treatment in remote areas would lead to high mortality from rabies, a factor that those high officials and scientists making policy from Shimla had “not done justice to.”95 He enclosed transcripts of debates at the Assam Legislative Assembly (Shillong was in the province of Assam), where the lack of antirabic treatment facilities was being criticized, revealing the political pressure faced by these institutes to decentralize treatment.96 However, the influential group of men in the GOI, which comprised administrative heads and scientists based in Shimla, Kasauli, and Delhi who made the all-India decisions, had a different point of view. Even before the Paris conference, decisions were taken by authorities in Shimla to stop the decentralization of rabies vaccination in light of John Cunningham’s new experiments in Kasauli. In 1925, the PHC of India reported that Cunningham would undertake experiments with the etherized vaccine in Kasauli and that “pending the results . . . no new centres, military or civil, should be established in the plains.”97 In September 1926, a medical committee comprising Major General Thomas H. Symons (DGIMS), Graham (PHC), J. K. S. Fleming (deputy, DGIMS), Samuel R. Christophers (director, CRI), and John Cunningham (director, Pasteur Institute of Kasauli) met in the office of the DGIMS in Shimla.98 They concluded that in order to facilitate Cunningham’s experiments with live vaccines no new outcenters were to be opened. They also anticipated that the forthcoming Paris conference would pronounce emphatically in favor of the etherized live vaccines, which would vindicate their stand.99 At this stage, it seems that certain sections of the scientific and government elite in India had hoped that the Paris conference with its majority of Pasteurists would endorse their position in favor of using a live vaccine. They had underestimated how far the fear of paralysis and of the live vaccine had gripped contemporary European scientific opinion. However, the question remains, why then did the GOI send Taylor to Paris with the positive results of the Semple vaccines when clearly matters in Shimla and Kasauli were on a different trajectory? To understand this contradictory situation, we have to focus closely on the ongoing experiments in Kasauli under Cunningham.

Revival of the Live Vaccine in Kasauli John Cunningham was a Scottish physician who entered the IMS cadre in 1905, and after working at various laboratories in India he served as the director of the King Institute in Madras (1919–26) and of the Pasteur Institute in Kasauli from 1926. Anderson Gray McKendrick (1876–1943),100 another Scottish IMS officer and a friend of John Cunningham, who was by then working in the Edinburgh

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Figure 5.2. “John Cunningham in Brewery Garden,” Kasauli, 1916, Gen 2004 B.5 XX/3, JC Papers. Reproduced with permission from Special Collections, Edinburgh University Library.

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Research Laboratory, introduced Cunningham to the etherized antirabic vaccine in 1925. McKendrick was the director of the Pasteur Institute of Kasauli between 1914 and 1920, a time when he did post-Semple rabies research at Kasauli. In Britain he subsequently became an authority on rabies. He was also present as a delegate at the rabies conference in Paris. McKendrick was keen that John Cunningham should try the new ether method developed by Hempt and Alivisatos, perhaps to serve his own statistical interests. Throughout the 1920s, he was involved in collecting and compiling data about various antirabic methods used in different institutions worldwide and he was aware of the fact that India provided an opportunity to collect statistical data on a massive scale. Soon after Cunningham joined the Pasteur Institute of Kasauli as director, McKendrick sent him a survey of recent European literature on rabies treatments and encouraged him to try the new ether method developed by Hempt and Alivisatos. “The procedure is so simple that you should be able to try it at Kasauli without upsetting your routine in any way.”101 Cunningham was enthused by these new researches, as he wrote within two months both to Hempt and Alivisatos inquiring about their research methods.102 McKendrick himself expressed no particular preference for either etherized or even live vaccines. During the Paris conference, he maintained the view that there was no significant difference in terms of mortality between Pasteur’s original dried cord method, Höyges’s dilution method, and Semple’s carbolized vaccine.103 He even pointed out that the risks were mostly from the dilution method, accepting that the carbolized method was entirely free from such accidents.104 Subsequently in 1934, when he published his massive statistical data covering practically every type of rabies vaccine used internationally, he grouped them as killed, live, and heat-killed, and concluded that postvaccinal paralysis occurred four times more frequently among those treated with live vaccines than those with killed vaccines, and eleven times as often than those treated by heated vaccines.105 While McKendrick was interested in the new ether method for collecting statistics, which Indian institutes could generate on a substantial scale, John Cunningham adopted the etherized vaccine with new enthusiasm and conviction of its efficacy in the tropics. He believed in the old Pasteurian dogma that a live vaccine had greater potency and that it was ideal for the severe cases found in India. He came to this conclusion particularly after reading Hempt’s early publications, which were based on using live vaccines.106 It needs to be pointed out that it was not unusual for Cunningham to have this renewed faith in the live vaccine at this time. The tradeoff was once again between safety and potency. While the Paris conference highlighted the concerns of safety, the harsh medical experiences of World War I led, among a few scientists in Europe, to a return to live vaccines, which were considered more effective for severe cases. In the 1920s, Ernst Friedberger challenged the claims that heat-killed antityphoid vaccines caused no serious short-term or long-term harm. He highlighted the

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serious damage the vaccine caused to those with weak hearts or other diseases. Although he did not openly advocate inoculation with attenuated live bacilli, Friedberger urged that only live vaccines could offer secure long-term protection.107 Therefore, despite the discovery and faith in dead vaccines, the assumption remained among scientists that live vaccines were more potent than dead ones. Even when Semple was conducting his research with dead vaccines, scientists preferred the new live vaccines for reasons of safety. W.  F. Harvey and McKendrick wrote in their report on antirabic research in India in 1907, “There is great advantage in using fresh material in anti-rabic immunisation (as in Höyges’ or Ferran’s methods) over dried or heated material, because the former method involves introduction of less injurious foreign nerve substance and is more accurate as regards dosage than the latter.”108 Soon after becoming the director of the Pasteur Institute of Kasauli in 1926, John Cunningham started his experiments with etherized vaccines on patients with the most severe injuries.109 He informed Graham (the PHC) about the new ether method and added that institutes in Europe were “using virus which is not dead but attenuated by ether.”110 Cunningham’s preference for ether was as significant as Semple’s choice of carbolic acid. The two attenuating agents had distinct historical trajectories. While carbolic acid was an antiseptic from Carlisle with a Listerian legacy, ether was an anesthetic with a French Pasteurian lineage.111 Pasteur originally used it for his rabies vaccine experiments, followed by Remlinger and Roux.112 To Cunningham, ether seemed to have special characteristics; “treatment with ether removes the toxic substance, which is responsible for post treatment paralysis.”113 This was a claim radically opposite to that made by Cornwall around the same time, according to whom it was carbolic acid that removed the toxic elements. There was an important factor behind John Cunningham’s apprehension about the carbolized vaccine. A vaccine that was considered dead and safe had led to the possibility of more brain matter to be injected in it. In 1926, the Lancet commented about Semple’s vaccine that since the virus in it was “apparently quite dead,” large doses of it could be given to rabbits and eventually to humans. “These results should encourage further search for a yet more potent dead vaccine.”114 John Cunningham found other reasons to invest his faith in live vaccines. Soon after he started his experiments with ether, he received news of the suspicious death of a British subaltern named Norman following treatment with the carbolized vaccine.115 Cunningham’s laboratory notes show reports of several other patients suffering from similar postvaccinal paralysis.116 This led Cunningham to express his doubts to Graham about the presumed safety of the carbolized vaccine, “whether the present carbolised vaccine is the last word.” He wrote that he wanted to conduct new experiments with the ether-attenuated virus and to keep vaccination centralized in Kasauli. He complained against “the tendency exhibited in this country up to the present of independent centres cropping up

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all over the place” and felt that it was “unwise” to move “whole heartedly” in the direction of decentralization with the carbolized vaccine until further research was conducted with ether vaccines.117 John Cunningham was also skeptical about evidence of the success of Semple’s vaccine in the Indian institutes. He wrote to Graham that he could not find any original report of Semple’s experiments in Kasauli. This appeared to him to be an attempt to hide cases of paralysis. “No record of any cases exists here, although I am fully aware that such cases have occurred.”118 After some rummaging in Shimla, Graham found some confidential notes about the original experiments of 1911–12 conducted in Kasauli, which were, as he wrote to Cunningham, “extremely interesting reading,” and that “paralytic complications ensued from time to time.” He asked Cunningham to keep the correspondence confidential until he could find more details.119 John Cunningham felt no urge to follow Graham’s advice, as he was keen to promote his experiments with etherized vaccine. He soon wrote to Acton (director of the CSTM) about the new figures for Semple’s vaccines that he had come across, which showed that even 1 percent carbolized vaccines caused paralysis. He questioned the credibility of claims made that no accidents occurred with the carbolized vaccine. “Is this actually ‘politically’ correct?”120 He also wrote to Fleming (secretary of the Pasteur Institute Committee of India) about these cases and questioned the policy of decentralization of rabies treatment currently undertaken in India by using carbolized vaccines. “No one can claim, however, that carbolised vaccine, which admits of a death rate of over 1% (over 100 deaths of which 50 were failures, out of over 8000 cases treated during 1925) . . . is the last word in antirabic treatment.”121 He added that recent work in Europe by Alivisatos, Hempt, and B. Busson with etherized vaccines had shown better mortality rates. In spite of the huge dose of brain substance inserted in ether vaccines, paralysis cases had also disappeared in those institutes that had adopted the method. According to Cunningham the etherized vaccine was not dead, but attenuated, and needed to be prepared everyday in the laboratory, which required the treatment to remain centralized in Kasauli. The centralization of vaccine research became an important point of conflict between the two different rationales of medical research in British India. Some of the medical officers and administrators, particularly those in relatively remote areas like Shillong and Rangoon, saw the Semple vaccine as crucial to mass vaccination campaigns. For others in Shimla and Kasauli, like the DGIMS, the directors of the CRI and the Kasauli Pasteur Institute, the very rationale of bacteriological research in the tropics was still tied to the logic of the isolated hilltop laboratories. John Cunningham’s project provided new impetus to this rationale of keeping research confined in the hilltop Pasteur laboratories at a time when nationalists questioned it intensely. Cunningham believed that with the impending decentralization the Indian Pasteur laboratories, like the one in Kasauli, would become redundant, as no patient would visit them; “in my

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opinion, a very important duty of the Government of India is to see that such an Institute does exist where new methods can be tested and antirabic research carried on. For this purpose a certain number of patients to be treated is a necessity and the total cessation of such cases would immediately put the Institute out of touch with the most important side of antirabic world.”122 So Cunningham’s opposition to the decentralization of antirabic treatment, although it was ostensibly to test Hempt’s etherized vaccine, made sense in the larger logic of imperial medicine and the politics to retain the Kasauli Pasteur Institute as the experimental headquarters. It provided the GOI and the office of the DGIMS with a new rationale to sustain the remote Pasteur institutes and to retain imperial control over medical research in India more generally in the time of dyarchy. This led them to endorse Cunningham’s experiments enthusiastically. However, John Cunningham’s plans with the etherized vaccines soon received a setback. In January 1927 he learned that dafadar (Indian cavalry) Kalyan Singh, who had been treated with etherized vaccine at Kasauli, had developed severe paralysis and died. The civil surgeon who looked after him reported his horrific death to Cunningham. “The patient was lying propped up on pillows with flushed face upon which was an expression of anxiety and fear.” He added that Singh had suffered from “complete flaccid paralyses.”123 Cunningham had come across other similar cases as well, which he reported to Fleming, but was careful not to link them with the dreaded laboratory rabies: “The first point to make clear is that this was not a case of ‘rage laboratoire.’” The paralysis, he suggested, was due to foreign nerve tissues that were introduced, which was common in antirabic treatment. However, his faith in the ether vaccine had been shaken and he suggested a tactical retreat; ether vaccines should now be used only for severe cases and the rest should be treated with the carbolized vaccine.124 In February 1927, just before the conference in Paris was to take place and at a time when the complications with the etherized vaccine had become evident, John Cunningham wrote a critical letter to McKendrick. He elaborated that Taylor, who was on leave in England, was to represent India: “[Taylor] does not know the ins and outs of the matter as far as Kasauli is concerned.”125 By this time, Cunningham had some doubts about etherized vaccines, as he had come the across cases of paralysis (Singh) with them. John Cunningham had another important revelation to make to McKendrick. He found that the original fixed virus, which he had worked with in Kasauli, was so weak that it actually died when immersed in ether and could not be attenuated as was done by Hempt and Alivisatos in Europe. Thus he believed that he had experimented with a practically dead etherized vaccine, contrary to his intentions.126 In his December report to the League of Nations the year before, he noted the same fact.127 This meant that he could not really suggest to McKendrick the advantages of a live etherized vaccine, apart from the fact that even the dead etherized vaccine had led to paralysis. Therefore, at

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the time of the Paris conference, Cunningham was in an ambiguous position about ether vaccines and hoped that the conference would vote in favor of the new etherized vaccine developed in Europe, which would allow him to continue his research. The position of the members of the GOI and DGIMS was similarly complicated at the time. They could neither withdraw the Semple vaccine from the report for the Paris conference suddenly, which was seen as ideal for the decentralization of treatment, nor could they reveal that postvaccinal accidents had indeed taken place with Semple’s vaccine, which had been concealed previously and had recently come to light. They too hoped that the Paris conference would favor the etherized vaccines, which would in turn enable them to continue their research with them, and the entire fiasco with the Semple vaccine could be avoided.

“Living Versus Dead” McKendrick had a difficult task in Paris. On the one side, there were the Pasteur hardliners like Roux and Calmette who still favored the original dry cord method and live vaccines; on the other were the new breed of scientists convinced of the benefits of the dead carbolized vaccine. To add to this was his personal eclectic statistical interest in all forms of etherized, live, and dead vaccines. He found the conference divided in two camps, as he wrote to John Cunningham: “the question is living versus dead.”128 In these debates in Paris, the etherized vaccine was considered clearly as dead. As McKendrick wrote to Cunningham, “Dead including both carbolized and etherized. . . . Kill by any means and get the results” (5). He rejoiced at the fact that the original dry cord method of Pasteur received a decisive blow owing to postvaccinal paralysis. Even those working in the Paris Institute now seemed to prefer dead vaccines for fear of paralysis: “it is dead vaccine that all are striving after though they may not admit it” (2–3). In his chat with Hempt, McKendrick realized that the former too had turned toward dead carbolized vaccines for the same reason: “Hempts virus is dead and carbolized” (2–3). The Pasteurian scientist Remlinger seemed to be torn between two worlds. In his experiments in Morocco, he had come across several cases of paralysis with dried cord vaccines and yet faced the Pasteurian hardliners in Paris who insisted on Pasteur’s original method. McKendrick wrote that “Remlinger looked to me like a soul in purgatory. His reason and his sentimentality were pulling in different directions” (4). At the same time, he provided Cunningham with incentives for continuing research with etherized vaccines, which might lead to a breakthrough in antirabies research. When the next conference comes on, say in 3 or 4 years, I shall be a back number—but you won’t. . . . From the international point of view India stands

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in a unique position from its experience of this one disease “Rabies.” Rabies may not be economically as important to India as say Malaria. But regarding Malaria India is a small unit, regarding Rabies India stands out prominent. Think that over. You can’t afford to neglect the shop window. (5)

According to McKendrick, India provided the scope to define the new antirabic vaccine, etherized or carbolized. John Cunningham interpreted this as encouragement to continue his research with live etherized vaccines. He had retained his faith and fascination with the live vaccine, with which he believed he had not had the scope to experiment with owing to the weakness of the Kasauli strain. He noted with interest from McKendrick’s communication that some of the French scientists still believed that live vaccines, although hazardous, were more potent. He decided that his future contribution to antirabies research ought to be with live vaccines, particularly for India, where cases were much more severe.129 He thus arrived at such a position in 1927, contradictory to the Paris resolutions. Following the Paris conference, John Cunningham resumed his comparative research on live and dead vaccines. Now he could also start experiments with the fresh Paris fixed virus sent to him by Calmette, which, he believed, remained alive after the ether treatment, as Hempt had outlined. In November 1927 McKendrick wrote to Cunningham, continuing to encourage him with his research on etherized vaccines, particularly in resolving the dualities of carbolized and etherized vaccines. “The value of such a deduction not only to India, but to Rabies workers all the world over will be immense. It will keep India in the forefront.” He added that he looked forward to Cunningham’s comparative experiments with vaccines of the same strength, 5  percent carbolized and 5  percent etherized vaccines. This would mark a new direction in antirabic research, since scientists in Europe like Hempt laid stress on quantities of brain matter rather than the attenuating agent. “Hempt as I told you was of [the] opinion that one wouldn’t expect any better results with one than with other.”130 The results from Cunningham’s experiments with the two methods favored Alivisatos in terms of mortality rates (table 5.1): Table 5.1. Cunningham’s experiments with live vaccines, 1927: Hempt and Alivisatos. Vaccines

Total Treated

Alivisatos

Total Deaths

Percentage of Deaths

169

4

2.3

66

4

6.0

235

8

3.4

Hempt Total

Source: E. 17, JC Papers, 13–14.

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Cunningham drew two conclusions. First, even the so-called live vaccines showed cases of postvaccinal mortality. Second, the better results were with Alivisatos’s method, which contained greater quantities of brain substance than that of Hempt.131 Scientists in Europe, meanwhile, remained unaware of John Cunningham’s research with live vaccines. In August 1927 Dr. Carl Prausnitz (German bacteriologist and hygiene administrator), who was impressed by the reports on Semple’s vaccine at the Paris conference, wrote to Cunningham about his decision to change his own treatment to the Semple method.132 He was surprised to learn that in Kasauli Cunningham had in fact reverted to using live etherized vaccine, particularly when Hempt himself, following several cases of paralysis, had moved to using a dead carbolized one. The real difference now between Hempt and Semple, according to Prausnitz, was that the former used much more brain matter. According to him, for severe cases this quantitative scheme was to be followed rather than using ether and live vaccines, in other words, using more dead brain matter in the vaccines.133 It was at this point that Cunningham admitted to Prausnitz that he had not known about the change made by Hempt from live to dead vaccines, although he had clearly learned about it previously from McKendrick.134 John Cunningham now accepted that Hempt used dead vaccines because he had found a new hero in Alivisatos, who had apparently not made this shift to the dead carbolized vaccines, and Cunningham had found better results in experiments with his live vaccines (table 5.1). From then on in his experiments Cunningham was more inclined to use the Alivisatos method for severe cases than Hempt’s vaccine. He also refused to use dead carbolized vaccines of higher dosage as suggested by others, since he believed that they would lead to paralysis. Instead he continued to insist that rabies cases in India required a different vaccine from that used in Europe: “conditions in India are so different to those in Europe that the principles laid down in my August note as to the possibility of using living virus in certain cases still holds good.”135 Later that year, in 1928, Cunningham sent another report to the League of Nations in which he elaborated that he had opted for more potent live vaccines of lower dosage. He also elaborated that while scientists in Europe were trying to standardize the dosage for all cases, in Kasauli they had adopted a method of classification, giving the high dosage only in severe cases.136 In the meantime John Cunningham faced stiff opposition from directors of other Indian Pasteur institutes. In December 1928 an Indian rabies conference was held in Calcutta at which directors of all the Indian Pasteur institutes met to discuss the future of antirabic policy for India and the decentralization of treatment, which had been stalled since 1927. Cunningham presented the results of his experiments with etherized vaccines and remained opposed to increasing the dosage of carbolized vaccine. He suggested a combination of treatment, etherized live Alivisatos vaccine for more severe cases and carbolized ones for

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less severe cases. He also opposed any decentralization.137 Colonel William C. H. Forster, president of the Central Committee, Pasteur Institute, Burma, on the other hand, stressed the immediate need for outcenters. He pointed out that the topography of a province like Burma made it impossible for patients from remote parts to travel to Rangoon. According to him, the whole discussion on dosage, the nature of vaccine, and mortality rates had ignored one important factor: geographic proximity of patients to places of treatment. He showed evidence that while mortality among Rangoon patients was 0.37 percent, morality among patients of the countryside was 1.07 percent. In severe cases mortality of Rangoon patients was 1.08 percent, while that of patients in the countryside was 5.07  percent. According to him, the available vaccines needed to be used for decentralization, while experiments could continue in Kasauli.138 In the middle of these experiments and debates, there was an abrupt end to John Cunningham’s antirabic research in India. In February 1929 he left India, went on leave to Edinburgh, and did not return. R. H. Malone, who had assisted him in his research in Kasauli, took over the investigations.139 In 1929 Malone produced the first report with the results of his experiments conducted on monkeys, which showed that Alivisatos (the now-favored live vaccine) gave better results than 5 percent carbolized vaccine, which was in turn better than 5 percent E.C. (etherized-carbolized, Hempt). The human tests showed similar results. He also wrote that he was working on developing what he called a “brain free virus” by using brain matter crushed with sand that would reduce the brain content by about seventy-five times and would thus help to increase the dosage, as he claimed, by 25 percent without any danger of postvaccinal complications.140 Cunningham forwarded a copy of the report with its recommendations for live vaccines in severe cases to Graham. He also dismissed the opinion of the other Pasteur institute directors about decentralization and the use of Semple’s vaccine. “Their opposition simply means that our suggestions do not fit in with their preconceived ideas.”141 Graham remained firmly behind Cunningham. Describing the report as a “Magnum Opus” he continued to arrange for more funds from IRFA to let Malone continue his research.142 These debates raise the fundamental question, what were living and dead vaccines? As we have noted, scientific opinion shifted back and forth between the two types of vaccines. Throughout the interwar period, particularly at the time of the Paris conference, scientists were divided about using live and dead vaccines, since postvaccinal complications supposedly caused by live vaccines were becoming common in other vaccines as well. The interwar period marked a great deal of interest among scientists in Europe in dead vaccines for reasons of safety. In 1926 James McIntosh (professor of pathology, University of London), in his presidential address to the Pathological Section of the Royal Society of Medicine, regarded the use of live vaccines for rabies as a “retrograde” step, as cases of “vaccinal encephalitis” had shown, that should be “rigorously opposed.” He was also suspicious of Calmette’s advocacy of a live vaccine of attenuated tubercle bacilli.143 At the same time there

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were those like Friedberger, who returned to a supposedly more potent live vaccine. Scientists like John Cunningham, Hempt (initially), and Alivisatos started experimenting with live vaccines for different reasons of safety and potency. Despite such divisions in opinion and distinction in choices made by scientists, a range of ambiguities remained about the differences between live and dead vaccines. We can recall here the assertion of Semple that Pasteur himself started with dead vaccines and gradually moved to live ones, although the essential Pasteurian pride was in using attenuated live vaccines. The confusion between McKendrick and John Cunningham about etherized vaccines was also borne out of this ambiguity. This was because there were several variables involved in the production of vaccines, such as the strength of the virus fixe, the time and degree of attenuation, and the nature and strength of the attenuating agent. Thus Cunningham in Kasauli, following the methods of Hempt and Alivisatos for preparing a live etherized vaccine, found his vaccine to be dead. The ambiguity stemmed primarily from the fact that in Pasteurian research, categories like “dead” and “live” were used as ideological rather than as scientific categories. No consistent scientific category or experimental method was defined to distinguish one from the other, which were in some ways only differences in degrees of attenuation. It was the idea of the heroic and potent live vaccines, of possessing the power of controlled life in the form of vaccines, that drove European bacteriologists to undertake their vaccination campaigns in different parts of the world, particularly in the tropics in Asia, South America, and Africa, to eradicate diseases. This moral idiom of crusade and of controlling life made sense among bacteriologists in tropical India, where diseases, germs, and viruses were believed to thrive in their most virulent forms. In attenuating terms, however, such categorization between “dead” and “living” vaccines remained vague and often indistinguishable. While examining the different methods of producing vaccines and experimenting with them in Kasauli, Malone identified an interesting phenomenon: the line between the live and the dead was not always clear. While explaining why live etherized and dead carbolized vaccines gave similar results, he explained, “What we mean when we use the word ‘dead’ is that a particular quantity of vehicle containing the virus is unable to infect any of the given number of animals of a particular species when a particular mode or route of injection is employed.” He elaborated that while Semple had claimed that the virus in an 8  percent suspension of brain after incubation at 37°C for twenty-four hours in the presence of 1 percent carbolic acid was dead, “we have shown that it is not the case, for if sufficient number of rabbits be subdurally inoculated with 0.2 c.c. of such suspensions approximately 1 in every 125 will contract rabies and presumably a greater number would have been infected had we been able to inoculate larger quantities.” Therefore, by this definition, they remained live viruses that could infect. He also mentioned that the good results with 5 percent carbolized was due to higher nerve cell content, but also added that even in this vaccine, “the possibility of the presence of

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living virus in the 8% suspension from which the vaccines were prepared cannot be entirely excluded.”144 Even earlier in 1929, Malone had written to John Cunningham that he was struck by the fact that the “number of brains which contained live virus after immersion in ether is greater than the number shown because we have not retested the original brains when the first passage animals have died without symptoms of rabies.” He also wrote about the same confusion that he mentioned in the report. “Another interesting point which has emerged is that the 8% carbolized vaccine is also attenuated and not dead as supposed by Semple.”145 Despite these ambiguities in his laboratory experiments, in the final recommendations he maintained the conventional distinctions between dead and live vaccines and kept his faith in the Alivisatos method.146 Cunningham himself had come across similar situations during his experiments in Kasauli. In 1926 he found that the Kasauli fixed virus died if immersed in ether for thirty-six hours.147 But in 1927, when he studied the action of ether on the Indian “street virus” (that collected from infected brains sent recently), the virus remained alive in the central portion of the brain immersed up to seventy-two hours.148 Finally, in 1928, he discovered that live virus could be found in infected brains even after immersion in ether up to eighty-four hours, but not in cords exposed to ether for ninety-six hours.149 Malone’s and Cunningham’s confusing discoveries were also due to the ambiguities that remained throughout this period regarding the nature of the rabies virus itself. In the 1920s scientists were unsure whether it was a microbe, protozoa, a toxin as in the case of diphtheria or tetanus, or indeed a Negri body. It was only in the 1960s that a clearer idea of the virion of rabies emerged.150 However, by then the stereotypes about live and dead vaccines were established. At another level, there were uncertainties in the contemporary scientific understanding of the wider question of live and dead itself, an ambiguity that few scientists confronted or referred to. A rare and wonderful exposition of this came in 1928, from the pathologist and naturalist Arthur E. Boycott, when he self-confessedly strained “the privilege of a presidential address” to the Royal College of Medicine to speak about “The Transition from Live to Dead.” He elaborated how in nature a polarization between the live and the dead was false. The two were in a continuum. [In] . . . an assemblage of concurring and converging probabilities which encourage one to think it possible that things which are alive and things which are not alive constitute in effect one series, beginning with hydrogen atoms and reaching up to man, and perhaps to angels, not arranged in a continuous linear succession but on a scheme resembling the phylogenetic line of the animal kingdom. . . . Such a view satisfies our natural antipathy to a dualistic explanation of the universe and makes the old controversy about vitalism and mechanism largely unnecessary. It tells us nothing about the nature of life; by indicating that organisms are analogous to elements, it encourages us to think

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of life as being as insoluble as gravitation. . . . If you like to be paradoxical, you can say that live things are dead, or if you prefer it, that dead things are alive. Both at bottom have much the same characters, and it is unlikely that any sharp distinctions between them can be drawn.151

Yet John Cunningham, Malone, and other scientists continued to categorize vaccines into conventional classes of “live” and “dead” ones. The problematic lines drawn between dead and live vaccines were evident in later vaccines as well. In 1952 Jonas Salk developed the first successful vaccine for poliomyelitis. He used formalin to kill the virus and determined a theoretical margin of safety for the formaldehyde inactivation procedure. However, when British pharmaceutical companies began to prepare the inactivated vaccines in the 1950s, they became aware that those manufacturers who depended solely on the predicted inactivation of Salk’s formula were producing a vaccine that contained live virus. Manufacturers in the United Kingdom had to devise their own methods of testing. The same was the case in the United States, where manufacturers complained that “we have to test the stuff to death” and that “every batch of vaccine is a damned research project.”152

The Making of the New Semple Vaccine Despite these ambiguities in concept and laboratory experiments, scientists, policy makers, and government officials in colonial India were firmly entrenched on the supposed divide between live and dead vaccines. In December 1929 a medical research workers conference was held in Calcutta, where the Rabies Committee, consisting of the directors of Indian Pasteur institutes such as Acton, King, and Taylor (as the chairman), examined an interim report submitted by Malone and Cunningham. Malone, who was present at the meeting, made a strong case for live vaccines. Malone’s second report provided a more substantial comparative analysis of Hempt, Alivisatos, and Semple vaccines of 5 percent and 2 percent strengths on humans (table 5.2).153 Therefore, while Alivisatos (live) and Semple (carbolized) showed similar results, Hempt’s etherized-carbolized (twice-killed) vaccines showed the worst mortality rates. The other directors strongly favored the Semple vaccine and cited new experiments conducted by two British scientists, G. Stuart and K.  S. Krikorian, at the Department of Health Laboratories in Palestine on etherized and carbolized (both killed, in their opinion) vaccines, which concluded that the Semple vaccine reduced cases of paralysis.154 The directors pointed out that according to Malone’s report, while in 1925 the total brain substance used was 0.7 to 1.95 grams, leading to a mortality of 1.07 percent, in 1926–27 when the total brain matter used was 0.7 grams, mortality had risen to 1.39 percent. They concluded that the real difference in mortality rate was due to the quantity of

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Table 5.2. Comparative analysis of Hempt, Alivisatos, and Semple vaccines on humans: Malone’s Interim Report, December 13, 1929. Total nerve substance (in grams)

Duration of treatment (in days)

According to Alivisatos method described in the first report

From 8.5 to 3.4 according to weight

15

4.90 5.38 4.88

5% carbolized 5% etherizedcarbolized 5% etherized (Alivisatos) live

According to the method described in the first report

From 4 to 1.6 according to weight

15

.81 1.07 .54

2

2% carbolized 2% etherizedcarbolized

5 c.c. for first three days; 10 c.c. for last 4 days

1.1 for all cases

7

1

2% carbolized

5 c.c. for 4 days or 5 c.c. for 7 days

0.4 or 0.7

Class of case

Vaccine employed

Dosage

4

5% carbolized 5% etherizedcarbolized 5% etherized (Alivisatos) live

3

Mortality

4 or 7

Source: E. 21, JC Papers, 7–8.

brain substance, and so the improvements in the vaccines should be on those lines rather than on using a live vaccine.155 They also highlighted the rationale of safety with dead vaccines; for millions of Indians affected by rabies it was better to give them a “stable” vaccine like Semple’s than a “freshly prepared nonstable vaccine containing a living virus.” The committee condemned the use of a “living vaccine” and stressed that a dead carbolized vaccine should given. It recommended the increase in dosage for severe cases, rather than changing the nature of the vaccine from dead to live.156 The policy of decentralization ought to be based on geographical and human factors rather than just laboratory requirements.157 The GOI and the local governments subsequently adopted these recommendations and resolutions as the official antirabic policy. Antirabic research soon stopped at the Pasteur Institute of Kasauli. In 1931 Malone was transferred to Rangoon as the officiating director of the Pasteur

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Table 5.3. Comparison of the results of treatment with the various vaccines used for class 4 cases, 1925–30. Hempt Carbolized Carbolized Alivisatos etherized Carbolized etherized 5% CE 5% 5% (1.7%) 1% 1% 1928–30 1928–30 1926–30 1926–28 1926 1926 Treatment length in days

15

15

15

6

14

14

Condition of virus in vaccine

Dead

Dead

Live

Live

Dead

Dead

Total doses of brain substance in grams Total number treated Total Deaths

8.5

8.5

8.5

4.0

0.7

1.95

1097

1101

819

723

325

1004

47

72

40

46

28

81

Total mortality rate

4.28

6.54

4.88

6.36

8.62

8.07

Corrected mortality rate

3.74

5.54

3.54

4.7

5.00

7.17

Failure rate

2.37

3.72

2.08

4.29

6.15

4.18

Source: E. 22, JC Papers, 15.

Institute there. He wrote to John Cunningham that Shortt was the new director of the Pasteur Institute in Kasauli and he feared that rabies research would now suffer for funds, as Shortt might use the grants for his work on trypanosomiasis, “one of his pet subjects.”158 In 1939 the Pasteur Institute of Kasauli was closed down and all its routine work was transferred to the CRI.159 Shortt, while at the Pasteur Institute of Kasauli, drew up the final report of this project in the absence of both Cunningham and Malone (table 5.3).160 The report reaffirmed the earlier conclusions (table 5.2) that more brain matter in vaccines showed better mortality rates. It stated for the first time that the main element in the vaccines was the quantity of brain matter, not the distinctions between live or dead, or Semple (dead) and Alivisatos (live): “the better result recorded with the 5 per cent vaccines, whether carbolized or etherized, is primarily due to the increased dose of brain substance administered and not to either the presence of living virus in the vaccine or the preliminary treatment of the brain with ether.”161 It also became evident that the results were similar when quantities of brain matter and degrees of attenuation remained the same.

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The etherized-carbolized vaccine showed the worst results, as it was much more attenuated. Paradoxically, the concerns expressed in Paris in 1927 about live and dead now seemed a nonissue. However, this did not erase the conventional divides between dead and live vaccines. It should also be added here that in all these statistics and reports on Indian antirabies vaccination, the issue of paralysis was no longer mentioned. In India, mortality, severity of bites, and virulence of viruses dominated the research questions, rather than safety, which was the more common concern in Europe. After two decades of deliberation, Semple’s carbolized vaccine finally emerged triumphant as a universal antirabic vaccine used globally. On the other hand, Adolf Hempt, who had moved from the etherized to etherized-carbolized vaccine, felt that as a result of these experiments conducted in Kasauli his reputation had suffered adversely, as his vaccine showed the worst mortality rates. An upset Hempt wrote to John Cunningham in Edinburgh in November 1933 claiming that the experiments compared his vaccine unfairly with that of Alivisatos.162 He insisted that both he and Alivisatos had decreased their dosages in Europe. Cunningham replied in his familiar tone that that would not be effective in India, where most of the cases were severe.163 By the 1930s, the general emphasis of antirabic vaccine research in India and abroad had shifted from the type of vaccine to the dosage. While in Europe the dosage was being reduced, in India it was increased. A report by Shortt, Malone, and Craighead published in 1934 pointed out that “the improvement recorded as a result of the introduction of the method of Alivisatos was due not to any inherent value of the precise details of the method but to the fact that it utilized a larger total dose of brain substance. Thus the use of a carbolised 5 per cent rabbit vaccine gave results comparable with Alivisatos’ vaccine.”164 So the “advantage of a higher dosage of brain substance . . . [has] thus been established.”165 At the same time different yardsticks were used to draw the lines between dead and live vaccines, showing the underling ambiguity of these concepts. BMJ, while commenting on the 1933 report, considered even Alivisatos’s vaccine to be dead along with the Semple and Hempt vaccines, as according to it, only dried cord vaccines were live ones.166 By the 1940s, the dosage of the Semple vaccine was increased and standardized in India. The vaccine now contained carbolized virus of a 5 percent suspension of sheep’s brain.167 E. C. R. Fox (IMS) first used sheep’s brain in 1926 for the Semple vaccine in the Pasteur Institute in Calcutta.168 Scientists in India adopted it as a universal substance for the Semple vaccine in 1934, as it was economical to use, particularly when a higher dosage was standardized for all cases and mass vaccination was resumed.169 The decentralization of antirabic treatment in India progressed rapidly in the 1930s, and by 1938 nearly two hundred outcenters were supplied with the Kasauli vaccine alone. Similar trends were noticeable in the Madras presidency as well.170 The Coonoor figures (fig. 5.3) present the entire history of the evolution of the Semple vaccine and of antirabic vaccination in India in a concise form. The

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Dried cord

Treatment

Kasauli fixed virus Semple’s carbolized rabbit vaccine Högyes 1% only

1% to 5%

Paris fixed virus Carbolized sheep vaccine 5% only

Numbers treated 13,000 12,000 11,000

Treated at Pasteur Institute, Coonoor

10,000 9,000

Treated at outcenters

8,000 7,000 6,000 5,000 4,000 3,000 2,000

Year

1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938

1,000

Figure 5.3. Patients treated with antirabic vaccine at the Pasteur Institute of Southern India, Coonoor, between 1907 and 1938. Annual Report of the Pasteur Institute of Southern India, 1940, 15.

earliest vaccines used in India were Pasteur’s dried cord vaccines, which were replaced in 1911 by the original Semple vaccine (1  percent carbolized rabbit brain). This was replaced in 1923 by the experimental vaccines ranging from 1 to 5 percent potency. From the 1930s, the standardized Semple vaccine (5 percent sheep brain, carbolized) was used exclusively. This was also the period when treatment was increasingly decentralized, with more patients being treated at the outcenters than at the Coonoor Pasteur Institute.

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At the same time, there was evidence that the new (5  percent carbolized) Semple vaccine caused paralysis. As early as 1930, BMJ observed that “A few complaints were received about the unfavorable effects of antirabic treatment on the general condition of health. . . . Experience has also shown that headache and insomnia are comparatively common complaints, and that giddiness, fainting, and palpitation may be reasonably ascribed at least, to this cause.”171 In 1936 Shiva Deval Singh Greval (IMS, CSTM) revisited the almost forgotten question of paralysis of antirabic treatment in India in a piece in IMG titled “Against Orthodoxies in Rabies” and provided details of cases of paralysis at the Pasteur Institute in Kasauli and the centers using vaccines supplied by it.172 He revealed that in the annual report of the Kasauli Pasteur Institute for 1930 Shortt had reported two cases of paralysis. Out of the four cases Greval studied closely, three occurred with the higher doses or “intensive treatment” with the carbolized vaccine, which as he pointed out was contrary to the “opinion generally held . . . that the incidence of paralysis is independent of the intensity of treatment.”173 According to him, “Carbolization of the vaccine does not ward off the sequelæ. It would not be necessary at all to state this point if the opposite were not so widely believed in India by the general medical profession.” Greval believed that the apparent lack of cases of sequelae (the morbid paralysis caused by the vaccine) in Indian vaccination records, despite scattered evidences of paralysis throughout this period, was due to “a lack of an efficient system of correspondence.”174 The annual report of the Coonoor Pasteur Institute of 1940 noted that the Semple vaccines, although highly effective in treating rabies cases, were also leading to serious posttreatment paralysis, as they contained large quantities of nerve tissues. The report raised the need to produce a vaccine with equal potency but free from such nerve tissues. Some preliminary experiments were undertaken to see whether excess sheep brain could be eliminated from the vaccine without reducing its potency.175 However, there were few takers for this point of view at this time. By the 1940s Semple vaccine had become the main and most celebrated vaccine for antirabic treatment in Asia and Africa, and as Webster wrote in 1943, “Semple’s vaccine is now in general use all over the world and has to a large extent replaced vaccines of the other types.” He reiterated that “it is a dead vaccine.”176 Out of the various debates, ambiguities, and intangible divisions between live and dead, the Semple vaccine was produced, its dosage fixed, millions of patients in Asia, Africa, and America were inoculated with it, several lives were saved and several others died from paralytic complications. The making of the Semple vaccine is indicative of the general trend in developing or tropical countries, where the consensus has been either to use a vaccine of higher dosage or one that is live. Fears of virulence of viruses and germs in the tropics have continued to define vaccination policies and the choice of live or dead vaccines for these regions. In the industrialized or developed countries, on the other hand, the concern has been more about postvaccinal complications rather than the potency of the vaccine. In the case of polio, in the 1970s the WHO maintained

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that countries where polio is endemic required the more potent live vaccine developed by Albert Bruce Sabin in the late 1950s. In 1978 the government of India decided to use the live Oral Polio Vaccine (OPV) exclusively, ignoring questions of its scientific validity and safety. In 1988, India signed the WHO resolution for a global polio eradication program of “zero incidence of wild poliovirus infection” and adopted the exclusive use of live polio vaccine.177 The killed poliomyelitis vaccine IPV (inactivated polio vaccine), which is considered safer, was adopted by most European nations in which the incidence of polio is not endemic. The same divide has informed contemporary vaccine research for HIV, where the debate on using live or dead vaccines is seen as a “tradeoff between efficacy and safety.”178 Finally, returning to rabies, if distinctions between live and dead vaccines were untenable, then how do we understand “laboratory rabies” and its links with live vaccines, an association that is central to the evolution of the antirabic vaccine? To do so, we need to go beyond the phrase “laboratory rabies.”

Deconstructing “Laboratory Rabies” As noted earlier, laboratory rabies was first identified by scientists opposed to Pasteur’s methods as a unique disease developed in the laboratory by Pasteur’s vaccination. Scientists suggested that this disease was caused by the same prophylactic treatment that was designed to eliminate it. Antivivisectionists soon adopted this new disease as a powerful tool of moral and methodological critique of Pasteur’s laboratory science. Subsequently, historians like Gerald Geison adopted it as well, sometimes with the same connotation.179 However, the actual etiology of the disease has remained unclear. The first problem is to identify whether it is a specific disease or a generic term for several postvaccinal complications and cases of mortality, the latter indicating a different failure of treatment. Often critiques clumped all the postvaccinal complications under this label. Even Pasteurian scientists who were alarmed by the criticism tended to view the postvaccinal cases as a disease.180 In India too, certain cases were noted as “failures,” separate from the mortality cases but not clearly defined. Moreover, the actual nature of the paralytic or neurological complications in the postvaccinal complications has also remained uncertain. The discipline of neurology and the knowledge of tissue culture and the nerve cell itself was at a formative stage in the 1920s.181 Even in the 1930s, doubts remained as to the proper etiology of this paralysis. Some scientists believed that it was due to the nature of “street virus”; others like Busson argued that it was due to the fixed virus. Tinti considered it an anaphylactic phenomenon, while others identified human susceptibility to rabbit brain as the chief factor. The editorial of the American Journal of Public Health confirmed this ambiguity in 1930: “It is now widely

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Table 5.4. Incidence of paralytic accidents after rabies vaccine: McKendrick, “Ninth Analytical Review.” Attenuated virus (Pasteur)

1:3,000

Diluted virus (Högyes-Harris)

1:3,000

Phenol treated virus (Semple)

1:9,000

Ether treated virus (Alivisatos)

1:10,000

Heat treated virus

1:18,000

Source: Pait and Pearson, “Rabies Vaccine Encephalomyelitis,” 875.

believed to be due to the action of some unknown substance contained in the vaccine. We can only accept the statement of the Rabies Conference that our knowledge does not enable us to make positive assertions as to the etiology.”182 In 1940, McKendrick produced his most extensive antirabic vaccination report, which included data from 1,062,707 cases of rabies collected from Pasteur institutes all over the world.183 Although he studied a variety of cases treated by both live and dead vaccines used in different laboratories and under different conditions, he could not identify any discernible difference in mortality rates or paralytic cases among people given different treatments (table 5.4). L. T. Webster, who worked on rabies at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York, described this as “disturbing.”184 The question is, was laboratory rabies another form of rabies created in the laboratory, as its name suggests, or a residual of the original affliction, or a different disease not clearly identified? By the 1940s, postvaccinal paralytic cases were defined as a form of encephalitis. In 1949, the international rabies committee of the WHO focused on the problem of postvicinal paralysis, the “demyelinating lesion” of the cord, and noted that the cases of paralysis were a reaction of some constituent of nervous tissue in the vaccine rather than as an effect of the virus.185 It also added that it was a form of encephalomyelitis.186 Thus the rabies virus did not cause allergic encephalomyelitis (AEM); it was a condition not necessarily connected with rabies, as it could be caused by nonrabid brain matter as well. The main issue was the amount of adult brain tissue, and thus such cases could be caused by dead vaccines as well, particularly in larger doses. Strictly speaking, it appears that laboratory rabies is a different disease, not another form of rabies. The same year (1949), Charles Pait and Harold Pearson in Los Angeles, while studying encephalomyelitis caused by rabies vaccine, concluded that the most clearly identifiable factors were indiscriminate usage of vaccines and the presence of brain tissue. “On the basis of data presented here and elsewhere it is apparent that the incidence of rabies vaccine encephalitis is a real contraindication to its

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indiscriminate use . . . it is likely that the incidence will be reduced markedly when a product more completely purified of brain tissue is produced.”187 Thus rage du laboratoire, as it came to be regarded, too was a construct, much like “live” and “dead” vaccines, adopted by opponents as well as proponents of Pasteur. In their imagination, it became a peculiar form of rabies and was linked with the fear of and fascination with the living virus. It was as ambiguous a disease as were the differences between live and dead vaccines, from which it drew its sustenance. This construct of laboratory rabies and the demarcation between live and dead vaccines became so entrenched that in 1969 G. S. Turner (of the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine) observed that postvaccinal paralytic cases were produced by “two main causes.” The first, which he called “laboratory rabies,” was allegedly caused by the live vaccine. However, he provided no further scientific specification of the nature of the disease or its link with the live vaccine. Second, he identified a different disease, the “demyelinating lesions” of the central nervous system, which according to him was caused by brain tissues of mature animals found in dead vaccines.188 Therefore, according to him, both the dead and live vaccines caused paralysis, but of two different types. The same demarcations were maintained by his colleague, C. Kaplan, who while discussing the neurological problems consequent to treatment with Semple vaccines commented, “here I do not mean the so-called ‘rage de laboratoire’ which may be caused by incompletely inactivated vaccine, but those symptoms which are directly referable to the large amounts of foreign tissue injected into the patient daily.”189 The Pasteurian ideology of live vaccines has remained a moral paradigm that scientists have revisited and reaffirmed in search of vaccines that are either more potent or safe. In 1960, eighteen people died in Fortaleza, Brazil from postvaccinal paralytic complications. Bulletin WHO described the deaths following rabies vaccination with Fermi-type vaccine (which as the report detailed was essentially the Semple vaccine, carbolized, 5 percent and from sheep brain) as “Rage de Laboratoire” caused by the live vaccine.190 More important, in 1973 the WHO Expert Committee on Rabies stipulated that no vaccines containing live virus should be used.191 While doing so, it did not specify the characteristics of a virus considered as live or dead. Moreover, it did not ban any higher dosage of brain matter or stipulate any limit of dosage, factors clearly identified with postvaccinal paralysis. In 1974 a BMJ report, while commenting on this WHO directive, pointed out that both live and dead vaccines caused the same disease. “Both vaccines are good antigens but can give serious side effects owing to a paralytic factor in adult brain tissue.”192 John Cunningham’s preference for ether was also not without grounds, as research in the 1940s showed that anesthesia with ether did have a positive impact on rabies and equine encephalomyelitis. Ether anesthesia delayed the development of central nervous system symptoms not only when administered soon after the injection of the virus but also when administered

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after the disease has progressed far enough to cause objective signs of encephalitis.193 The WHO in the 1970s was apprehensive not only about rabies but also about using “live” plague vaccines.194 At the same time, no clear and consistent definition of what was a live and what was a dead vaccine was produced. One important and tangible outcome of this was the making of the Semple vaccine. Once the vaccine was designated as “dead” and thereby safe, a higher dosage of brain matter was sanctioned to be injected in it. The consequences of this policy have been evident. In 1984, a fatal case of encephalitis due to the Semple vaccine prompted a search for neurological complications among 722 recipients of two vaccine batches administered in Bangkok, Thailand. A review of all patients admitted with neurological symptoms from June through August 1984 to the five major teaching hospitals in Bangkok found six cases (0.83 percent), including the index case who had received the vaccine. Rabies infection was ruled out in all six cases. Four patients had meningitis, and two had meningo-encephalitis. Only the index case was fatal; the other patients recovered without neurological sequela. The rate of neurological complications after receiving the Semple vaccine was therefore a minimum of 8.31 cases per one thousand persons vaccinated (1:120). This complication rate was about twentyfive times higher than the overall complication rate of 0.33 per one thousand (1:3018) determined from fourteen previous reports. The fatality rate was 1.39 per one thousand (1:722), about fifteen times higher than the rate of 0.09 per one thousand (1:10805) calculated from the previous studies.195 The Semple vaccine, which until 2001 was the only form of vaccine used in countries like Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, was provided free of cost by the respective governments.196 In 2005 the WHO noted that although the use of the Semple vaccine was still widespread, it was responsible for severe and long-term side effects in an estimated 0.3 to 0.8 per one thousand cases. It attributed the neurological complications from Semple vaccine to myelin, the basic protein. It first recommended suckling mouse brain vaccines, which contain virtually no myelin, and later cell culture vaccines and purified duck embryo vaccines.197 This marked a paradigm shift in vaccine research from the dead/alive to the adult/embryonic. The lines of demarcation in the latter are yet to be historically analyzed. Thus cases of paralysis were not necessarily linked to live or dead viruses. There was no clear divide between live and dead vaccines, and no evidence was available that the etherized vaccine was indeed live or the carbolized was dead, or that the live vaccine caused paralysis. Laboratory rabies remained a sacrosanct disease, little understood, often feared, but rarely questioned. It became an important concern for Pasteurists in Europe, as it was a powerful weapon in the armory of the anti-Pasteurians. Laboratory rabies and its association with the live vaccine was an exercise (in the Kuhnian sense) in creating a regime of problems and then solving them.198 In India, however, as discussed elsewhere in this book, the antivaccinationist cause did not have the same appeal, and laboratory rabies, or even postvaccinal paralysis, did not have the same significance for

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scientists. There the fear of the virulence of viruses and the concerns of decomposition of vaccines determined the choice between dead and live vaccines.

Life, Death, and the Fear of the Tropics While Semple preferred to kill his vaccine for fear of tropical heat and dust, John Cunningham sought to keep it alive to combat the virulence of rabies in the tropics. A compromise from these two opposite yet related approaches was that the Semple vaccine adopted by the GOI from the 1930s was a carbolized vaccine of higher potency than Semple originally intended. It appeared as an ideal tropical vaccine and was used in other colonies as well. The history of the making of the Semple vaccine shows an interesting convergence of Pasteurian and British tropical bacteriology, between ideas of attenuation and antisepsis. At the same time, categories like “live” and “dead” vaccines, like the links between climate and bacteriological research, remained moral constructs.  Scientists on either side of the debate, although faced with evidence of a continuum between the live and the dead vaccines in their experiments, invariably returned to the conventional divides on which their science was based. Cunningham did point out the dangers of the carbolized vaccine, which could lead to the increased use of nerve cells. His gradation method of vaccination according to severity of cases was also innovative. However, he too was caught up in the Pasteurian paradigm of the potency of live viruses and vaccines, which he sought to relocate to India. The debates around the live and dead vaccines refer to the two most important concerns of vaccine research, potency and safety. The debate was polarized into categories of “live” and “dead” rather than in identifying the gradations and degrees of attenuation, because live vaccines appeared as “heroic” in Pasteurian discourse. Dead carbolized vaccines, emerging from the British legacy of antiseptics, on the other hand, were identified as safe, stable, and dependable. The divide remained strong, despite evidence of ambiguity in laboratory experiments, because vaccine research is result oriented and one way to resolve some of the complex problems faced by antirabic vaccination in terms of safety and mortality in different geographical and social conditions and in laboratory experiments was by creating clear demarcations between different vaccines. These demarcations were at the heart of the modern understanding of the term “virus,” which was organically linked to the term “virulence.” From Pasteur’s time, scientists sought to engage with the virulence of viruses, to understand it and to produce the antivirus. In the tropics this fear of the virulence of germs and life in general assumed greater significance and shaped both vaccine research and vaccination campaigns.

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Chapter Six

Pathogens and Places Cholera Research in the Tropics Until we know exactly what the cause of cholera is, it is clearly impossible to remove that cause from a body of men; but we can remove the body of men from [the] cause. —Sanitary Commissioner of India, 1896

This final chapter is on twentieth-century laboratory research in cholera, the archetypical tropical disease. I will juxtapose laboratory research with epidemiological studies and contest the argument put forward by historians that biomedicine and epidemiology and the introduction of ecological factors in the twentieth century led to a greater holism in medicine.1 I will argue that in the tropical colonies ecology and epidemiology were as limitative concepts as was the laboratory. I will then explore why, despite these new medical ideas and various developments in the medical sciences, tropical regions continue to be stricken with diseases. This apparently straightforward agenda has complex undertones. Cholera, caused by the cholera vibrio that colonizes the small intestine of human beings, is firmly rooted within the traditions of the bacteriology of Koch and Haffkine. Simultaneously, “Asiatic cholera” was an essential formulation of British medical theories about diseases in the tropics from the eighteenth century that linked local climate and environment with disease. This poses an important question to the understanding of bacteriology in the tropics: why did scientists see the cholera vibrio as a peculiarly tropical problem rather than a universal one. This chapter will show why the idea of home appeared in a more persuasive form in cholera research throughout the twentieth century and how it was established by contrived and tenuous modes. There are three main questions in analyzing this history: those of spatiality, causality, and temporality. First, cholera raises problems of spatiality. The idea of its Asiatic “home” (specifically, tropical Bengal) was important throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century. It was also an idea that medical researchers who worked on cholera constantly returned to through bacteriology and epidemiology. The idea of “home” was central to British thinking around cholera from the nineteenth century. British medical men saw cholera as a “disease of locality,” more

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precisely, of tropical locality.2 From the early nineteenth century, as cholera appeared in European constitutions and consciousness, it was also referred to as “Asiatic cholera,” since the lower Gangetic belt of Bengal was seen as the home of the disease. Bengal, the first province occupied and controlled by the British from the mid-eighteenth century, seemed to be the source of all choleric outbreaks in Asia, Europe, and America, and this perception focused attention on the climatic and environmental conditions of this region.3 Indeed, the tropical roots and habitations of cholera were always believed to be obvious and extant for eternity. Yet, cholera has been an Asiatic disease with a European legacy. Despite having its home in India, cholera has had a peculiarly European history and narrative.4 It threatened Europe in the nineteenth century more than any other disease. Cholera was seen as the invader in Europe, a status originally ascribed to plague in the fourteenth century.5 European physicians and statesmen believed that in 1817 this Asian pestilence moved out of its home and spread to Europe and America. It then had a profound effect on society and economies on either side of the Atlantic, and the decades between 1830 and 1860 were referred to as the “cholera years.”6 The epidemics led to popular unrest and social conflict and were catalysts for municipal reform and the development of modern public health in Europe. They also gave rise to vivid cultural and social imagery around cholera in Europe and received great medical attention throughout the nineteenth century. In spite of this vivid European legacy, cholera has been consistently identified with Bengal. This did not change with the advent of bacteriology, as Koch’s investigations in 1883 confirmed that the cholera vibrio had traveled from Bengal to Egypt. Yet, doubts remained as to how cholera traveled from its so-called home to Europe, where it appeared in both epidemic and pandemic forms and remained dormant for long stretches of time in temperate climates. This supposed indigenity between cholera and the tropics was neither essential nor obvious in the historical and scientific understanding of cholera. Christopher Hamlin has recently shown that the nineteen-century identification of cholera with Bengal was based on flimsy evidence.7 Even in mid-nineteenthcentury England public health officials suggested that the cholera that spread in Europe was a new disease, not the one that raged in Bengal.8 This question about the habitations of cholera is linked to the other problem, that of identifying the causality of the disease. Cholera was the most common and yet the most complex disease of the nineteenth century. As Mark Harrison reminds us, “No disease was more important, and no disease so little understood, as the ‘epidemic cholera.’”9 For its repeated invasion of Europe in the nineteenth century, cholera received great medical attention in England, and Johnsonian climatic determinism played an important role in the British understanding of cholera, particularly from the 1830s. At the same time, cholera was one of the earliest diseases to be subjected to bacteriological analysis and mass human bacteriological vaccination (by Haffkine). Cholera thus captures

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the tension between sanitary measures and laboratory research and provides a unique opportunity to study the broad spectrums of interplay of various theories of causation of disease, particularly with the evolution of germ theory. It provides an opportunity to explore how in the twentieth century the idea of germs revoked the moral ideas of a disease, which was identified closely with tropical filth and contamination. The third issue is that of temporality. Owing to the nineteenth-century European history of cholera, historians have described cholera as the “classic epidemic disease of the nineteenth century.”10 Consequently, medical and historical interest in cholera, so dominant in the nineteenth century, seems to suddenly fade away in the twentieth, which has been dominated by malaria research. Historical interest in the bacteriological research on cholera and cholera vaccines has not moved beyond the works of Haffkine and Koch, which are located firmly within the paradigms of late nineteenth-century bacteriology. As a result, while we know a lot about the cultural, epidemiological, and ecological history of nineteenth-century cholera, we know very little about its twentiethcentury bacteriological and tropical history. This lack of interest in twentiethcentury cholera is reflected in the comparatively late discovery of the cholera toxins. Toxins of diphtheria (isolated by Roux and Yersin in 1888), tetanus, and botulinum (Emile van Ermengem, 1897) were all hypothesized about the same time as cholera, but their existence was demonstrated within a few years of their being hypothesized (and the next generation vaccines were developed). But it took almost seventy-five years to identify the cholera toxin. This is despite the fact that cholera has an equally colorful and graphic twentieth-century history outside Europe and the United States. The twentieth-century history of cholera is a narrative of poverty and global capitalism both in the colonial and postcolonial era. Understanding cholera research of the twentieth century therefore requires a new conceptual framework beyond the existing historiographies of bacteriology and tropical medicine. This relative insignificance of cholera in the twentieth century is due to the unfolding of two congruous processes: the disappearance of cholera from Europe by the end of the nineteenth century and the twentieth-century mapping of the disease within the tropics through new epidemiological cartographic methods. As this chapter will show, epidemiology, which evolved in the twentieth century as a new medical and moral paradigm in colonial and tropical medicine, dominated cholera research in this period. This led to the reintroduction of climatic and ecological factors within the germ theory of cholera, and instead of introducing heterogeneous entities within bacteriological research on cholera, it essentialized, homogenized, and even limited the understanding of cholera as a disease. The intense mapping of cholera also served to reduce its visible and tangible threat to Europe and situated it permanently within the remote geographical setting of tropical Bengal. This chapter will explain the disappearance of cholera from the twentieth-century European psyche and physique as

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an outcome of the deliberate and strategic relocation of its problematic to its socalled Asiatic home. It will examine twentieth-century cholera research in India in order to trace its reincarnation as a disease of the tropics. In all these medical discourses, the home of the disease was never defined clearly in either medical or metaphysical terms. In fact in medical terminology, the word “home” has never been an analytical category for analyzing a disease, yet in the scientific as well as popular literature on cholera it has always been and continues to be the key category. This chapter studies why the tropical home of cholera has remained a subliminal yet powerful category in the understanding of the disease, much like the notion of the tropics itself.

Airs, Waters, Places, and Cholera Studies on cholera in the nineteenth century, particularly in India, followed the Hippocratic corpus of airs, waters, and places, although episodically. Various theories about the causality of cholera were thrown up; the anticontagionists stressing the atmospheric causes attributed it to lunar influences, to pandemic waves, and to endemic constitutions of the air.11 In Exeter (Britain) in the 1830s, cholera was treated as an airborne disease and various fumigating methods were used including lighting fires with tar and tar barrels and burning vinegar in the most confined parts of the city to “purify the air.” Often, “the smell of all these things [disinfectants] was worse than the Cholera smell itself.”12 This Hippocratic reinvention made particular sense in India, where cholera was linked to tropical airs, waters, and places. The airborne theory continued to capture British imperial imagination even after John Snow had demonstrated that cholera was spread by water. In the 1860s and 1870s, the GOI’s chief medical advisor on epidemic cholera, James L. Bryden, studied cholera in India extensively. He reported that cholera was not transmitted by contaminated water. He continued to assert that cholera was an airborne disease and its seedlike organisms were spread by monsoonal winds.13 The airborne theory of cholera also captured the popular and literary imagination. In his short story, “A Germ Destroyer,” Rudyard Kipling described a British inventor named Mellish who came to the summer capital of the GOI in Shimla to display a fumigator that he had developed to destroy cholera germs. When he gained his audience with the viceroy, Mellish poured his secret powder into an ashtray and set light to it. The result was spectacular. There were “fat, greasy wreaths of copper-colored smoke. In five seconds, the room was filled with a most pungent and sickening stench—a reek that took fierce hold of the trap of your windpipe and shut it. The powder hissed and fizzed, and sent out blue and green sparks, and the smoke rose till you could neither see, nor breathe, nor gasp.”14 This might be a Kiplingisque caricature, but reality was not too far, as Europeans believed that cholera lurked in the air. In 1850 when cholera struck in Kingston, Jamaica, for the first time,

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four thousand residents died in the city alone. The desperate Board of Health borrowed a canon from the ordnance stores and fired blank cartridges in the streets of Kingston “to destroy the morbific power that lurked in the dark alleys of the pestilence-stricken city.”15 Even in the 1890s, the wind-extension theory held sway in India and troops were ordered, when attacked by cholera, to march at right angles to the wind.16 The theory that cholera germs were spread by the monsoon winds was particularly useful in India, as it explained the spread of cholera up the Gangetic basin, from Bengal to northern India, against the flow of the rivers.17 In the meantime, as cholera spread in England in the 1850s, physicians challenged the airborne theory. In 1854, the London physician Snow discovered that cholera was a waterborne infection. He traced a London outbreak of cholera to a public water pump in Broad Street.18 Following this, there emerged medical traditions of identifying water as the carrier of the disease, which retained its relevance even in the postbacteriology era.19 Snow’s waterborne theory gradually became popular in India. In 1893, BMJ reported that it had received a “spirited defence” of the theory of cholera being water borne and noncontagious from Ernest Roberts, the late acting deputy sanitary commissioner of the NorthWest Provinces and Awadh. BMJ appreciated the fact that “reliance is no longer placed on theories of ‘air currents’ and ‘pandemic waves’ to explain the prevalence of cholera.”20 In India the waterborne theory gradually acquired particular moral, spatial, and political implications. It reinforced the idea that cholera was a disease of the tropics and that the rivers and the surface water sources of Bengal were the real home of the morbus. This is when cholera was located to its place, to its so-called Asiatic home. The anticontagionists asserted that the waters of Bengal had a particular propensity to breed the disease. Their views were supported by contemporary European medical theories. In the 1870s Pettenkofer lent his support to the waterborne theory and asserted that the composition of the soil and its interaction with groundwater was equally important to the activities of the pathogen. Pettenkofer’s belief was that the cholera germ had to transform or “ferment” under these favorable circumstances before it could become contagious and cause an epidemic. In his view, isolated from these circumstances the cholera germ could not cause epidemics. This theory is also known as “contingent contagionism” or “localism.” Pettenkofer concluded that since cholera was linked to the peculiar environment of India it was not contagious and that quarantine was not only vexatious and expensive, but also useless.21 This was in accordance with the dominant view among British medical men in nineteenth-century India who believed that cholera was a disease of the “locality.”22 Pettenkofer’s ideas were accepted enthusiastically in India.23 By the end of the nineteenth century, cholera was seen as the bane of any modern sanitary regime. It was characterized by sanitarian and imperial morality as a “filth disease carried by dirty people to dirty places” that could be eradicated by a regime of purity: “pure water, pure

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air, pure soil, and pure habits.”24 By the early twentieth century, the waterborne theory and its links with the “unhealthy” locality of the lower Gangetic basin became almost a medical obstinacy in India. The debates about the localized character of cholera had important international implications. Following Koch’s discovery, Germany played the contagionist card and Britain adopted anticontagionism for maintaining free passage through the Suez Canal.25 Britain, which had acquired a major interest in the Suez Canal in 1875, wanted to abolish quarantine altogether and make do with medical inspections. Koch’s discovery of a cholera germ implied that cholera might have been brought to Egypt or even to Europe from India via the Suez Canal. Quarantine would hamper free passage through the canal, and if free passage of ships from India and Australia were not secured, the value of a second canal, for which the British government had anticipated investing as much as £8 million, would be drastically reduced. Koch’s claims were deeply contested by the British medical establishment, which continued to assert that cholera was essentially a disease of locality and was endemic to the waters of the Gangetic basin.26 A paper titled “The Official Refutation of Dr. Robert Koch’s Theory of Cholera and Commas,” published in 1885, provided an overview of the social, economic, and political implications of the British government’s response to Koch and bacteriology.27 In 1884, following directives from the India Office, the government established India’s first medical laboratory to refute Koch’s claims. D. D. Cunningham was appointed director of the laboratory. Cunningham’s attack on Koch came from two areas. First, following Murray’s earlier work, he highlighted the indefinite nature of the vibrio. He claimed that bacilli in the intestine of cholera patients could assume several forms, varying according to temperature and acidity, and that they entered the body through various routes, which meant that there was no definite pathogenic pattern to identify. Second, he suggested the “general feebleness” of the germ in its inability to multiply actively in earth, cow dung, and human excreta, which led him to suggest its limited agency in the production of epidemics. Thus, without really disproving Koch’s theory, he placed a far greater emphasis on the environment necessary for the generation of cholera.28 D. D. Cunningham’s work highlighted the need for a deeper understanding of the ecology of germs, a theme that would shape bacteriological research on cholera in the twentieth century.

Cholera and Vaccine Research D.  D. Cunningham’s research did not indicate a plan for cholera eradication, although it was compatible with British imperial, economic, and political concerns. Cholera continued to affect India and the British government was keen to demonstrate progress in cholera control, even through vaccination. Help came

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from an unexpected quarter. Around the 1880s, Haffkine, while working at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, began to study cholera. Haffkine had two goals: one was to try to adapt the cholera microbe to grow in laboratory animals in order to obtain an experimental model of human cholera; the second was the development of a cholera vaccine. In 1892 he published a brief paper in which he demonstrated that immunity could be induced in animals by inoculating them with attenuated cholera bacilli. By July he had conducted successful experiments on humans, including himself, thus raising the possibility of preventing and eradicating one of the most dreaded diseases of the nineteenth century. News of Haffkine’s work spread quickly and soon came to the notice of Lord Dufferin, a former viceroy of India. Dufferin wrote to the secretary of state for India requesting that Haffkine be permitted to pursue his studies at the “home” of the disease. Haffkine arrived in Calcutta in 1893. After injecting himself and four Indian doctors, he was able to induce some villagers in the cholera belt of Bengal to come forward for inoculation. His cholera vaccine was the first serious attempt at large-scale immunization using human vaccines.29 However, he faced active hostility from British medical officers who were dubious about the efficacy of his inoculation practices. Medical skepticism was reinforced by racial prejudice, and Haffkine’s Jewish-Russian background made him suspect in the eyes of the British-Indian establishment.30 Haffkine was forced to travel to north India where cholera was not endemic but where he could conduct his inoculations relatively peacefully.31 Haffkine also faced the reality of transferring the laboratory results of the Paris experiments among a large population in India. The year 1893 was one of the quietest in India in terms of cholera epidemics. He spent his first year in India traveling along the Ganges plain northwest of Delhi attempting to induce local people to accept his vaccination. He found over twenty-two thousand volunteers, but in the total absence of epidemic cholera along his route he was unable to formulate any statistical conclusion. During his cholera inoculations in Bengal in 1894, Haffkine encountered another unexpected problem. He realized that the spread and outbreak of the disease was far more unpredictable than he had assumed in Paris. Despite his expectations, he found that the occurrences of cholera outbreaks in Bengal were not localized. The outbreaks typically occurred “unexpectedly,” and even in places where outbreaks were of regular occurrence they were “spread and scattered over large areas.”32 This made the collection of inoculation statistics far more difficult for cholera than for “localised contagious diseases, like smallpox, or in plague.”33 Thus by actual epidemiological evidence, even in Bengal, the socalled home of cholera, the disease appeared less localized than other diseases and posed challenges to its statistical mapping. As he found it difficult to localize cholera in Bengal, Haffkine looked for novel ways to create laboratory spaces from the reality he faced when he collected his inoculation statistics. He selected a trial village, inoculating half the inhabitants and waiting for the next epidemic to collect his figures. Meanwhile

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in a densely populated city like Calcutta, his challenge was to create experimental and inoculation sites. “In a city like Calcutta, with over 800,000 inhabitants, was I to inoculate half of the population for the purpose of comparing inoculated with non-inoculated and of testing my method?”34 He again found a way out and inoculated 116 out of 200 people in a cholera-affected bustee (slum). All 116 of them escaped infection; there were nine cases, several fatal, among the 84 not inoculated. Following his successful experiments in Bengal, he traveled to the tea gardens of Assam, where he spent the winter and spring of 1894–95. The policy of inoculating laborers had its own problems; the inoculation produced a reaction during which labor was impossible, and the planters were reluctant to lose the work time. In addition, the laborers formed a highly mobile population, unused to having their movements tracked, which made the collection of results difficult. Haffkine also started conducting experiments among well-defined populations such as prisoners, with carefully selected groups. His experiments in Gaya and Darbhanga jails were his most important innovation in preventive medicine. In the Darbhanga jail, following an outbreak of cholera he adopted a selective process of inoculation. He asked the prisoners to sit on the ground in rows and inoculated every second man or woman. The results were encouraging: among the noninoculated cases, all cases were fatal, while out of the 110 inoculated, only 3 died. A contented Haffkine remarked, “Few operations which I made within the walls of a laboratory exceeded in precision the one just described.” The plans for the future were now clear. “The next step was to transfer the operations to the East [Bengal], where their efficacy could be first of all tested in cholera-affected localities and, if ascertained to be favourable, put into practice.” However, he had soon to leave India because of ill health, abandoning his cholera vaccination. On the eve of his departure he added, “The complicated problem of introducing the inoculations, in proportion to their protective power, as an adopted prophylactic among the populations of the East, remains practically untouched.”35 The task would remain unattended for a long time. The outbreak of plague in Bombay in 1896 diverted government attention, and cholera inoculations were shelved in India. Haffkine became involved in plague vaccine research, and cholera research and vaccination stopped in British India. Another colonial bacteriologist, Major E. D. W. Greig (IMS), assistant director of CRI, took it up from 1912.36

Cholera and the Carrier in India Greig’s previous research was on enteric fever, and like Koch and Semple he too had focused on the biliary passage as the site of infection. He was initiated into this method during his training in Germany on bacteriological investigations in enteric fever.37 He approached cholera with a similar question, “a problem

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which naturally presented itself was, is the cholera vibrio present in or absent from the biliary passages?”38 Although in colonial India the focus on the biliary passages was a marginal trend, Greig’s cholera research was located within a broader bacteriological research question in the early twentieth century. He was contributing to the emerging consensus that the colonies of cholera, dysentery, and typhoid in the intestine were similar. G. S. Kulescha, Henry Nichols, and O. Schöbl in their research on typhoid, cholera, and dysentery had identified the gall bladder and the intestine as the main sites of infection.39 These scientists were keen to develop new vaccines for these diseases, as they believed that prophylactic treatment needed to be directed toward the bile rather than the blood stream and tissues.40 Greig’s cholera research reflected another important international orientation of twentieth-century bacteriological research. In 1902, during his typhoid research in Trier, Koch proposed the theory of the “carrier state.” He suggested that healthy individuals, who showed no signs of the disease, carried in their gall bladders or intestines the germs of typhoid with which others could be infected. Koch used this theory to explain the endemic nature of the disease among certain members in a population who could also infect others. The theory marked two important shifts in bacteriological research: On the one hand, the human body as the site of germs became the focus of research. On the other, it had significant implications for twentieth-century racial pathology and tropical medicine. In the colonies, it led to the identification of native bodies as carriers of the disease, as Koch forwarded the thesis in his research to tropical diseases like trypanosomiasis.41 Latour has argued that the identification of humans as carriers of germs contributed to what he refers to as the “Pasteurization” process. The Pasteurian population, according to him, consisted of “sick contagious people, healthy but dangerous carriers of microbes, immunised people, vaccinated people, and so on.”42 Three clarifications need to be made here to show that Latour’s framework is Eurocentric and that the categorization of humans in such terms was a much wider and a pre-Pasteurian phenomenon in the colonies. First, the idea of “healthy carriers” was not strictly a Pasteurian or French phenomenon, but was, as we have seen, proposed by Koch and applied in different social and demographic contexts outside French Pasteurian influence. Second, in India, this idea was not a completely new proposition either, as the eighteenth-century morbid anatomical tradition had established the human body in the tropics as “carriers” of diseases. Third, in the colonies, the human “carrier” theory that developed from the nineteenth century in conjunction with germ theory had more clearly racial rather than Pasteurian or bacteriological connotations. In India, beginning in the eighteenth century, British medical men viewed the human body, particularly the intestine and the biliary tract, as the main sites of tropical diseases, particularly of cholera and fevers. Corpses of mostly European soldiers were subjected to intense pathological studies from the eighteenth

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century. This fact had important medical, cultural, and political connotations. James Johnson, James Annesley, and William Twining were prominent in the attempt to produce a “pathological map” of India. These British surgeons and physicians viewed the human body in India as a microcosm of its environment, and the social and environmental dissolution was reflected in bodily decay. The pattern of decay appeared to manifest itself differently in the bodies of Indians and Europeans, according to their habits, customs, and constitutional traits.43 British surgeons in India believed that cholera infected European constitutions unfamiliar to the tropics more than it did Indians. Johnson placed great emphasis on excessive biliary secretion as a cause of many diseases including hepatitis, dysentery, cholera, and certain types of fevers. He found evidence of vitiated bile wherever these disorders occurred, appearing in postmortem dissections as a mass of black or dark-green fluid. Johnson believed that biliary disorders were endemic to Europeans in India because their bodies were poorly equipped to cope with extreme heat. These eighteenth century pathological mappings of cholera by British surgeons provided the basis for new ideas of racial difference that estranged Europeans from the Indian environment, and they had profound implications for debates about colonization and acclimatization.44 The focus on morbid anatomy diminished in the nineteenth century with the growing emphasis on air and water as the carriers of disease. However, there were continuities, and the human body in India was still seen by some physicians as the site of cholera infection. In the 1870s, in the face of emerging environmental theories, John Murray, the inspector general of hospitals of the Bengal Medical Department, insisted that the medical focus should instead be on the “poison” of cholera, on how it infected the human body. He practiced morbid anatomical studies to show that the primary action of the “poison” was on the nervous system and the secondary action was on the mucous surface of the intestines. The “cholera poison” underwent a change in vitality from a state of dormancy to “one of active life and reproduction” in the human intestine. Although he acknowledged the role of water, he suggested that the cholera poison entered the body through various routes: the skin, the lungs, and the bowels. Based on these ideas, Murray produced a rather complicated theory of causation of cholera that combined the role of water, wind, and the human body. Cholera entered the human body through the lungs, skin, or the stomach and then mixed with the blood and multiplied in large numbers, which caused the paralysis of nerves and the intestine. Two natural agents facilitated this process, gastric juices and the bile. For Murray, the human body was the real workshop of the disease and the reproduction of the germ there could be restrained, or its vitality destroyed, by the use of chemical agents like antiseptics.45 While proposing this particular theory of the complex interplay of three agents, Murray criticized Pettenkofer’s thesis for its singular emphasis on subsoil water and the environment. According to him, Pettenkofer overlooked an “important element,” the process by which inanimate substances were vitalized

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and then acted on the healthy body.46 According to him, subsoil water was only one of the several causes of the spread of cholera, and he questioned Pettenkofer’s assertion that the cholera germ could only develop and multiply in the subsoil water and not in the human body. Murray suggested that since the germ multiplied in the human body, it could also spread by human contact at a dormant stage, so the “arrest of the dissemination of this most fatal disease by human intercourse should be attempted.”47 Murray’s theory never received wider acceptance, perhaps because of his critique of the anticontagionist policies of the imperial government and his opposition to the 1872 report by J. M. Cuningham, the sanitary commissioner with the GOI.48 Within the premises of modern bacteriological research, in his Agra laboratory Hankin first put forward the human carrier theory for cholera in the 1890s, even before Koch provided a formal thesis based on his research in Trier. Hankin’s ideas emerged from a medical consensus in British India, where Indian servants and cooks employed in the service of British masters had been regarded as “carriers” of diseases long before Typhoid Mary was uncovered in America.49 Hankin first conducted an experiment with a bhisti’s (traditional water carrier) mussak (leather sack for carrying water), which was cleaned and filled with clean water. After few hours, the water was found to be infected with cholera microbes. He discovered that since the bhisti moistened the outside of his leather bag from any water source, the water was infected again. Hankin then suggested that Indian cooks who used infected cloth soaked in water while cooking infected the food in the kitchen. He even conducted an experiment with a chocolate pudding that his Indian cook prepared for his guests at a dinner party. In his laboratory, Hankin imitated the cooking process, collected milk from a “disinfected cow” supplied by a “disinfected milkman.” Some of the white of a fresh egg was removed through a hole in a portion of the shell that had been calcined in blowpipe flame. He added these two liquids to a previously sterilized and dissolved gelatin in a test tube; he inoculated the mixture with a trace of cholera microbes and found about twenty thousand of these microbes per cubic centimeter in the pudding. Hankin then imitated the cook in keeping the mixture in a warm place by putting the test tube in the incubator. In eighteen hours, the cholera microbes had increased to four hundred million per cubic centimeter. He concluded that his cook could have infected his guests.50 Koch’s research on the germ of cholera and its action on the human body developed as part of the European tradition of viewing the human body as the site of infection and spread of disease. The German Cholera Commission headed by Koch arrived in Calcutta in December 1883, collected evidence, and found vast quantities of a particular bacterium in the intestines of the people suffering from the disease. In 1884, Koch proposed that the cholera vibrio was the causal bacteria.51 Although there is no clear link between the earlier British traditions of morbid anatomy and that of Koch’s, both of these were part of a medical framework that focused on the human body as the site of disease

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and thereby also the site of its treatment. In his research on enteric fever in Alsace-Lorraine Koch had established that “man, in fact, is the storehouse of the virus.”52 Nevertheless, Koch’s ideas were influential in India, and a convergence took place of his ideas and those of British imperial scientists in identifying the human body as the site of infection of tropical diseases. Bacteriologists in India such as Semple also studied enteric fever on similar lines.53 This was a time when bacteriology was still situated firmly within the laboratory, in contrast to climatic understandings of diseases, a distinction that would erode in the later decades of the twentieth century. There was one important distinction between eighteenth-century morbid anatomy and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century bacteriological studies that identified the human body as the site of infection and the spread of the disease. This was in their racial and political implications. While in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Johnson identified European bodies as particularly susceptible to diseases of hot climates and those of Indians as relatively immune to them, the bodies of natives was seen as the site of infection. Semple’s bacteriological investigations in the cantonments identified native bodies, particularly those of Indian soldiers, cooks, and orderlies, as the “storehouse” of the disease. His conclusions reflected a fear and distrust of native bodies at a time when the massive political and military establishment of the Raj had become heavily dependent on Indians, even more so within the Indian army: “there are scattered throughout the various units of the British Army in India a group of men in whose bodies the virus is living.”54 In India, germ theory and the carrier thesis identified a new “home” of cholera, in the intestines of the local people. Therefore, despite its universalist claims, germ theory too was ensconced in the problematic of the local in the colony. This belief shaped bacteriological research on cholera in the tropics. It was within this backdrop of new and existing medical thinking around the human body as the site of the cholera vibrio that Greig started his research on cholera. Soon after the establishment of the IRFA in 1911, Greig was commissioned to submit a report on cholera in Calcutta, and he revisited the issues raised earlier by Hankin.55 However, rather than locating the vibrio in the climatic and environmental conditions of Calcutta, his research followed international bacteriological trends, which increasingly focused on the human body as the site of the infection of the disease. He raised the question whether in India it was humans or the environment that spread cholera. To that extent, Greig’s thesis was an interesting combination of D. D. Cunningham’s and Koch’s ideas. He made an important discovery that the cholera vibrio did not survive for long in the waters of the Calcutta area, thereby confirming for Calcutta what Hankin had found earlier in Agra. He found that the life of the cholera vibrio outside the human host in the natural conditions of India, particularly in Bengal, was very short in either water or soil and certainly too short to cause epidemics, thereby largely negating the climatic theories. Greig instead focused on the biliary tract of the human body as the site of cholera infection. Here Greig also

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challenged the trend in British medicine of treating typhoid and cholera as very different epidemiological cases. In his work on cholera around the same time, Leonard Rogers had rejected the suggestion that the biliary tract was the site of infection of cholera and had instead argued for different causalities for cholera and typhoid: “The absence of infection of the gall-bladder and bile ducts by the comma bacillus places the disease in quite a different position from that of typhoid in this respect.”56 Greig, on the other hand, following the work of Kulescha and Schöbl and his own research on typhoid, found that the cholera vibrio could enter, reside, and even remain dormant in the bile for long periods.57 It was the human body that was the “chronic carrier” of cholera and infection spread by human contact. By highlighting the “carrier” hypothesis in cholera research, Greig rekindled a problematic aspect of nineteenth-century British medical thinking. British anticontagionists had strenuously argued that cholera was spread by miasma, not the human carrier. The “human factor” of Greig’s theory of cholera causation raised new challenges to the ecological one: The death rate of the cholera vibrios outside the human body was extremely high and in a comparatively short time it becomes extinct. On the other hand, scientific research has shown that in certain portions of the body of man, namely the biliary passages, the organisms find conditions suitable in all respects for continuing its life. The bile is an excellent medium for the growth of the cholera vibrio.58

He pointed out that even findings in London, contrary to popular belief, had showed that the problem was not really with water, but with human contact. A. C. Houston, director of water examinations of the Metropolitan Water Board of London, declared, “So far as infectious disease is concerned the real enemy of mankind is man.”59 Houston showed that the home of the typhoid bacilli was not so much in impure water or even crude sewage, but in its human carrier. Greig believed that earlier measures for tackling enteric fever among troops in India were based on the idea that the virus existed outside the human host, “particularly in the water,” which failed, as they ignored the “factory of the virus” that was “man himself.”60 Therefore, the need in India was to protect “mankind from man.”61 In Calcutta, Greig soon found his “Typhoid Mary.” He studied the water supply of the city, where the untreated water came from the river Hughly at Palta and was pumped into settling tanks, then onto filter beds, and then to the collecting wells. From the collecting wells, the water was pumped into the mains leading to the Tallah reservoir, from where it was directly supplied to the city of Calcutta without further treatment. The health officer of the Calcutta Corporation sent him samples of water from the Tallah reservoir for bacteriological investigation.62 He found cholera vibrio in that water resource and investigated how it entered the water supply at that late stage. He found a man named Lakshi Behara, aged forty-two, who came from Rajkantha, in the Cuttack district, and

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was employed as an assistant in the Municipal Laboratory of Calcutta at Tallah. Behara told him that he had been attacked by cholera when he was five years of age. He was employed in taking the water samples from Tallah since May 26, 1914, and although he never touched the water with his hands, and all the apparatus were previously sterilized, Greig believed that the discharges of vibrios in his stools must have somehow contaminated the water. He was transferred to another department, which subsequently reduced the traces of cholera vibrio in the water. Although the man had no recent history of cholera attack, Greig concluded, “This man is probably a chronic ‘carrier’ of long standing, and harbours the comma bacillus in his gall-bladder or biliary passages.”63 The human carrier theory provided a racial perspective to bacteriology in the tropics in indentifying native bodies as polluting objects. In 1916, Greig was withdrawn for wartime vaccine production in the CRI. He was soon posted to Mesopotamia, where he spent most of the war.64 The timing of his withdrawal from cholera research was inopportune, as there was a great increase of cholera incidence in Bengal and the United Provinces during the war, particularly in 1917. The war also led to shortages in supplies of potassium permanganate used to disinfect wells.65 Greig’s departure, typical as we have seen of most colonial investigations in plague, cholera, rabies, and antivenin, which were undertaken by individual initiatives and abandoned because of imperial, military, and personal priorities, once again put an abrupt end to research on the impact of cholera on human bodies in India. This was followed by years of epidemiological research on cholera in India and abroad. Greig’s research, driven by his previous research in typhoid and his collaboration with scientists in Europe, was anomalistic within the wider trend of colonial research in cholera as conducted by D. D. Cunningham, Rogers, and others. Following his departure, cholera research in India, under the funding of the IRFA, returned to the question of the climate, water, and environment of India. Henceforth, the “field,” rather than the human body, dominated cholera research in India. Medical men sought to establish that it was indeed the tropical climate and environment that caused cholera. While Greig’s departure led to the end of research in India on cholera and the human body, research on typhoid and the human body continued in Europe. This development disconnected typhoid research from cholera since the interwar years. An important aspect of the subsequent epidemiological years was in the link between cholera and typhoid—the link that had informed the research of Greig and his contemporaries in Europe was lost. Cholera, unlike typhoid, was linked to tropical water sources. Typhoid, also a waterborne disease with a healthy “carrier,” did not acquire the same climatic or cultural connotations as did cholera for its “invasion” of Europe. Moreover, cholera’s link with water did not pose a problem to bacteriological research and vaccination campaigns. During the First World War, when cholera vaccine research and vaccination campaigns stopped in India, the first mass antityphoid vaccination was undertaken in Britain and Europe.66 With this delinking, cholera was reinvented in the twentieth century as a peculiarly tropical disease.

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Reference: Shading represents rainfall in inches, thick black lines represent cholera mortality per 10,000, and hard lines represent temperature in degrees. Note: In reading the temperature on this diagram, the scale should be taken to rise by ten instead of one as marked.

Figure 6.1. “Madras cholera clock”: cholera mortality, rainfall, temperature, and humidity, 1919. King, “Applied Hygiene in the Tropics,” 14. Reproduced with permission from the Wellcome Library, London.

The Home of Cholera The IRFA, which organized and coordinated medical research in India in this period, took up epidemiological research in the interwar period and its

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surveys produced detailed and fabulous epidemiological maps of cholera. It was around this time that the Bengal and Madras cholera field inquiries were established. These studies confirmed the Gangetic belt as the “permanent” and “natural” home of the disease and established the link between climate and cholera.67 The field surveys drew up a striking “Madras cholera clock” with round-the-year data on cholera mortality, rainfall, temperature, and humidity for all the subdivisions of the Madras presidency.68 Fascinating though it was, however, the cholera clock established neither a periodic correlation nor a causal connection between the occurrences of cholera with the meteorological data that it presented. This link between disease and ecology, as formed in the research on cholera in the twentieth century, was neither unproblematic nor holistic. In medical research, ecology, particularly tropical ecology, was as confined a category as was the laboratory. This turn toward epidemiology in imperial research was due to the interplay of two factors. On the one hand, epidemiology provided cartographic visibility and statistical clarity to disease, which was essential to the purposes of power and governmentality. This tradition had started in mid-Victorian England, where cholera appeared as an epistemological as well as an epidemiological challenge. It offered opportunities for an assertive public health movement promoting state intervention into the lives of the unhealthy urban poor, leading to Snow’s famous cholera maps and their apparently decisive demonstration of the waterborne nature of the disease. This turn toward epidemiology acted as a legitimization of specialist medical authority.69 As a result, cholera marked the emergence of medical geography as a specialization in Britain.70 There was another reason why the links between water, ecology, and cholera were deeply entrenched in British medical thinking. This association was not just a methodological concern, but a moral one as well. Cholera outbreaks proved critical in English public health movements and subsequently in providing pure water for the public from the mid-nineteenth century.71 On the other hand, the question of ecology was particularly significant in European research in cholera because it confirmed its roots within the tropics. This marked an interesting convergence of contagionist and noncontagionist ideas. Both Koch and D. D. Cunningham, while they differed on its modes of transmission, agreed that Bengal was the home of cholera. In European thinking, the spread of cholera in Europe were inescapably linked to European links with the tropics. By situating cholera firmly within the confines of the Gangetic basin, European scientists and colonial officials sought to exorcise Europe from the problematic of both cholera in particular and of the tropics in general, and to that extent from the consequences of colonialism itself. These researches confirmed nineteenth-century British medical thinking around cholera and sustained the intellectual continuum between colonial diseases and tropical climate and culture. There was no fundamental contradiction between bacteriological and epidemiological investigations in the twentieth-century search for

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the causality of cholera. Both served to establish cholera as endemic to tropical India, either in its water resources and climate or in its inhabitants. The surveys of the IRFA established that cholera was an epidemic disease with an endemic center. It tended to recur repeatedly in river deltaic tracts of all the major Indian rivers, such as the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Kavery. The outbreaks commenced in the towns or villages on the banks of these and other rivers, the infection then rapidly and systematically spread down the waterways; “there is no question that, in endemic areas, cholera spontaneously appears, year after year, in the same villages and towns.”72 A. B. Fry, the sanitary commissioner of Bengal, declared that these epidemiological studies had confirmed Bengal as the “permanent home” of cholera.73 This was a conscious return to the British medical ideas articulated almost a hundred years previously by William Twining that the climate of Bengal had a “remarkable influence” on cholera.74 This was also the period when epidemiological mapping of other diseases in the tropics such as malaria dominated international medical research and the concerns of the League of Nations. The most prominent example was Patrick Hehir’s Malaria in India, published in 1927, which presented the first malaria map of India consisting of the “Endemiology, Epidemiology and Ætiology” of malaria in India.75 It also contained a geological map of malaria, correlating the occurrences of the disease with the rise and fall of water tables.76 The epideological mapping of diseases in India marked the beginning of a practice of linking epidemiology in India with sciences like geology and meteorology, which had developed over the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in India and had helped in the nineteenth-century geographical and topographical survey and mapping of the Indian subcontinent.77 The vast data and statistics accumulated by the British in over a hundred years of mapping in India became relevant in the epidemiological studies of the 1920s in identifying the causality of diseases in the tropics. Epidemiology finally confirmed India as the home of cholera. What constituted this home of the disease? In medical terms, the category of a “home” of a disease was an ambiguous concept. Pasteur’s and Koch’s germ theory asserted the universality and ubiquity of germs, while later bacteriological researches identified the human body as the site of infection. Twentieth-century epidemiology and biomedicine identified the environment and ecology as the critical factor in the spread of germs. This suggested that tropics provided ideal climatic and ecological conditions for diseases. This theory was most clearly pursued in cholera research, where the attempt was to scientifically determine its link with the tropics through maps, statistics, and meteorology. There were several attempts at using meteorological data to link cholera with tropical climate in the early decades of the twentieth century. This, as we shall see, also has shaped twenty-first-century cholera research through satellite mapping of climatic patterns. William G. Hunter started the trend in Egypt in 1883 when he used meteorological data of fourteen years to show that the particular outbreak in Egypt was due to “favourable” weather conditions.78 In the interwar years,

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Leonard Rogers made the first serious and concerted attempt to do so for the entire Indian subcontinent. After a long and distinguished career in India during which he had accumulated vast meteorological data, Rogers produced his report on cholera and climate in 1926 on his return to London.79 He sought to create the first empirical link between cholera and the tropical climate, and to provide sustenance to a conviction that had been nurtured for almost a hundred years in British India. Within this grand scope, the report confirmed very little. Rogers was unable to link rainfall patterns or temperature directly with cholera, but he established a direct correlation between absolute humidity and the occurrence of cholera. He found a regular decline or disappearance of the disease in all parts of India when the absolute humidity fell to or below 0.400 (90). Rogers, however, failed to establish any causal link between this correlation of humidity and the life of the vibrio. Beyond this climatic analysis, another focus of his report was on the annual movements of pilgrims in India. Every twelfth year, two million people assembled in Hardwar in late March or early April and these gatherings were often followed by an epidemic of cholera in the neighboring region of Punjab. The same was the case with the pilgrimages in Allahabad, which led to cholera outbreaks in the United Provinces. Similar cases were observed in western and southern India as well (88–89). Despite a very limited accomplishment, Rogers’s research was acclaimed by British medical men as one that provided scientificity to many of the nineteenthcentury assumptions about disease in India and eventually helped to establish the idea of the “home” of cholera. Clifford A. Gill (IMS) noted that Rogers’s report had “proved” a timeless idea: “it had always been recognized in India that cholera epidemics were in some obscure way correlated with meteorological conditions, but . . . no one had yet succeeded in giving an adequate explanation of the peculiar features presented by cholera epidemics that those shrewd observers, Bryden, Cunningham and Bellow had relied upon in upholding, almost as an article of faith” (91).80 Rogers’s report was quoted and referred to several times in later years, despite the rather tenuous link that it created between cholera and climate. The report and its appreciation by IMS/British medical men marked one of several returns to the nineteenth-century problematic of cholera, reinvented in twentieth-century epidemiology. The report reaffirmed the idea of the tropics as an amorphous yet enduring entity. While the report was celebrated for its statistical acumen, the adoption of its recommendations posed a problem for the British Indian medical establishment. Since Rogers had identified the prevalence of humidity and the pilgrimages as the two main factors for cholera outbreaks, the only preventive measure was in compulsory vaccination against cholera of all pilgrims before they reached the fairs (91). British scientists revered the report for its statistical acumen, but its suggestion of mass vaccination of pilgrims was left unattended. The Central Board of Health of the GOI regarded Rogers’s recommendation of

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vaccination as “revolutionary” but in 1930 the board “unanimously” rejected it as “impractical, inexpedient, and even dangerous.”81 This was despite the fact that almost forty years earlier, Haffkine had carried out his cholera inoculations in different parts of the country, predominantly among the poor, without facing much public outrage in India. The government finally acted on Rogers’s recommendations in 1936, following a serious cholera outbreak in Allahabad and other fairs. They ordered compulsory cholera vaccination for all Pandarpur pilgrims, and inoculations took place without any incident. This localized vaccination campaign was continued for the next five years, and it was only in 1944 that the Central Board of Health recommended it for the rest of the country.82 By this time, the Indian Pasteur institutes had become marginal to cholera research and vaccine production. These institutes undertook very little research on cholera vaccine, and by 1940 private commercial firms manufactured cholera vaccines rather than the Pasteur institutes or the CRI.83 The reluctance of the British officials to adopt large-scale cholera vaccination in India was a complex historical phenomenon. There were several factors that contributed to it. The first was the opposition among Indians toward vaccination, which Arnold has documented in the case of smallpox in the nineteenth century.84 The second and more important reason was British attitudes toward Indian habits and beliefs, especially where introducing Western medical and sanitary measures was concerned. There was a tendency among British officials to attribute the failure of or the lack of inoculations in India to Indian cultural prejudices and social fears. This was concomitant with, as discussed in the case of plague in Bombay, the general reservations against vaccination among British medical men. The public health commissioner of India, J. D. Graham, blamed the ryots (Indian peasants) for the lack of success of cholera vaccination: “anyone intimately conversant with the native peoples realized how difficult it was in the absence of an epidemic to get the ryots to submit to it.”85 He did not refer to Haffkine’s cholera campaigns, which took place successfully despite official skepticism. Robert Harvey (DGIMS) on the other hand noted that when Haffkine started his cholera vaccination in Calcutta (Harvey was then the surgeon-general of Bengal), several residents evaded the vaccinations initially. However, after the fear subsided they soon had themselves vaccinated in large numbers. In other parts of the country too he saw Indians coming “in their hundreds” to be inoculated and even paid 2 annas [the sixteenth part of a rupee] each “for the privilege.” This left Harvey convinced that “Indians were a strange people.”86 Statistically, vaccination numbers rose whenever there were government initiatives in its favor. Arnold has shown that the number of cholera inoculations in India rose from only 1.5 million in 1932 to nearly 7 million in 1935 and to 10.8 million in 1938. There was a corresponding decline in the number of fatal cholera cases from 337,000 in 1930 to 97,566 in 1939.87 Throughout the early 1940s, at a time when the Raj was in a precarious situation in India

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because of the war, the Quit India movement of 1942, and the famine of 1943, inoculation numbers went up steadily, without any political incident. In 1942 almost 13 million people were inoculated, in 1943 almost 20 million, and in 1944 the number rose to 29 million.88 The final factor in the British reluctance to practice vaccination in India on a large scale was the teleological preoccupation of British medical men in identifying cholera with tropical climate through epidemiological mapping. In their thinking, the best mode of treating the disease was by containing it “in the same villages, year after year.” The maps that the IRFA surveys developed provided that possibility. On the other hand, the close link created by the British between cholera and the tropics had also internalized a fatalism in colonial medical thinking about the possibilities of the eradication of cholera from India. Given this fatalism and climatic determinism, there was little hope of or effort in eradicating cholera through large-scale vaccination or even by providing cleaner water. The epidemiological turn, however, did not go unopposed. A few of those medical men who served in regions where cholera outbreak frequently took place suggested that other considerations needed to be taken into account. In 1928, W. C. Ross, the director of public health of Bihar and Orissa, complained against the trend to focus singularly on the waterborne and specifically the riverborne theory, which according to him, failed to explain one vital fact: how cholera traveled from Bengal to north India against the flow of the River Ganges.89 He questioned the singularity of the consensus that had emerged about cholera being a waterborne disease: I maintain that nothing was actually proved than the possibility of cholera being water-borne: nothing more could be proved from any single example, and I consider that the water-borne theory is based on the obsession of an illogical and erroneous idea which has been accepted and raised to the dignity of a theory of transmission because of the clearness and completeness of proof in an isolated case [Hamburg-Altona], and because of the great publicity which it received. (2)

Ross referred to Greig’s earlier claim that cholera germs did not live for long outside the human body and that the original source of every outbreak was an infected person (3–4). According to him, water was only one of the several mediums of transmission. The spread of the vibrio from human to human could take place in various ways, for instance, via human excreta and flies (4). He suspected that the waterborne theory was well entrenched in India; for a long time there had been a prejudice among the British about the river waters of India, which Indians used commonly for their everyday domestic purposes. There was another important fact that Ross came across in the Gangetic plains, north of the Bengal delta. The wells, which constituted the drinking water supply for the houses, could only disseminate infection among a small population of the household using them and could not be the means of transmission in a

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widespread epidemic. Ross thereby concluded that water played a minor part in the transmission of cholera (9–10). Nevertheless, within the predominant practices of imperial medicine, the home of the disease had been identified. While the report by Rogers sought to link cholera with climate, another prominent report by J. Taylor (director, CRI) sought to reiterate the other important nineteenth-century link, that between cholera and water, or “Bengal waters” as the report referred to it.90 Taylor summarized the epidemiological studies under the IRFA between 1920 and 1940. In doing so, his objective was at the same time local and global. His aim was, in his own words, to identify the “permanent endemic areas which form a source of [cholera] for spread to other areas and eventually to other parts of the world” (24). To that extent, as we shall see, Taylor’s report was a precursor to the surveys undertaken by the WHO in the 1950s. The report focused on the question of the survival of the V. cholerae in “Bengal waters.” Taylor challenged Greig’s theory to suggest that the V. cholerae persisted in “Bengal waters” up to sixteen days, thereby tilting the balance once again in favor of the waterborne theory (28). How did Taylor arrive at such a conclusion? Through a combination of laboratory and field studies. The “field enquiries” that he referred to tested large samples of Bengal open water resources, but they did not did not test the same sample of water after sixteen days for the presence of the vibrio. Rather, the water sources in the immediate vicinity of a cholera case were tested and were found to contain the germ for up to sixteen days after the onset of that particular case (27). The second method used was to identify the conditions in which the germs survived in water. It was found that the germ did not survive without a minimum salt and organic matter content, both of which were found to be high in the Bengal waters (23). However, water from any other geographical region was not subjected to the same test. After thus establishing the link between cholera and “Bengal waters,” Taylor questioned the carrier thesis of Greig. He suggested that the carrier was unlikely to transmit infection at any prolonged interval after primary infection, since the germ had a “very short persistence” in the intestinal tract of the convalescent (26). He insisted that the period in which a person might be infective was “a few days only.” This conclusion was not based on morbid anatomy or laboratory research but on statistical and epidemiological analysis. He drew evidence from a “field enquiry” conducted in the Khulna district of Bengal where in the majority of cholera convalescents the V. cholerae could not be isolated from the stools later than the fifth day from the onset of the attack. The maximum period of persistence was thirteen days (27). However, what was not specified was if (as Greig claimed) the cholerae vibrio were to survive in the intestine for a long period in a dormant state, would they continue to pass through the stool? Nevertheless, the Khulna field inquiry helped Taylor to reverse Greig’s findings and draw his most important conclusion, that it was water rather than the human intestine that was the home of cholera. The “persistence [of V. cholerae] is longer in water than in the intestinal tract” (27).

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The report stressed both the home and the permanence of the incidence of cholera in Bengal. Taylor described Bengal as the “endemic centre” where cholera was “permanently present” (29). To tackle such a problem he suggested undertaking “general sanitation.” The report made no recommendations for large-scale vaccination (31). It is important to note here that by this time local sanitation in India was no longer the responsibility of the imperial government. In 1919, the Montague-Chelmsford reforms introduced the concept of “dyarchy,” transferring functions such as education, public health, sanitation, and agriculture (referred to as “transferred” subjects) to provincial legislative bodies, while retaining others such as finance, revenue, and home affairs as “reserved” or “imperial” ones. This indirectly increased the number of elected Indian members in district boards and municipal corporations, since the authority to regulate local government bodies was placed in the hands of the popularly elected ministers, whose constituents naturally wanted more devolution of power.91 The cholera policy of the GOI continued to stress epidemiological mapping, and in the process the mapping of cholera became an end in itself. Little progress took place in the identification and control of the microbe itself. This is not to suggest that cholera research stopped altogether in colonial India during this period.92 Some research did continue in the CSTM and AIIHPH (both in Calcutta); there was also a bacteriophage inquiry conducted at the Pasteur Institute in Shillong.93 But there was a definite shift under IRFA, the imperial funding agency, toward investing most of the resources in epidemiological and statistical mapping rather than in laboratory research or in adopting measures of active disease prevention. This policy shift also marked an important institutional shift. By the 1940s, research in plague, cholera, and rabies had stopped in the Indian Pasteur institutes. The remote hilltop laboratories that almost half a century ago had promised to eradicate all the diseases of the tropics had become marginal to dealing with the problems of disease in the tropics. It is interesting that in the twentieth century, unlike the nineteenth century, in spite of the advances made in bacteriology and laboratory medicine there was an even greater acceptance of climatic theories, particularly for diseases in the tropics. In the nineteenth century, anticontagionists had adopted miasmatic theories in the face of growing international criticism and the fear of the spread of cholera from India to Europe and the United States to demonstrate the localized nature of the disease. With the advent of germ theory and laboratory research by the end of the century, these ideas were challenged. In the twentieth century, there was a robust return to climatic theories in understanding diseases, particularly those of the tropics. The tropical laboratory, more than any other, incorporated the climatic and environmental factors in its study of microbes. This return to the ecology of tropics within modern germ theory was a moral turn in which germs were conceptualized not only as microscopic organisms but were also seen as parts of the tropical whole, peculiarly conditioned by and uniquely “at home” in the tropical environment and climate. It is this ecological

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Figure 6.2. Mapping of cholera endemicity in Bengal, 1934–48. S. Swaroop, “Index of Endemicity,” 1089. Reproduced with permission from the World Health Organization.

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turn of twentieth-century medicine that pathologized the tropics inescapably, rather than the advent of the laboratory within the tropical space.94 This moral turn in understanding disease and germs in the tropics was also a global phenomenon, subscribed to by the institutions of international healthcare. The mapping of cholera in the waters and ecologies of tropical Bengal, which had been carried out by IRFA in the interwar years, assumed even greater significance within international regimes of healthcare in the postwar period. The practice of localizing diseases and the malaises of the poor became integral to approaches of modern international and national health and development strategies. Postcolonial nation states and international organizations such as the WHO adopted epidemiology to similarly localize disease problems.

International Health and the Fear of Cholera Despite the identification of the cholera vibrio and the intense mapping of its home, the nineteenth-century fear of cholera in Europe remained. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries it returned, intermittently, as the fear of the unknown. The 1959 WHO report by Robert H. Pollitzer on cholera marked the epidemiological dead end of international cholera research.95 While Taylor’s report summarized cholera research in India over the last two decades, Pollitzer’s report encapsulated international cholera research carried out in Europe, Asia, and America. Internationally, laboratory research in cholera had remained important, but the emphasis was on studying the life of the vibrio in water and other objects, rather than on its nature, toxicity, and how it infected the human body. The most important concern in this research was on “survival in water.” Pollitzer drew from detailed surveys conducted in different rivers of the world. In experiments conducted in the laboratory on the Rostock River water in Russia, the cholera vibrio was found to survive for one day at 30 degrees centigrade, for two to three days at 20 degrees centigrade, five days at 10 degrees centigrade, and at least 23 days at 6 degrees centigrade. Pollitzer found that the water in the Shanghai River in China was unsuitable for the cholera vibrio, and this was similar to Hankin’s findings for the Yamuna River water. He ascribed this to the “heavy contamination of the Shanghai surface-waters with various bacteria.”96 The report also drew from W. D. B. Read’s study of the survival of cholera vibrio in autoclaved samples of water taken from Calcutta, but not raw surface water.97 Despite these eclectic laboratory results, the report came to the conclusion that cholera could survive and multiply in the “natural waters in the Calcutta area.”98 While presenting this research, Pollitzer also returned repeatedly to the question of survival of the cholera vibrio in the environment in or on substances such as earth and dust, cloth and cotton, leather and rubber (six hours), and paper (“20 hours on a postcard”). Tests were also conducted on Chinese banknotes (four hours), metals (silver coins), tobacco (twenty-four hours), meat (in win-

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ter one to two weeks), fish and selfish, whey, butter, salt, sugar, honey, bread and cakes, cereals, potatoes, onions and garlic, green vegetables (particularly in cucumbers), fruits, beverages (coffee, beer, wine, tea, cocoa), etc (172–80). In all this the survival of cholera germs in the human intestine was overlooked. Pollitzer also reiterated the climatic link in suggesting that “differences in the prevailing temperature were largely, if not solely, responsible for the marked differences observed in regard to the length of survival of the causative organisms in cholera stools in India and Europe respectively” (171). This conclusion too was based on interesting findings. The vibrio was found to survive in septic tanks of Batavia for not longer than twenty-four hours, while in Europe it survived in cesspools and manure for up to two weeks. Although Pollitzer could not establish that tropical temperature was more suitable for the vibrio, what was important for him was the evidence that temperature did have a role to play in the life of the vibrio, something that Rogers had failed to establish in India. Therefore, environment, ecology, and climate forced themselves into the cholera laboratory. In doing so, these factors introduced within the laboratory the racial, imperial, and cultural ideas of the tropics. Rather than making the laboratory more holistic, it had brought cholera research to a cul-de-sac. This twentieth-century study of cholera was also a reiteration of the fear of contagion from the so-called Asiatic malaise, a fear that sustained and encouraged the environmental interest in cholera. Pollitzer’s WHO report was primarily addressed to American and European audiences, and in the concluding remarks he reiterated the fear of Asiatic cholera for Europe and warned against “undue optimism.” He admitted that the system of cholera control adopted globally was unable to deal with the threat of its spread in an effective manner, and that a threat to Europe was omnipresent. He wrote about a temporary and fragile “equilibrium” that existed in India between germs, water, and sanitation measures, which could be easily disturbed, leading to a breakdown of the sanitary defenses against cholera. One has to fear, therefore, that, should such a disequilibrium ever come about—and this would be apt to promote a spread of the infection from the endemic areas to the hitherto cholera-free regions through the uncontrolled movement of large population groups—cholera would once more become a major menace. (981)

The WHO reports of the 1950s showed that cholera remained a regular feature of twentieth-century India. It returned regularly in waves of epidemics; starting from the peak, each successive epidemic appeared to be reduced in magnitude.99 In the overall mortality statistics of cholera in British India (fig. 6.3), periods of decline were followed by periods of high mortality rates. The highest peaks of the 1940s were comparable to other peaks in previous decades. This was before the 1960s, when a more virulent form of cholera outbreak occurred with even greater mortality numbers.

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89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19

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Figure 6.3. Cholera mortality in British India, 1889–1945. Compiled from Annual Reports of the Sanitary Commissioner with the Government of India, 1889–1919; Annual Reports of the Public Health Commissioner with the Government of India, 1920–45; Statistical Appendices to Annual Reports of the Public Health Commissioner with the Government of India for the Period 1940–1944.

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By the 1950s the endemicity of cholera in India was firmly established when the American Geographical Association produced a gigantic “Map of the World Distribution of Cholera” claiming that “cholera has existed in India since the beginning of recorded history” without presenting any such records, and yet reasserting India as the “permanent home” of the disease.100 The map and the assertion drew from the whole range of epidemiological studies undertaken from the 1920s by Rogers, Russell, Swaroop, and others.101 Contemporary research continued in two areas, water and climate. Research on Bengal waters reiterated “the long recognized connection between the incidence of cholera and changing weather conditions in Bengal.” The theory proposed was that in hot and dry weather algae in the Bengal village water tanks raised the pH of the water so high that the cholera vibrio was favored over other organisms.102 Later research, however, showed that there were far too many factors that affected the pH level in water enough to affect the life of the cholera vibrio, such as industrial waste and metallic pipes, none of which can be identified only with Bengal.103 Consequently, little progress took place in controlling the microbe itself or in observing how it affected the human body. It was only in 1959 that a pathologist, Dr. Sambhu Nath De (1915–85), who worked among dead cholera patients in the pathological laboratory in Calcutta, demonstrated that cholera bacteria secrete enterotoxin in the human intestine.104 Based on his findings, De provided a new definition of the locality of cholera: “cholera should be regarded as a local infection with the bacteria confined to the superficial mucosa of the small intestine.”105 He reiterated Greig’s claim about the healthy carrier made forty years before: “‘Contact or healthy carriers’ play an important role in the spread and in the maintenance of the infection in epidemic areas like Calcutta.”106 The discovery of the cholera toxin eventually promoted research toward identifying a treatment to neutralize the toxin. The next generation of cholera vaccines was developed in the 1960s by SEATO (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization) based on De’s findings and used in East Pakistan.107 De’s discovery—that that the cholera toxin kills by stimulating the secretion of isotonic fluids into the bowel—paved the way for oral rehydration therapy in the late 1960s as well as oral administration of vaccines to induce mucosal immunity. Oral rehydration therapy dramatically brought down the cholera case fatality rate from 30 percent in 1980 to around 3.6 percent in 2000 in Bangladesh.108 De’s work on the healthy carrier of cholera had a different political premise from that of Greig’s. In Cholera: Its Pathology and Pathogenesis, De provided a wider explication of his work on cholera toxins. He drew a wide scale of the historical and geographical spread of cholera over the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and argued that “cholera should not be regarded as something natural and innate to the soil and atmosphere of any particular place.” He also suggested that “Asia and particularly the city of Calcutta is not necessarily the original and natural home of cholera. My contention is perhaps diametrically opposite to the prevailing belief.”109 He explained that cholera was ubiquitous

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in nature; the cholera vibrio lay dormant, and had remained so for centuries, in healthy carriers in different parts of the world, including Europe. It flared up only when there were famines, war, and general distress affecting the population. Through a detailed analysis of evidence from outbreaks in Asia and Europe, he challenged the theory that cholera traveled from Asia to Europe in the nineteenth century. He suggested that on the one hand, there was little evidence to establish such a transit, and that on the other, cholera was as endemic to Europe as it was to Bengal, since there had been sporadic outbreaks in Europe even before 1817 that were either not diagnosed correctly or not recorded properly.110 Thus, De sought to redefine cholera as a universal problem. He opposed the conclusions drawn by Bulletin WHO report on cholera in 1955 by Pollitzer and Swaroop, which categorized cholera as an “Asiatic” disease.111 For De, the problem of cholera lay dormant anywhere there was human life. In the 1950s and 1960s—the era of the international epidemiological mapping of cholera—De’s suggestions of cholera being a universal problem, rather than a local one, received little attention. By then, cholera was seen clearly as a tropical disease rather than a global problem. De’s 1959 paper in Nature, which established the presence of toxins, was virtually unnoticed among the contemporary scientific community, although it was later recognized by scientists working on cholera toxins as the “cornerstone” of antitoxin vaccine research.112 De suffered from two kinds of marginalization. First, his work in the Calcutta pathological laboratory was geographically and epistemologically marginal to the contemporary research and concerns of the metropolitan scientific community. Second, his research findings were incongruous and marginal to the main trajectories of scientific attitude toward cholera in the twentieth century. De died in 1985, and in his lifetime he was never elected a fellow of any Indian academy of science nor did he receive any major domestic or international award.113 David Arnold has argued that cholera was “familiarized” to India in the nineteenth century in the course of its regular occurrences, while it appeared shocking to Europe.114 There was an even more elaborate process in the twentieth century by which the disease was firmly situated within India and at the same time disconnected from the concerns and the consciousness of the West. Despite the intense mapping inside and outside the laboratory, the cause of cholera has remained subliminal. Scientists and governments have failed to acquire a deeper understanding of how and why cholera affects the human body. Cholera resides neither exclusively in the small intestine nor in water. More than any other disease, it was borne by poverty. Bacteriologists and epidemiologists had noted this from the nineteenth century. While vaccinating the inhabitants of Calcutta, Haffkine noticed that “the intellectual part of the population almost does not suffer from cholera at all.”115 Pollitzer admitted the factor of poverty in the endemicity of cholera, writing that “cholera has become mainly a disease affecting the underprivileged classes of the population.”116 Even in Victorian Britain cholera was identified as a disease of the poor.117 De provided a rare

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glimpse into understanding the disease in terms of the stress of poverty on the body of the poor. He argued that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries cholera appeared with the same periodicity in both Asia and Europe. To explain this he proposed a theory of “local revival after long quiescence.” He showed that there were sudden and sporadic outbreaks of cholera in Europe as well in the twentieth century that could be explained by the fact that the dormant pathogen that inhabits the human body flares up in situations of bodily stress, particularly in times of war and famine when “the resistance to infection was lowered.”118 It is worthwhile to note that during the devastating Bengal famine of 1943, cholera mortality rates shot up in India to 459,931, almost as high as anytime in the twentieth century and in contrast to the gradual decline in the late 1930s (see fig. 6.3).119 Twentieth-century cholera research has been seen as crucial to discussions on “medical geography” and in creating the “convergence” of pathological and geographical factors. It led to the coinage of a new term and a new pathological entity: “geogens,” which are described as “pathological complexes” that consist of both physical environments and cultural habits.120 Recent research has reestablished cholera as a disease of locality; the Gangetic-Brahmaputra basin has been identified as the endemic region or the “reservoir.” Contemporary studies using satellite technology on climatic influences of cholera have renewed some of the older links between environment and cholera. Such studies have also been shaped by the growing concerns over the effects of climate change and environmental deterioration on disease dynamics. Cholera, by its recurring presence in certain climatic zones, has been a particularly important epidemic for such studies. These studies have reiterated the Gangetic and Brahmaputra basin as the “native habitat” of cholera. Here too, cholera has appeared more prevalent in lower deltaic belts than in cooler higher locales and has appeared to wax and wane in cycles from three to six years. These studies, however, have failed to establish any causal relationship between cholera and the tropical climate and environment, and between cholera and its home.121 At the same time, cases of cholera are disappearing not only from the focus of the western nations but also from official records in India. A recent study published in Bulletin WHO shows that cases of cholera in India are extremely underreported and that local authorities were reluctant to acknowledge them for “fear of societal repercussion,” as cholera represents a breakdown or a lack of sanitation and clean water supply. The report presented the overall number of cases of cholera in India to be 222,038, a figure several times higher than the one reported to the WHO (37,783) from 1997 to 2006. However, the report estimated that the real number was perhaps even higher.122 Endemicity of disease is an economic and political issue. The medical efforts at locating the causality of cholera in tropical climates, waters, and bodies have thereby failed to identify the means of eradicating the disease. Cholera is no more a biological phenomenon than water is an ecological or environmen-

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tal entity. Both essentially represent political matrices. Water and vaccines are resources, access to which is economically determined. Even with the discovery of new vaccines, mass vaccination programs, and identification of new sources of clean water, the bodies of the poor remain susceptible to pathogens. It is therefore important to conceptualize disease and germs, particularly in the tropics, in terms of inequitable distribution of resources and the consequences of colonialism and global capitalism. In the twenty-first century, when water resources, particularly those of the poorer countries, are being privatized, it acquires particular significance. The privatization of water in India and Africa is going ahead in spite of mounting evidence that it leads to epidemics. In India, the domestic bottled water companies have been aggressive in securing the water resources of the poor. In South Africa in August 2000, when cholera broke out in the Dolphin Coast it turned out to be the worst cholera epidemic in South Africa’s history, infecting over twenty-five thousand people and killing about three hundred by 2002. According to researchers at the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) of South Africa, the practice of making people pay the full cost of drinking water was “the direct cause” of causing cholera in the region. Millions of poor people could not afford to pay the rate charged for drinking water and were therefore compelled to use polluted water. An “aggressive group” of European utility companies are seeking to privatize the world’s drinking water. The world’s three largest water companies, France’s Suez and Vivendi Environnement, and British-based Thames Water, owned by Germany’s RWE AG, have since 1990 expanded into every region of the world.123 The privatization of water has been accompanied by the seemingly shifting “home” of cholera in the twenty-first century. In 2007, according to the WHO, about 62 percent of cholera cases and 56.7 percent of cholera deaths were reported from the WHO African region.124 This relocation of cholera to Africa is not due to African soil, water, or climatic conditions, but to the issues of poverty, civil war, and water privatization affecting the continent. Cholera has finally found its home in the tropics, secured in its tropical location.

Colonial Disease and the Problem of Mapping In January 2010, a devastating earthquake in Haiti claimed more than 200,000 lives. The earthquake and its consequent human suffering led to a cholera outbreak of 60,240 cases and around 3,333 deaths. Along with undertaking measures to control the epidemic, European and American health experts also sought to identify the origins of the outbreak, and once again cholera seemed to have invaded from Asia. The mayor of Mirabelais in the Artibonite Valley, based on a report by the French epidemiologist Renaud Piarroux, blamed the camp housing the UN peacekeeping troops from Nepal as the source of the epidemic. Although UN spokespersons denied any connection, protests erupted against

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the UN peacekeeping forces.125 Subsequent laboratory comparison of different strains by scientists at Harvard showed that although the Haitian strains were similar to isolates from Latin America and Africa, they were most closely related to recent South Asian isolates (the 2002 and 2008 outbreaks in Bangladesh). The report concluded that cholera in Haiti came “from a distant geographic source.”126 It, however, remains unclear how cholera actually entered Haiti through human contact, and no evidence was available that troops from Nepal introduced it. The recent cholera outbreak in Haiti and the response to it reiterated three issues. One, outbreaks of cholera continue to arouse nineteenthcentury memories of the invasion of diseases from the East. Despite the fact that cholera has been a globalized disease for several centuries, the latest outbreak was described in Science as “cholera’s new global assault.”127 Second, the theory of healthy human carriers has reinforced the idea of the geographical roots of cholera. Laboratory research, environmental studies, and cultural prejudice have reinforced one another. Finally, the debate about its origin has tended to obfuscate the fact that cholera outbreaks, in Haiti and elsewhere, are a result of long-standing and more recent human suffering caused by poverty, lack of clean water, political instability, and environmental disasters.128 The history of bacteriological and epidemiological research on cholera in India shows that the real divergence in the tropics was not between the laboratory and society or the environment, but between the laboratory and praxis. This was the characteristic of not just laboratory medicine but also of colonial science itself. The colonial institutions and their sciences, rich and multifaceted though they were, evolved in disjunction with and in denial of the social and economic realities that embedded disease in the tropical colonies. In the United States, the theory of healthy carriers helped the evolution of public health ideas from environmental sanitation to personal cleanliness, “from the filth theory to the germ theory of disease.”129 In the process, bacteriology transformed public health activity. The identification of human carriers of typhoid demonstrated the health benefits that developed from the application of bacteriology into public health in America. By targeting the attack on typhoid to those individuals who could be identified as “carriers” by laboratory methods, the health department streamlined its efforts.130 This was not the case in colonial India, where the identification of the cholera vibrio or its location, either in water or in the human intestine, did not translate itself into or vitalize similar public health activity. Locating and identifying the vibrio remained an end in itself. Did epidemiological and environmental studies liberate cholera research from the confines of the bacteriological laboratory? The answer to this question lies in the fact that in medical terms, the tropical environment was as structured and confined a space as was the modern laboratory. In imperial cholera research, the laboratory and epidemiological studies were not distinct entities; both were involved in the same problematic of identifying cholera within the tropics, in tropical water or tropical inhabitants. By these intensive mappings

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and investigations, cholera was not only located to its “home” but was also dislocated from the problematic of Europe, along with issues of colonial poverty. The failure of the laboratories to devise the means of eradicating cholera was a failure of this medical paradigm. Consequently, cholera eradication policy in the twentieth century struggled for cognizance between the environment and the laboratory. Cholera policy of the WHO moved constantly between sanitation measures and vaccine research. In the 1960s the WHO, encouraged by the epidemiological studies and the Pollitzer report, advocated sanitary measures as the mainstay of WHO’s battle against cholera. It began a massive project of installing deep tube wells in eastern India and Bangladesh. The consequences were disasterous. It led to widespread arsenic poisoning produced from the deep tube wells that kills more people today in these parts than does cholera.131 On the other hand, the development of effective treatment against cholera has remained elusive.132 The WHO remained unconvinced about any use of vaccines for eradicating cholera until the 1970s.133 Even in the 1990s, the WHO actively discouraged the use of cholera vaccines “under any circumstances.”134 The optimism about eradicating cholera through cleaner water or by ensuring better hygiene, which was expressed by the WHO and other organizations in the 1970s, has now disappeared. In 2001 the WHO stated that although hygiene, food safety, and sanitation were important measures, drastic improvements in these fields were difficult to achieve in most cholera endemic areas, which are also poverty stricken. It reiterated the need for a new vaccine for the successful eradication of the disease.135

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Conclusion This book has traced the intellectual, social, and cultural history of bacteriology and laboratory medicine in British India. In the process of finding its home in India, bacteriology led to the creation of several new institutions and made unique intellectual connections with imperialism and tropical medicine. Bacteriology was introduced to India through a long public movement in which British physicians, scientists, and administrators as well as Indian elites participated. Several institutions, such as the Imperial Bacteriological Laboratory at Poona, which later moved to Mukteswar; the Pasteur institutes at Kasauli, Coonoor, Rangoon, Shillong, and Calcutta; and the Central Research Institute (Kasauli), were established. Along with these institutions, several provincial bacteriological laboratories functioned in the major cities and district towns, the most prominent among which were the Bacteriological Laboratory at Agra, the Plague Research Laboratory in Bombay, the King Institute at Guindy near Madras (Chennai), and the Cholera Research Laboratory in Calcutta. There were also administrative bodies, such as the IRFA and the Bacteriological Department of the GOI, that funded and administered bacteriological research in India. From the end of the nineteenth century, India became a theater for bacteriological research and experimentation. Prominent scientists from France, Italy, Germany, and Britain visited India in search of an ideal field for experiments with germs and vaccines. Bacteriologists such as Koch, Haffkine, Hankin, Brunton, Leonard Rogers, Paul-Louis Simond, Lustig, Yersin, the Cunninghams (D. D. and John) conducted research in Indian institutes for different lengths of time. They produced vaccines for various diseases including rabies, surra, plague, typhoid, cholera, malaria, and snakebites. These vaccines were used for British army personnel serving in different parts of the world. Mass but sporadic vaccination campaigns were conducted among the civilian population in different parts of India: in the cities, villages, hospitals, slums, jails, railway stations, and pilgrim sites. Vaccinations were also conducted at the Pasteur institutes in the remote hill stations, to which Indians traveled to be inoculated, particularly against rabies. In the process, millions of people were vaccinated, often without any major instance of resistance. In analyzing laboratory research, vaccination campaigns, and the modes of establishment and functioning of these institutions, this book has narrated two concurrent processes. First, bacteriology found its home in India through a complex alignment with British imperial and tropical medicine and by creating distinct links between germs and the tropics. At the turn of the nineteenth century, bacteriology appeared in India as a panacea; the discovery of various vaccines provided the vision of a singular prevention of the complex disease realities that

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the British faced in India. British residents in India and the Indian elites viewed the establishment of bacteriological laboratories as part of their crusade against diseases in the tropics. The establishment of a variety of research institutions also reinstated the supposed benefits of Western medicine in the colony, as well as shaped international policies of disease eradication in the tropics in the twentieth century. Second is the duality and tension that emerged in the process within bacteriology as practiced in Europe and in the tropical colonies. In this duality and tension the universalist propositions of bacteriology assumed localist forms in the tropical colonies, in the divergence between Europe and India in the research methodologies for vaccines, in the establishment of the hilltop Pasteur institutes, in ethical principles of animal experimentation, in attitudes toward vectors and vermin, in ideas of climate and vaccine, and in the general conceptions of endemicity of disease and germs. The “tropics” was a complex and even an abstract idea that manifested itself in European medicine beginning in the eighteenth century. For over three centuries it was also an imperial paradigm, a European construct in climatic, social, and cultural terms for a wide range of geographical areas that accompanied the European colonization of tropical regions. It is because of this temporal and spatial diversity that the term “tropics” often aroused contradictory ideas. Yet through its constant reference and usage, it also acquired specificity. Tropics were the “other” of Europe. This book has located the emergence and establishment of a European medical paradigm in such a non-European world. Bacteriology made complex institutional, cultural, and epistemological interventions in colonial medicine, but it simultaneously became morally, methodologically, and institutionally embedded as a colonial science distinct from its metropolitan counterpart. Bacteriological research in the tropics was shaped by the concerns of how tropical climate affected germs and vaccines, by ideas of the tropical wilderness that led bacteriologists to associate vermin with vectors, and by assumptions of the propensity of the waters, soils, and “native” bodies of the tropics for being endemically infected with germs and diseases. While many of these associations have become deeply entrenched in our idea of diseases in the tropics or of the developing world, this book has argued that these associations were neither obvious nor immediate and were sometimes even intangible. Much like the idea of the tropics itself, they were constructed through a historical process and by a tenuous alignment between germs and the tropics. This alignment was accomplished through the convergence of Pasteurian ideology and science with colonial medicine and imperial power and morality. This association between the tropics and germs has been so engrained in the popular and the scientific imagination that Western nations continue to live in fear of an invasion of germs from the East. It is for this association, tenuously and compellingly created between germs and tropical environment, culture, climate, and bodies, that the making of bacteriological knowledge in the tropics appears more composite and complex compared to that in Europe. Laboratory medicine in the tropics, it has been argued,

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more readily included climatic, environmental, cultural, and social factors. In the tropics, more than in Europe, bacteriologists viewed germs as inextricably linked to the culture, society, and environment of the tropics. Bacteriology in the tropics was further shaped by a wide range of social and cultural ideas, such as the view among the British that India was a land of wild animals that needed to be exterminated along with its germs, by the projected masculinity of colonial bacteriologists, and by the conviction that native bodies and environments of the tropics were the hotbeds of germs. Even the foundations of bacteriology in India had a wider objective. The laboratories that the British built there, the vaccines that bacteriologists produced and the bacteriological surveys that they undertook were designed not just to identify and eradicate germs but also to wage a war against the very idea of the tropics, abstract and amorphous a construct though it was. Yet, as explained in the final chapter, this complex constitution of bacteriology in the tropics did not necessarily make it more holistic, since the essential disjuncture in laboratory medicine in the tropics was not between the laboratory and the field, as has been identified for Europe and America, but between medical research and praxis. Underneath these grand imperial and international projects and undertakings, there was the duality of bacteriology in the tropics. Bacteriology brought about new orientations in colonial medicine, but in the process itself became a divided paradigm. Until the end of the nineteenth century, European medical practices in the colonies had two main orientations. On the one hand was the European study and adoption of local flora, pharmacopeia, and indigenous modes of treatment into their own materia medica that started in the seventeenth century. On the other, Europeans introduced their own theories of diseases of hot climates, surgical methods, pharmaceuticals, ideas of hygiene and sanitation, and institutions such as hospitals and dispensaries into the colonies. Bacteriology, or germ theory, introduced a new element to these existing practices. The identification of germs as the cause of diseases, the attenuation of those germs and preparations of vaccines, and the possibility of eradicating diseases appeared as a new hope in colonial medicine at the turn of the century at a time when several epidemic outbreaks in plague, cholera, and yellow fever had challenged the existing modes and practices of European medicine in the tropics. Pasteur institutes appeared as the new way forward in British India beginning in the 1890s. They also became a new form of colonial medical institutions, a step further from the hospitals and dispensaries in the various cities and towns. Like the British Raj, the Indian Pasteur institutes were remote and imposing at the same time, situated in the hilltops and architecturally grand. The transformation of bacteriology in the colonies, as this book has argued, was simultaneously spectacular and subliminal, and ridden with epistemic tension. Through its institutionalization in the tropics, bacteriology was subsumed within the existing medical and social paradigms of European imperialism and was ensconced within the ideas of tropical climate, filth, and culture. A metamorphosis of germ theory took place in the tropics. These marked developmental changes were evident in the debates around the location of colonial bacteriological and Pasteur

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institutes, in the reiteration of the noncontagionist ideas of place and “home” within twentieth-century bacteriology and theories of healthy carriers, in the making of the “colonial bacteriologists” who were not just laboratory scientists, or even public health campaigners and hygienists as in France and the United States, but were also military officers, shikaris, who posed as paternalistic sentinels of the Raj and as saviors of the poor, wretched, and hapless natives. This duality was evident in the way debates were shaped about cruelty in colonial laboratories; British scientists posed as inherently more humane than the natives and rejected any restriction on animal experiments in India at a time when public critique against animal experiments generated strict regulations in Britain. The distinct characteristic of colonial bacteriology led to the uniquely hybrid tradition of antivenin research and in the search for the causality of cholera in India. The duality was also present in the way the debates around the use of live or dead, or active or inactive, vaccines developed distinctly in the tropics and shaped general vaccination policies in the developing world. Despite making these creative links and enjoying the complex lineages, many of the problems that were encountered by bacteriology in the tropics fell through the fissures of this epistemic duality and remained unresolved. The “home” of the cholera vibrio remains elusive; the relationships between tropical climate, germs, and bacteriological research have remained chimerical; the suggestions that blood serums showed racial immunity have remained a medical intrigue; the differences between live and dead vaccines, particularly in the tropics, remains ambiguous; the universal antivenin has remained a mirage and the meaning of tropical diseases itself has remained unclear. Yet, solutions from within and outside the laboratory have continued to be introduced or enforced in the tropics. They consisted of bacteriological and epidemiological surveys, mass vaccination campaigns with live or killed vaccines of high potency, deep tube wells to eradicate cholera, new laboratories for bacteriological investigations, new institutes to undertake epidemiological studies, new technologies for mapping the environmental effect of diseases in the tropics, and massive global investments in tropical medicine. One important implication of this history of the establishment of bacteriology in India is the moral and institutional entrenchment that laboratory medicine made in colonial India in the process. The public debates on Pasteur and germs, the hilltop laboratories, the vaccination campaigns, and the moral justification of animal experimentations, more than the sanitarian, public health, and quarantine measures undertaken by the Raj from the mid-nineteenth century, established laboratories as progressive institutions and validated intensive medical intervention in modern India. Laboratory medicine in India has not faced the type of criticism that it did in Britain or in the United States. The moral and institutional fabric of the intensive and intrusive presence of laboratory medicine visible in the developing countries today, in genome research, serology, organ transplant, stem cell research, and human and animal clinical trials, along with vaccination and vaccine research, was first woven by bacteriological research in the early twentieth century.

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Through the establishment of bacteriological laboratories and vaccination campaigns, India experienced ideological entrenchment that validated bacteriology at the sites of public culture and popular science, institutions, and state support. In the process, bacteriology and laboratories enjoyed a moral ascendency in colonial India that it did not achieve in Europe and America. Within the postcolonial modernist paradigm, the idea of tropicality itself underwent transformations. The notion of “tropical diseases” was absorbed within this postcolonial developmental ethos, which exposed the abstract nature of the idea of the tropics. In his presidential address on “Tropical Medicine—Past, Present, and Future” to the medical and veterinary sciences section of the forty-first Indian Science Congress in Hyderabad in 1954, R. N. Chaudhuri, director of the CSTM, elaborated on what constituted “tropical disease” in the mid-twentieth century and the tropics themselves. According to him, “‘tropical diseases’ and ‘tropical medicine’ are largely misnomers.” Very few diseases were specific to the tropics, and all the major diseases such as cholera, smallpox, plague, malaria, and leprosy “that now prevail here were once very common in Western countries.” As Chaudhuri elaborated, these so-called tropical diseases had disappeared from the West mainly because of an abundant supply of food, the removal of poverty through the industrial revolution and the acquisition of colonies, and the institution of public-health measures, which led to better housing and hygiene, improved sewerage, and a safe water supply. He defined the term “tropical disease” as “poverty disease”: “many of our so-called tropical diseases are the symptoms of backward countries and not primarily of tropical climates. Remove food deficiencies in the tropical countries and introduce all the sanitary measures now enjoyed in the West and many of the tropical diseases will be banished.”1 Along with the epistemological and institutional incorporation of bacteriology within colonial medicine, twentieth-century research on germs exposed the complex processes of mutation, generation, and the life cycle of germ cells and their passage through human and animal carriers.2 This meant that new forms of vaccines need to be developed constantly and wider awareness is required of the ecological and environmental factors that affect the mutation and life cycles of germs and viruses. This new awareness in vaccine research was accompanied by a greater awareness in the same period of the ecological, geographical, and climatic understanding of diseases. Along with that, the actual experiences of mass vaccination carried out in different parts of the world demonstrated that they were subject to various social, economic, and cultural factors. As has been studied recently in the case of the BCG (Bacillus Calmette-Guérin) vaccine campaign in India in the 1950s, vaccination campaigns in postcolonial India were embroiled with popular sentiments that reflected the complex meanings that vaccines and vaccination had assumed in modern India. The protests were not so much against laboratory medicine or vaccines (vaccinations did take place successfully in the end). The BCG campaigns were used as a symbol of the notions of westernization, modernity, and drastic intervention by the Indian state and international agencies in matters of Indian culture and welfare; this is what the movements protested

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against.3 It is important to recognize that in India vaccine research in and vaccination campaigns against cholera, plague, typhoid, snakebites, and rabies evolved through a complex relationship between research conducted within laboratories and public debates beginning in the late nineteenth century. In postcolonial India, vaccines and immunization programs have become an important part of mass scale health deliverance, particularly under the guidance of the WHO. Vaccine research and production in India have developed in this period in competition with international pharmaceutical companies and as part of India’s pursuit of economic self-sufficiency and attempts to eradicate deep-seated problems of poverty and nutrition. When India gained independence in 1947, the Indian vaccine research and development program was grossly inadequate for the country’s needs. India was heavily dependent on WHO, UNICEF, and multinational pharmaceutical and vaccine companies. Vaccination campaigns in postcolonial India were eventful. It took three decades for India after independence to articulate its first official policy for childhood vaccination, a policy that was in alignment with the WHO’s policy of “health for all by 2000.”4 In 1974, following the successful smallpox eradication campaign, WHO’s Expanded Programme on Immunization was launched and national vaccination programs were organized. Initially, the programs vaccinated against six diseases (polio, measles, neonatal tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis, tuberculosis), but with the availability of new vaccines and financial resources, other diseases like hepatitis B and yellow fever were also included. The tropics and bacteriology have retained their association in international schemes of disease eradication and in the more recent program of Global Burden of Disease (GBD) initiated under the WHO. These programs have identified the tropics as regions that suffer most from diseases. The GBD report of the WHO published in 2008 shows that the developing world bears the burden of global disease.5 The term “tropicality” was not defined within a strictly climatic framework, nor was the focus of medical intervention entirely on bacteriology and vaccines. In a contemporary global undertaking, bacteriology and vaccination are enmeshed with issues of poverty eradication, epidemiology, and disease eradication programs.6 There is a historical paradox in this new undertaking of disease eradication in the tropics. Paul Farmer had shown that diseases like HIV and tuberculosis spread particularly in those regions and among those communities that were economically marginalized and suffered from structural violence, particularly in terms of the availability of drugs and other medical facilities.7 In the tropics, as shown in this book, the infrastructure of modern medicine in the form of vaccines, laboratories, bacteriological surveys, and epidemiological studies made early and deep inroads almost simultaneously as those in the more prosperous nations. Yet these regions continue to suffer from a chronic lack of drugs, vaccines, and sanitation measures. Parts of Asia and Africa remain heavily dependent on international medical attention and aid.8 This book has traced the emergence of this medical tradition, which is simultaneously rich and barren; and the history of the relationship between bacteriology and the tropics, which is entangled, subliminal, and vivid.

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Notes Introduction 1. Diary of W. M. Haffkine, 1895, box 2, roll 1, W. M. Haffkine Collection [microfilm], 1892–1930, Modern Manuscripts Collection, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD (hereafter, “Haffkine collection”). 2. Haffkine, “Anti-choleraic Inoculations in India,” 37. 3. Lutzker and Jochnowitz, “Waldemar Haffkine: Pioneer of Cholera Vaccine,” 366–69. 4. Löwy, “Yellow Fever in Rio de Janeiro,” 144–63; Bashford, “‘Is White Australia Possible?,’” 248–71; and Palmer, “Beginnings of Cuban Bacteriology,” 445–68. 5. Löwy, “Yellow Fever in Rio de Janeiro,” 144–63; Moulin, “Patriarchal Science,” 307; Pelis, “Prophet for Profit,” 585; Pelis, Charles Nicolle, 1–14. 6. Warwick Anderson, “Geography, Race, and Nation,” 457–87. 7. Ibid., 458. 8. Arnold, “‘Illusory Riches,’” 6–18. 9. Arnold, Tropics and the Traveling Gaze, 11–21; Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitution, 25–57. 10. For an analysis of the convergences of ideas of Orientalism, romanticism, and the tropics, see Arnold, Tropics and the Traveling Gaze, 110–46. 11. Edney, Mapping an Empire. 12. M. Harrison, “‘Tender Frame of Man,’” 68–93. 13. Kennedy, “Perils of the Midday Sun,” 118–40. 14. Huber, “Unification of the Globe by Disease,” 453–76. 15. Peard, Race, Place, and Medicine, 2–10. 16. Annual Report, Pasteur Institute of India, Kasauli, 1913, 5. 17. M. Harrison, Public Health in British India; Ramasubban, Public Health and Medical Research in India; and Arnold, Colonizing the Body. 18. Worboys, Spreading Germs; Pelling, Cholera, Fever and English Medicine; Hamlin, Science of Impurity, chapters 9 and 10; and Mendelsohn, “‘Like All That Lives,’” 3–36. 19. Among the several works on the topic, this book refers most often to Worboys, Spreading Germs; Cunningham and Williams, Laboratory Revolution in Medicine; Latour, Pasteurization of France; Lederer, Subjected to Science; and Kohler, Landscapes and Labscapes. See also the special issue, Robert Kohler, ed., “Focus: Laboratory: History,” Isis 99 (2008); and Gradmann, Laboratory Disease. 20. Worboys, “Emergence of Tropical Medicine,” 76. 21. See, for example, Manson-Bahr, Patrick Manson; Haynes, Imperial Medicine; Bynum and Overy, Beast in the Mosquito; and Power, “Sir Leonard Rogers.”

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22. Power, “Calcutta School of Tropical Medicine,” 197–214. See also Power, “Sir Leonard Rogers.” 23. Ronald Ross, “Progress of Tropical Medicine,” 271; 272. 24. Ronald Ross, “Tropical Medicine,” 319. 25. Bynum, Science and the Practice of Medicine, 149–50. 26. Cameron, “Address on Micro-Organisms,” 584; Vandyke H. Carter, “Notes on the Spirillum Fever,” 273–300; Bastian, “Bearing of Experimental Evidence,” 49–52; and Crowfoot, “Address on the Germ-Theory,” 551–54. 27. Priestley, “Realm of the Microbe,” 814–15. 28. Roberts, “Address in Medicine,” 168–73. 29. “Professor Koch’s Investigations on Malaria: Second Report to the German Colonial Office,” BMJ 2038 (February 10, 1900): 325–27. 30. Quoted in Münch, “Robert Koch,” 69. 31. Manson, “The Goulstonian Lectures on the Life-History of the Malaria Germ,” 712–17; see also Sambon, “Remarks on the Possibility,” BMJ 1880 (January 9, 1897): 94. See also Crowfoot, “Address on the Germ-Theory.” 32. Buckingham, Leprosy in Colonial South India, 107–33. 33. Bhattacharya, Harrison, and Worboys, Fractured States, 146–230. 34. Nandini Bhattacharya, “Disease and the Practices of Settlement.” See also Nandini Bhattacharya, “Logic of Location,” 183–202. 35. Dutta, “Medical Research,” 93–112. 36. M. Harrison, Public Health in British India. See also M. Harrison, Climates and Constitutions. 37. Brorson, “Seeds and the Worms,” 64–76. 38. “Kasauli of the Hills, an Indian Pasteur Institute, Mad Beasts and Men,” Times, April 25, 1919, 11. 39. Cohn, “4 Epidemiology,” 74–100; and Pollitzer, “Cholera Studies: 1,” 449. 40. Worboys, Spreading Germs. 41. This was more influential than the identification of the role of the mosquito in spreading the malaria parasite, as suggested by Worboys, “Colonial Medicine,” 67–80. 42. “The Pasteur Institute of India,” CMG, November 27, 1893, 4. 43. “Vaccination of Cholera,” CMG, January 30, 1893, 4. 44. “Inoculation against Cholera: Mr. Haffkine at Agra,” CMG, April 25, 1893, 2. 45. Chakrabarti, Materials and Medicine, 184–87. 46. “Medical Research in India,” IMG 27 (1892): 288. 47. Tomes, “Moralizing the Microbe,” 271–96. 48. Ibid., 281. 49. Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature, 149–79; Warwick Anderson, “Immunities of Empire,” 94–118; and Edmond, “Returning Fears,” 175–94. 50. Tomes and Warner, “Introduction to Special Issue,” 7–16. 51. Worboys, Spreading Germs. 52. Latour, Pasteurization of France. 53. Moulin, “Patriarchal Science,” 307. See also Pelis, “Prophet for Profit,” 585. 54. Tauber, “Ethical Imperative,” 262.

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55. Lawrence and Weisz, Greater Than the Parts; and Quirke and Gaudillière, “Era of Biomedicine,” 441–52. 56. A typical example is Geison, Private Science of Louis Pasteur. 57. Tomes, Gospel of Germs, 13. See also Hardy, “On the Cusp,” 328–46. For histories of “bacteriologically informed applied public health,” see Hooker and Bashford, “Diphtheria and Australian Public Health,” 41–64; and Hammonds, Childhood’s Deadly Scourge. 58. Leavitt, “‘Typhoid Mary’ Strikes Back,” 608–29. 59. Ibid., 609. 60. K. C. Carter, “Nineteenth-Century Treatments for Rabies,” 67–78. 61. Worboys, “Colonial Medicine.” 62. Farley, To Cast out Disease; Kavadi, “‘Parasites Lost,’” 130–37; and Kavadi, Rockefeller Foundation. 63. W. Anderson, “‘Where Every Prospect Pleases,’” 506–29. 64. Kohler, “Lab History,” 764. 65. Ibid. 66. Shapin, “History of Science,” 157–211; Collins, “Sociology of Scientific Knowledge,” 265–85; Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery; Barnes, Interests and the Growth of Knowledge; and Shapin, A Social History of Truth. 67. Marks, Progress of Experiment. 68. W. Anderson, “‘Where Every Prospect Pleases,’” 526. 69. Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life, 40. 70. Latour, Pasteurization of France, 9–10. 71. Ibid., 12. 72. For a similar critique, see Winner, “Upon Opening the Black Box,” 362–78. 73. Schaffer, “Eighteenth-Century Brumaire,” 192. As Schaffer describes, “He [Latour] attributes life to the inanimate, silences criticism, and asymmetrically credits his hero’s stories while ignoring those of his hero’s powerful rivals” (192). 74. I use the word “agency” in the same sense that Schaffer refers to “hylozoism” (ibid., 186–87). 75. Latour has described such criticism as expressions of “masochism,” which were destined for “sure defeat” to science (Reassembling the Social, 252). 76. Ibid., 247; 2. More recently Patrick Joyce has pointed out that Latour’s emphasis on “contingency and on the description as explanation” does not satisfactorily describe historical processes through which power emerges in society. See Joyce, “What Is the Social,” 229. 77. W. Anderson, “‘Where Every Prospect Pleases,’” 526. 78. A prime example would be the Subaltern Studies, in Guha, “On Some Aspects,” 1–9. 79. Sutphen, “Not What, but Where,” 81–113; and Andrews, “Tuberculosis,” 114–57. 80. Chakrabarti, “Empire and Alternatives,” 75–94. 81. Tilley, “Ecologies of Complexity,” 21–38. 82. Vaughan, Curing Their Ills, 35. 83. In this I differ from Gooday, “Placing or Replacing?,” 783–95. 84. “Microbes of Indian Rivers,” BMJ 1780 (February 9, 1895): 312.

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85. Haffkine, “On Preventive Inoculation,” 269–70. 86. M. Harrison, Climates and Constitution; and Grove, Green Imperialism. 87. Isaacs, “D. D. Cunningham,” 281–82.

Chapter One 1. Hamlin, “Providence and Putrefaction,” 386–87. 2. Driver, “Moral Geographies,” 275–87. 3. Frankland, “Bacteriology in the Queen’s Reign,” 213. 4. Chakraborty, “Science, Morality, and Nationalism,” 245–74. 5. See, for example, “Memorial from Certain Distinguished Scientists advocating the establishment of a Central Laboratory at Calcutta,” May 12, 1897, file 723, L/ PJ/6/445, Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library (hereafter, APAC). 6. M. Harrison, Climates and Constitution, 205. Arnold, Colonizing the Body. 7. CMG, November 18, 1893, 6. 8. Pioneer Mail and Indian Weekly News (hereafter, Pioneer Mail), February 25, 1897, 3. 9. Naoroji, Poverty, 56–58. In a critique of the imperial undertaking of the “material and moral progress of India,” Naoroji writes, “While in India they [the British] acquire India’s money, experience, and wisdom; and when they go, they carry both away with them, leaving India so much poorer in material and moral wealth” (203–4). 10. Ibid., 211. 11. For a study of the emergence of the IMS, see M. Harrison, Public Health, 6–35. 12. Arnold, “Colonial Medicine,” 27. 13. Aparna Basu, “Indian Response,” 126–38; and Aparna Basu, “Technical Education,” 361–74. 14. Voelcker, Report on the Improvement of Indian Agriculture, 93–94, 135, 189, 358. See also Pioneer Mail, September 21, 1893, 4. 15. Pioneer Mail, April 16, 1890, 516. 16. See “Reply from A. Godley, India Office,” March 21, 1898, file no. 460, L/ PJ/6/473, APAC. In 1898, another request from nationalists to establish a research laboratory was refused by the secretary of state on the grounds that the required sum of six lakhs of rupees could not be spared. as it was the time of the Afghan Wars. Hitavadi, a vernacular newspaper, responded, “It is a wonder that a man in the position of the Secretary of State has not hesitated to make such a reply. A Government unable to spare six lakhs for a beneficial object is wasting crores in foreign wars!” “Report on Native Papers of Bengal Presidency, 1898,” Hitavadi, April 1, 1898, p. 345, L/R/5/24, APAC. 17. CMG, February 20, 1890, 4. 18. CMG, April 17, 1890, 4. 19. “A Bacteriological Department for India,” BMJ 1879 (January 2, 1897): 31–32. 20. “Lagging behind the Times,” CMG, January 15, 1893, 3; the four quotes immediately following are to the same page. 21. Letters to the Editor, “Prevention of Hydrophobia,” Pioneer Mail, January 15, 1890, 165.

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22. “Pasteur Institutes,” Pioneer Mail, May 11, 1893, 5. 23. “Obstructive Heads,” CMG, March 2, 1893, 3. 24. Lukis, “Opportunities for Original Research,” 392–93. 25. Pelis, “Prophet for Profit.” 26. “Mr. Haffkine’s Anti-cholera Inoculations,” Pioneer Mail, May 11, 1893, 3. 27. “Report by Major RWS Lyons, IMS, on a visit to the Pasteur Institute at Lille,” Home-Medical, vol. 1, January–June 1899, June 1899, p. 1137, P/5644, APAC. 28. “London letter,” IMG 38 (1903): 62–63. 29. “Deputation by HH the Dewan of Palanpur of Dr. N. F. Surveyor to study bacteriology in England, General Department, 1894, vol. 26, 1–4, Maharashtra State Archives, Elphinstone College, Mumbai (hereafter, MSA). 30. Letter to the Secretary of State, May 14, 1982, Home-Medical, 1892, pp. 501–2, P/4111, APAC. 31. “A Pasteur Institute for India,” IMG 27 (1892): 127. 32. Lingard to the Principal, College of Science, Poona, April 21, 1891, HomeMedical, 1892, p. 251, P/4111, APAC. 33. Ibid. 34. “Pasteur Institute,” CMG, August 21, 1893, 4. 35. “A Pasteur Institute for India,” IMG 28 (1893): 378–79. The report also detailed how French farmers had profited by using Pasteur’s treatment against anthrax. 36. Ibid., 378. 37. “Tropical Medicine,” Amrita Bazar Patrika, May 30, 1905, 7. 38. Ibid. 39. M. Harrison, Public Health, 150–51. 40. Latour, Pasteurization of France. 41. Moulin, “Patriarchal Science,” 310–11; 316. 42. Naraindas, “Poisons, Putrescence, and the Weather,” 31. 43. BMJ 1880 (January 9, 1897): 93–100. 44. Sambon, “Remarks,” 61–66. See W. Anderson, “‘Where Every Prospect Pleases.’” This is what David N. Livingstone has termed “moral climatology,” where it was assumed that biological as well as mental/moral attributes were directly linked to climate based on the assumption of inferiority of those living in the tropics. Livingstone, “Race, Space, and Moral Climatology,” 159–80. 45. McLeod, “Introduction of the Antiseptic System,” 62–63. In Britain, by the time Lister promoted antiseptic surgery the battle against anticontagionism had already been won and hospital wards were better ventilated and less crowded than before. Specific diseases had also been linked to specific organisms. See Gaw, “‘A Time to Heal,’” 134. Following Robert Koch’s experiments with anthrax and tuberculosis, which showed that specific germs caused specific diseases, germs varied in potency and some posed no threat at all to humans, and they were not exclusively airborne, Lister’s antiseptic methods using carbolic acid for killing all germs came under criticism (123–30). 46. “Report of Rabies and Hydrophobia by Surgeon Major A. Barclay,” HomeSanitary, 1889, p. 630, P/3429, APAC. See also “The Pasteur Institute,” BMJ 1488 (July 6, 1889): 38–40. 47. Sandison, “Sir Marc Armand Ruffer,” 150–56.

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48. Landes and Hall, “Letter from Louis Pasteur,” 361. 49. Ruffer, “Rabies,” 31 (hereafter cited in text). 50. See, e.g., “Scientific Notes and News,” Science 12 (1900): 413–14; or “The Pasteur Institute for India,” Lancet 148 (October 17, 1896): 1102. 51. “Proposal made by Dr Gamalein [sic], through the Minister of Plenipotentiary in charge of the Consulate General for France in Calcutta for the Establishment of a Pasteur Institution for the Treatment of Hydrophobia and orders thereon.” Part B. Revenue and Agricultural Department, No. 34C.—9, dated December 11, 1889, Home-Medical, December 1889, National Archive of India, New Delhi (hereafter, NAI). 52. Löwy, “From Guinea Pigs to Man,” 299. Gamaleya’s research in Odessa on anthrax following Pasteur’s methods were disastrous. Out of the 4,414 sheep he vaccinated, 3,549 died. See Rietschel and Cavaillon, “Endotoxin and Anti-endotoxin,” 11. 53. Transfers, for disposal of a letter from Monsieur J. Hannand, Minister Plenipotentiary in charge of the Consulate General for France in Calcutta, enclosing a copy of communication from Dr Gamalein [sic] of Odessa, proposing the establishment in India of a Pasteur Institution for the Treatment of Hydrophobia. To the Minister of Plenipotentiary in charge of the Consulate General of France in Calcutta, no. 781, December 17, 1889. Part B. Revenue and Agricultural Department, No. 34C.—9, December 11, 1889, Home-Medical, December 1889, NAI. 54. “Ignorance of Tropical Diseases,” BMJ 1774 (December 29, 1894): 1491–92. 55. Home-Medical, 1898, p. 1281, P/5418, APAC. 56. “A Bacteriological Department for India,” 31–32. 57. Ernest A. Hart, “Address on the Medical Profession,” 1469. 58. “A Bacteriological Department for India,” 31. 59. Hart to A. MacDonnell, Bombay, March 9, 1895, Home-Medical, 1895, pp. 789–92, P/4752, APAC. 60. “Provision for the carrying out of bacteriological investigation and teaching in India,” Home-Medical, 1985, pp. 790–92, P/4752, APAC. 61. “Particulars regarding the Cost and Construction of the Laboratories at Agra and Lahore,” July 1902, Home-Medical, 1902, p. 707, P/6347, APAC. 62. “Particulars regarding the Cost and Construction of the Laboratories at Agra and Lahore,” 708–10. 63. IMG 26 (1891): 128. 64. Isaacs, “D. D. Cunningham,” 281–82. 65. Caton, “Emergence of Animal Breeding.” 66. “India,” Times, November 22, 1866, 6. 67. IMG 25 (1890): 96. 68. “Despatch from GOI to the Secy. of State,” No. 1 of 1890, Home-Medical, 1893, p. 330, P/4345, APAC. 69. Cooke to the Director of Public Instructions, Poona, July 9, 1892, Home-Medical, 1893, p. 330, P/4345, APAC. 70. “Experiments made in India with Pasteur’s Anthrax Vaccine,” June 1892, Proceedings of the Revenue and Agricultural Department, June 1892, p. 62, P/4133, APAC. 71. “Bacteriology in Excelsis,” Pioneer Mail, May 11, 1893, 5.

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72. Cooke to the Director of Public Instructions, Poona, July 9, 1892, Home-Medical, 1893, p. 330, P/4345, APAC. 73. “Bacteriology in Excelsis,” 5; 6. 74. Frances Power Cobbe called the Institute of Preventive Medicine a “catchpenny” name. Cobbe to the Editor, April 28, 1892, Pioneer Mail, May 25, 1892, 20–21. 75. Elgin to Hamilton, May 25, 1897, Letter no. xiv, Elgin Papers, Elgin Collection: Papers of Victor Alexander Bruce, Ninth Earl of Elgin (1849–1917), as Viceroy of India 1894–18, 1897, p. 38, Mss Eur F 84/15, APAC (hereafter, Elgin Papers). 76. “A Cholera Party at Aligarh,” Pioneer Mail, May 18, 1893, 20. 77. Ibid. 78. Burrow, “Proof That the Hindu,” 487–97; Royle, Essay on the Antiquity, 45; and Wise, Commentary, 157. 79. For an analysis of these mythologies of antiquity constructed in this modern quest for science in India, see Chakraborty, “Science, Nationalism, and Colonial Contestations,” 185–213. 80. Brimnes, “Variolation, Vaccination, and Popular Resistance,” 199–228. 81. Dominik Wujastyk, “‘A Pious Fraud,’” 131–67. 82. “The Antiquity of Vaccination in India,” BMJ 2311 (April 15, 1905): 838–39. 83. “The Antiquity of Hindu Vaccination,” letter from W. G. King, May 11, 1905, IMG 40 (1905): 234. 84. “Antiquity of Vaccination in India,” 838–39. 85. “Antiquity of Hindu Vaccination,” 234. 86. Amrita Bazar Patrika, May 19, 1905, 5. 87. Wujastyk, “‘Pious Fraud.’” 88. For the incorporation of ideas of germ theory and vaccination within contemporary Ayurveda, see Mukharji, Nationalizing the Body, 133–46. For similar trends in Unani, see Attewell, Refiguring Unani Tibb, 206–9. 89. Mukhopadhyay, “Pasteur’s Discovery,” 378–84. All translations from Bengali to English are by the author. Subsequent quotes from this article are cited parenthetically in the text. 90. “A Fund for a Pasteur Institute,” CMG, March 17, 1893, 3. 91. Mazumder, Indian Army; and Neeladri Bhattacharya, “Colonial State,” 106–17. 92. Caton, “Emergence of Animal Breeding.” 93. “M. Pasteur’s Work,” CMG, April 17, 1890, 6. 94. Roe to the Inspector General of Civil Hospitals, Punjab, February 17, 1893, Home-Medical, 1893, p. 341, P/4345, APAC. 95. Editor, CMG to the Chief Secretary, Government of Punjab, May 20, 1893, Home-Medical, 1893, p. 345, P/4345, APAC. 96. Ibid., 346. 97. Roe to the Inspector General of Civil Hospitals, Punjab, February 17, 1893, Home-Medical, p. 341, P/4345, APAC. 98. Ibid., 343. 99. Letter to Inspector General of Civil Hospitals in Punjab from Roe, March 4, 1893, Home-Medical, P/4345, APAC. 100. “A Public Want in India,” Letters to the Pioneer from “Consul,” Pioneer Mail, February 25, 1892, 21. 101. “Bacteriological Department for India,” 31–32.

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102. “Resolutions of the Indian Medical Congress,” IMG 30 (1895): 75. 103. Editor, CMG to the Chief Secretary, Government of Punjab, May 20, 1893, Home-Medical, 1893, pp. 347–48, P/4345, APAC. 104. Ibid. 105. Pioneer Mail, April 5, 1894, 13–14. 106. “The Pasteur Institute Meeting at Madras,” IMG 49 (1894): 181. 107. CMG, February 19, 1894, 5. 108. Lancet, 148 (August 29, 1896): 631. 109. CMG, December 5, 1893, 5. 110. This one was never established in England. 111. CMG, December 15, 1893, 4. 112. C. J. Lyall (secretary to the GOI) to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Punjab, August 10, 1893, Home-Medical, 1893, p. 353, P/4345, APAC. 113. R. E. Younghusband (Junior Secretary to the Government of Punjab) to the Secretary to the Government of India (Home Dept.), July 11, 1893, pp. 348–49, P/4345, APAC. 114. “The Pasteur Institute Scheme,” CMG, December 8, 1893, 3. 115. Robinson (editor of CMG) to the Chief Secrtary to the Government of Punjab, June 15, 1893, Home-Medical, 1893, pp. 349–50, P/4345, APAC. 116. CMG, December 5, 1893, 5. 117. Ibid. 118. “A Fund for a Pasteur Institute,” CMG, March 17, 1893, 3. 119. CMG, December 5, 1893, 5. 120. “A Fund for a Pasteur Institute.” 121. CMG, April 17, 1890, 4. 122. “Resolutions of the Indian Medical Congress,” IMG 30 (1895): 75. 123. Home-Sanitary, 1897 (1), pp. 1110–11, P/5188, APAC. 124. Hankin to I-G, October 11, 1899, Home-Medical, vol. 1, January–June 1900, p. 764, P/5878, APAC. 125. “Anthrax and Hydrophobia,” Editorial, CMG, November 25, 1893, 3. 126. “The Pasteur Institute of India,” Editorial, CMG, November 27, 1893, 4. 127. “The Scientific Study of Preventive Medicine in India,” IMG 32 (1897): 421–22. 128. “Preliminary Note on Bacteriological Investigations into the Bubonic Plague at Bombay,” BMJ 1871 (October 31, 1896): 1343. 129. “The Plague in India,” BMJ 1880 (January 9, 1897): 105. 130. M. Harrison, Public Health, 81, 155. 131. Sutphen, “Not What, but Where.” 132. Kidambi, “‘Infection of Locality,’” 249–67. 133. Klein, “Plague, Policy,” 723–55. 134. Arnold, Colonizing the Body, 200–239; 238. 135. P. C. H. Snow, Report on the Outbreak, 17. 136. A phrase used by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie to describe the spread of plague from Asia to Europe through the trade routes of Central Asia from the thirteenth century. Ladurie, “A Concept,” 41. 137. Bibel and Chen, “Diagnosis of Plaque,” 633–51. 138. Haffkine, On Prophylactic Inoculation, 23.

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139. Snow, Report on the Outbreak, 1. 140. “The Plague in Bombay,” IMG 32 (December 18, 1897): 1818–19. 141. “The Epidemic of Plague,” BMJ 1883 (January 30, 1897): 294–96. 142. “Note by the Sanitary Commissioner with the Government of India on the Arrangements for Bacteriological research in India, Shimla, 20 June 1907,” HomeSanitary, June 1907, nos. 335–41, pp. 19; 20, NAI. 143. Ibid., 14. 144. Bombay Presidency Medical 1897, Telegram from Secretary of State, February 1, 1897, p. 55, P/5320, APAC. 145. Haffkine. Serum-Therapy of Plague in India, 2. 146. IMG 32 (1897): 103. 147. Haffkine, Serum-Therapy of Plague in India, 10. 148. Simond, Godley, and Mouriquand, “Paul-Louis Simond,” 101–4. 149. Hitavadi, June 24, 1898, Report on Native Papers of Bengal Presidency, 1898, p. 619, L/R/5/24, APAC. 150. Choksy, “On Recent Progress,” 1282. 151. Choksy, “Report of Bubonic Cases Treated at the Arthur Road Hospital from September 24th, 1896, to February 28th, 1897,” in Snow, P.  C.  H., “Report on the Outbreak of Bubonic Plague in Bombay, 1896–1897, Together with Reports from H.  W. Haffkine, T.  S. Weir, and N.  H. Choksy,” p. 261, V/27/856/7, India Office Records and Private Papers, Plague, BL, APAC. 152. Ibid., 261–62. 153. Choksy, Treatment of Plague. 154. Choksy, “On Recent Progress,” 1282. 155. “Professor Lustig’s Plague Serum,” letter to the editors by Choksy, Lancet 156 (July 28, 1900): 292. 156. Ibid. 157. Choksy, “On Recent Progress,” 1282–84. 158. “Notes from India,” Lancet 155 (June 2, 1900): 1608. 159. “Professor Lustig’s Plague Serum,” 291–92. 160. Choksy, “On Recent Progress,” 1282–84. 161. Ibid. 162. BMJ 4132 (March 16, 1940): 464–65. 163. Steevens, In India, 20. 164. “Notes from India,” Lancet 155 (February 10, 1900): 424. 165. Kumar, “‘Colony’ under a Microscope,” 239–71. 166. Kayasth Samachar (Allahabad), August 1, 1902, Vernacular Press Reports, United Provinces, 1902, pp. 580–81, L/R/5/79, APAC. 167. “Strictly confidential letter from Surgeon-General G. Bainbridge 19 January 1898, Town Hall, Bombay,” Confidential, Office of the Private Secretary to the Viceroy, M. Haffkine’s Plague Prophylactic; Correspondence with Lord Sandhurst, MSS Eur F 84/125/K, Elgin Papers. 168. Telegram from Elgin to Governor, January 28, 1898, Elgin Papers. 169. Telegram from Governor to Elgin, January 29, 1898, Elgin Papers. 170. Elgin (Barrackpore) to Sandhurst (Governor), February 7, 1898, Elgin Papers. 171. Bainbridge to Jackson, February 18, 1898, Elgin Papers.

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172. Elgin to Sandhurst, March 19, 1898, Elgin Papers. 173. CMG, February 7, 1900, 2. Bannerman, “The Plague Research Laboratory,” 113–14. 174. Hamilton (Secretary of State for India) to Curzon, November 27, 1902, Curzon Papers, Mss. Eur.F.111/161, p. 380, APAC. 175. “Allegations made by Mr Haffkine on one side and by Lieutenant Colonel Bannerman and Captain Liston, IMS, on the other regarding their position in their Plague Research Laboratory,” Home-Medical 1904 (1), pp. 1–153, P/6811, APAC. 176. Ibid., 2. 177. “The Progress of Plague and Plague Policy,” BMJ 2221 (July 25, 1903): 219. 178. Ibid. 179. “India: Report from Bombay. Decline in Mortality from Plague. Prophylactic Inoculation against Plague,” Public Health Reports 19 (1904): 1426–28. 180. Barrier, “Punjab Disturbances of 1907,” 353–83. 181. “Mulkowal Disaster and Charles Rivaz’s Plague Campaign,” Indian People, March 30, 1904, Selections from the Native Newspapers, United Provinces of Agra & Oudh, 1903–4, pp. 118–19, L/R/5/80, APAC. 182. “Inoculation Blunder at Malkowal in Gujrat District in Punjab,” Hindostan (English) December 1, 1902, Vernacular Press Reports, United Provinces, 1902, p. 739, L/R/5/79, APAC. 183. “Mulkowal Catastrophe,” Oudh Samachar (Lucknow), December 7, 1902, Vernacular Press Reports, United Provinces, 1902, p. 751, L/R/5/79, APAC. 184. Kayasth Samachar, December 1902, Selections from the Native Newspapers, United Provinces of Agra & Oudh, 1903–4, p. 15, L/R/5/80, APAC. 185. Bhattacharya, Harrison, and Worboys, Fractured States, 26–27. 186. Kumar, “Unequal Contenders,” 176. 187. “India: Inoculations in the Amritsar District, Punjab. Report of Capt. S.  B. Smith, of the Indian Medical Service,” Public Health Reports 19 (1904): 1430. 188. Ibid. 189. “Lord Lister, F.R.C.S., President, in the Chair, June 8, 1899, Discussion on Preventive Inoculation,” BMJ 2009 (July 1, 1899): 17. 190. Letter from H.  H. Risley, November 4, 1903, Home-Medical, 1903 (2), P/6579, APAC. 191. “India and Mr. Haffkine,” R. Ross to the editors, Times, June 1, 1907, 8; “Mr. Haffkine and the Mulkowal Accident,” Letters to the Editor, R. Ross, R. Tanner Hewlett, Albert S. Grunbaum, W. J. Simpson, R. F. C. Leith, William R. Smith, G. Sims Woodhead, E. Klein, Simon Flexner, Charles Hunter Stewart, Times, July 29, 1907, 18. 192. M. Harrison, “Haffkine, Waldemar Mordecai Wolff.” 193. IMG 42 (1907): 64–5. 194. M. Harrison, Climates and Constitution, 136.

Chapter Two 1. Livingstone, “Race, Space and Moral Climatology.” 2. T. Cooke to Director of Public Instruction, Poona, April 29, 1891, Home-Medical, 1892, pp. 251–52, P/4111, APAC.

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3. Memorandum by Surgeon General J. Pinkerton, Bombay, May 26, 1891, HomeMedical, 1892, p. 252, P/4111, APAC. 4. Cooke to Director of Public Instruction, Poona, September 26, 1891, HomeMedical, 1892, p. 252, P/4111, APAC. 5. Lingard to Cooke, September 8, 1891, Home-Medical, 1892, pp. 253–54, P/4111, APAC. 6. J. P. Hewett to Chief Secretary, Government of Bombay, March 18, 1892, HomeMedical, 1892, p. 259, P/4111, APAC. 7. Government of India, Finance and Commerce Department to Secretary of State for India, May 11, 1892, From Lansdowne, Roberts, P. P. Hutchins, D. Barbour, A. E. Miller, H. Brackenbury, C.  H.  T. Crosthwaite, Home-Medical, 1892, p. 261, P/4111, APAC. Also “Establishment of a Pasteur Institute at Poona in the Bombay Presidency,” August 1892, “Extract from the Proceeding of the GOI,” Finance and Commerce Department, No. 3044, July 23, 1892, Home-Medical, 1982, p. 501, P/4111, APAC. 8. Telegram from Bombay, Poona to Home Secretary, August 15, 1892, HomeMedical, 1892, p 503, P/4111, APAC. 9. Lingard to Cooke, July 8, 1892, Home-Medical, 1893, p. 339, P/4345, APAC. 10. Ibid. 11. Lingard to Cooke, June 27, 1892, Home-Medical, 1893, pp. 335–36, P/4345, APAC. 12. Ibid. 13. Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics, 85. 14. Lingard to Cooke, June 27, 1892, Home-Medical, 1893, pp. 336–37, P/4345, APAC. 15. Lingard to Cooke, July 8, 1892, Home-Medical, 1893, p. 339, P/4345, APAC. 16. Lingard to Cooke, June 27, 1892, Home-Medical, 1893, p. 336, P/4345, APAC. 17. Kennedy, Magic Mountains. 18. Pioneer Mail, April 29, 1897, pp. 26–27. See also, “Outbreak of Cholera at the J J Hospital,” Bombay Presidency Medical Branch, 1894, pp. 125–30, P/4657, APAC. 19. “Minutes of an Adjourned Meeting of the Central Committee, Pasteur Institute of India, Held at Shimla, September 10, 1896,” IMG 31 (1896): 429. 20. “Proceedings of the Madras Committee Meeting,” CMG, February 3, 1896, 6. 21. Editorial, “The Pasteur Institute of India,” CMG, April 6, 1896, 3. 22. “The Proposed Pasteur Institute,” [Editorial], CMG, February 10, 1896, 3. In response, surgeon John Smyth (IMS), acting secretary to the Madras Committee of the Pasteur Institute, wrote that the hill stations were isolated and not ideal sites for research in India diseases, CMG, March 6, 1896, 5. 23. T. H. Hendley’s letter, June 9, 1898, Home-Medical, 1898, p. 1282, P/5418, APAC. 24. Hendley to the Secretary of Bengal, October 16, 1899, Home-Medical, vol. 1, January–June 1900, p. 755, P/5878, APAC. 25. Hewett to Secretary, January 29, 1901, Home-Medical, January–July 1901 (1), pp. 164–65, P/6114, APAC. 26. CMG, May 30, 1900, 3. 27. Annual Report, Pasteur Institute of India, Kasauli, 1901, 3. 28. IMG 35 (1900): 231 [“And may it be lucky, prosperous, and auspicious”].

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29. “Obituary, Major Lamb,” reprinted from BMJ 2626 (April 29, 1911), C. J. Martin (FRS), Director, Lister Institute, London, Private Papers of Major George Lamb, Mss Eur D893, p. 6, APAC (hereafter, Lamb Papers). 30. Ibid. 31. “Kasauli of the Hills, an Indian Pasteur Institute, Mad Beasts and Men,” Times, April 25, 1919, 11. 32. Ibid. 33. Annual Reports of the Pasteur Institute of India, Kasauli, 1904, 7. 34. Creagh, “Pasteur Institute of India,” 675–76. 35. Mackie, “Medical Research in India,” 280. 36. Latour, Pasteurization of France. 37. Moulin, “Bacteriological Research,” 327–49; and Moulin, “Patriarchal Science.” 38. Moulin, “Bacteriological Research,” 342. 39. “Selection of a site for, and the management of, the proposed Pasteur Institute for Southern India,” G. S. Forbes, acting chief sectrary Govt of Madras to the secretary, GOI, July 26, 1903, 1371–72, Home-Medical, 1903 (2), p. 1381, P/6579, APAC. 40. Ibid. 41. Memorandum of King, July 1, 1903, Home-Medical, 1903 (2), Home-Medical, 1903 (2), pp. 1372–74, P/6579, APAC (hereafter cited in text). 42. Ibid. [Risley’s reply, dated November 4, 1903], 1381. 43. Ibid., 1385. 44. Home-Medical, 1904 (1), pp. 465–66, April 1904, P/6811, APAC. Italics in original. 45. Ibid., 472. 46. Ibid., 467–78. He also attached letters from Professor Klein and Almroth Wright in support of a laboratory in the tropical plains. Wright wrote, “I would unhesitatingly sacrifice the amenities of a hill climate in order to work in the plains in contact with hospitals” (473–77). 47. Wright to A. M. Branfoot, March 9, 1904, Home-Medical, 1904 (1), p. 477, P/6811, APAC. 48. J. C. Fergusson, Under Secretary, to Chief Secretary, Government of Madras, April 29, 1904, Home-Medical, 1904 (1), p. 478, P/6811, APAC. 49. Murray Hammick, Acting Chief Secretary, Government of Madras to Secretary General, March 1, 1904, Home-Medical, 1904 (1), p. 353, P/6811, APAC. 50. Report of the Plague Commission of India, vol. 5, 1901, 409. 51. “Scheme for the Extension of Bacteriological Work in India,” AHL Fraser, Officiating Secretary to GOI to all the provincial governments, Shimla, August 9, 1899, Home-Medical, vol. 2, July–December 1899, August 1899, pp. 1559–61, P/5645, APAC. 52. Resolution, GOI, Home Department, Sanitary, Shimla, June 8, 1905, HomeMedical 1905 (2), p. 897, P/7054, APAC. 53. “Note by the Sanitary Commissioner with the Government of India on the Arrangements for Bacteriological research in India,” Shimla, June 20, 1907, HomeSanitary, June 1907, nos. 335–41, p. 15, NAI. 54. “Research in Tropical Diseases in India,” IMG 40 (1905): 307.

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55. “Introduction of a Short Course of Training in Clinical Bacteriology and Technique at the Central Research Institute for Civil Surgeons and Military Medical Men,” Home-Sanitary, September 1908, nos. 245–47, pp. 1–6. NAI. 56. Resolution, GOI, Home Department, Sanitary, Shimla, June 8, 1905, HomeMedical 1905 (2), p. 898, P/7054, APAC. 57. Moulin, “Patriarchal Science,” 309. 58. For a detailed account of French imperialism under the Third Republic and its strong sense of the civilizing mission, see Conklin, Mission to Civilize, 59–72. 59. Henry Edward Shortt (1887–1987), Colonel, IMS, 1911–44, memoir, “In the Days of the RAJ and After, Doctor, Soldier, Scientist, Shikari,” n.d., European Manuscripts, BL, Mss Eur C435, APAC. 60. T. Richards, “Doctor, Soldier,” 1669–70. 61. Bennett, “Shikar and the Raj,” 72–88. See also, Sramek, “‘Face Him Like a Briton,’” 659–80. 62. Collingham, Imperial Bodies, 169. 63. Gradmann, Laboratory Disease, 222–24. 64. “Medical Research and Organisation,” The Indian Empire, 102. 65. Note by J. T. W. Leslie, Sanitary Commissioner to the GOI, December, 5, 1907, “Appointments connected with the bacteriological laboratories in India Administration of the Bacteriological Department and recruitment of officers for it Grant of Free Quarters to directors of laboratories in which one or more assistants are employed,” Home-Sanitary, July 1908, Nos. 285–90, pp. 2–3, NAI. 66. “Medical Appointments in the Colonies and Mandated Territories,” BMJ 3582 (August 31, 1929): 435–36. 67. “Indian Medical Service,” BMJ 3573 (June 29, 1929): 1168–69. 68. Headed by Lord Inchcape, James Lyle Mackay (1852–1932). 69. “Retrenchment in Expenditure on Medical Research in India,” Deparment of Education, Health and Lands, A, May 1925, Nos. 17–25, p. 9, NAI. 70. Ibid., 3. 71. Power, “Sir Leonard Rogers,” 148–49. 72. M. Harrison, Public Health, 165. 73. Arnold, “Colonial Medicine,” 14. 74. “The Indian Medical Service,” BMJ 3573 (June 29, 1929): 1168–69. Rogers was the Indian correspondent for BMJ between 1898 and 1929. 75. “Notes on the Indian Medical Service, 1930,” ROG/C.19/22, Leonard Rogers Papers, Manuscripts, Wellcome Library, London (hereafter, Rogers papers). 76. Power, “Sir Leonard Rogers,” 161–62. 77. Ibid., 176. 78. Note by Rogers, E&O 6102, p. 5, L/E/9/609, APAC. 79. See, for example, BMJ 1 (1929): 1168–69. 80. McRobert, “Rogers, Sir Leonard.” 81. Jeffery, “Recognizing India’s Doctors,” 310. 82. Ibid., 311. 83. As quoted in Ramanna, Western Medicine, 3. 84. Ibid., 217–21. 85. Representation of the Bombay Medical Union to the Royal Commission on the Public Services, 1–4.

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86. IMG 48 (1913): 396–99. 87. “Memorandum on the Present Position and Future Prospects of the Indian Medical Service,” 1913/14, British Medical Association, Medical Appeal Board, pp. 1; 11, L/S&G/8/305, APAC. 88. “Medical Research and Organisation,” 56–58. 89. Ibid., 102. 90. “Proposed All-India Research Institute,” BMJ 3088 (March 6, 1920): 344. 91. Ibid. 92. Report of the Committee on the Organization of Medical Research under the Government of India, 15–16. 93. Ibid., 15. 94. Proposed establishment of an imperial medical research institute at Delhi, 2. Retrenchment in Expenditure on Medical Research, Education, Health and Lands, Sanitary, June 1923, nos. 7–27, NAI. 95. Austoker, “Walter Morley Fletcher,” 23–33 (hereafter cited in text). 96. Report of the Committee on the Organization of Medical Research, 43 (hereafter cited in text). 97. Sarkar, Modern India, 204–25. 98. Report of the Committee on the Organization of Medical Research, 45. 99. John F. Richards, “Environmental Changes,” 299. 100. Report of the Committee on the Organization of Medical Research, 45. 101. Fletcher to Rogers, November 9, 1927, Medical Research Council, Adelphi, London, “Correspondence with Sir Walter Fletcher, Medical Research Council 1927– 1933,” ROG/D.5/1-11/1, Rogers papers. 102. Diary of Dr. Heiser’s World Trip, October 17, 1927–May 1, 1928, 53–54, Rockefeller Archive Center, New York (hereafter, RAC). Fletcher had forged a strong relationship between MRC and the Rockefeller Foundation, and in the interwar period the RF provided Britain with £25,000,000 for medical teaching and research. See Austoker, “Walter Morley Fletcher,” 28. 103. All-India School of Hygiene and Public Health, Calcutta, 1913–14, 1927–February 1928, 464 A, box no. 5, p. 36, RAC. 104. Report of the Committee on the Organization of Medical Research, 48–62. 105. “Public Health Institute Calcutta-Founded with Assistance from Rockefeller Foundation Central Medical Research Institute. Scheme in Abeyance Fletcher Committee Report on the Organization of Medical Research,” File 7B, 148, L/E/9/610, APAC. 106. Rogers to Graham, November 17, 1927, ROG/A/55/76, Rogers papers. However, A. V. Hill, in his famous report on scientific research in India, was careful to point out the limits of this comparison. While mentioning that the MRC in the United Kingdom “has an extremely free hand” and that the “Indian Research Funds Association (I.R.F.A.) plays a rather similar role in India,” he added, “Its funds, however, are very scanty. . . . Because of its poverty it cannot take the same broad view of its functions as the MRC does: for example, to maintain even a single clinical research unit in one of the medical colleges would be financially out of the question until ampler funds are available.” Hill, Report to the Government of India, 20–21. 107. Extract from the Legislative Assembly Debates, vol. 1, no. 12, February 8, 1930, New Delhi, E&O 2919, 1, p. 8, L/E/9/609, APAC.

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108. “Extract From Official Report of the Legislative Assembly Debates,” March 14, 1929, E&O 2919, 1, pp. 1843–45, L/E/9/609, APAC. 109. For a detailed account of the debates around the establishment of the Central Medical Research Institute, see Chakrabarti, “Signs of the Times,” 188–211. 110. Fletcher to Rogers, May 8, 1931 [Private, confidential], ROG/D.5/1-11, Rogers papers. “Bandar-log” translates as “monkey people” in Hindi, a racially derogatory term used by the British for Indians. Fletcher was known for his strong language and opinion and was sometimes considered to be “too trenchant in his denouncement of others.” Austoker, “Walter Morley Fletcher,” 24. 111. Fletcher to Rogers, May 8, 1931, ROG/D.5/1-11, Rogers papers. 112. Indian Council of Medical Research, 33–34; 35. 113. Report of the Health Survey and Development Committee.

Chapter Three 1. E.15, Papers and correspondence of John Cunningham, 1880–1968, GB 0237 Gen. 2004, Special Collections, Edinburgh University Library (hereafter, JC papers). 2. Rupke, Vivisection. 3. Brian Harrison, “Animals and the State,” 786–820. 4. Lynch, “Sacrifice,” 265–89. 5. Simon, “Monitoring the Stable,” 181–200. 6. There is a wide range of literature on human experimentation, depicting how these targeted the most vulnerable in the society. To cite only a few: Lederer, Subjected to Science; McNeill, Ethics and Politics of Human Experimentation; Grodin and Glantz, Children as Research Subjects. However, the two characteristics in this literature are that the focus is predominantly on Anglo-American society and that there has been little attention paid on how these wider social histories affected Pasteurian laboratory science in particular. 7. Willis, “Unmasking Immortality,” 207–18. 8. J. Turner, Reckoning with the Beast. 9. Franklin, Animals and Modern Cultures, 2–6. 10. Van Sittert, “‘Keeping the Enemy at Bay,’” 336–56; and Rangarajan, “Raj and the Natural World,” 265–99. 11. Steevens, In India, 25. 12. See Rangarajan, “Raj and the Natural World”; Karen Brown, “Tropical Medicine and Animal Diseases,” 513–29; and Davis, “Brutes, Beasts, and Empire,” 242–67. For a study of early nineteenth-century British attitudes toward Indian animals, see Sivasundaram, “Trading Knowledge,” 27–63. 13. Arnold, Colonizing the Body. 14. Mills, “Body as Target,” 96. 15. Collingham, Imperial Bodies, 143–44. 16. Clare Anderson, Legible Bodies. 17. One scientist wrote about this different attitude toward chloroform in Edinburgh and London, “in Edinburgh chloroform was proverbially safe, in London notoriously dangerous”; see John Stewart, “Chloroform Anæsthesia,” 1054.

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18. The states of British India that were ruled by native princes before the Indian Independence Act of 1947. 19. Report of the Hyderabad Chloroform Commission, 3. 20. “The Hyderabad Commission on Chloroform,” Lancet 133 (March 2, 1889): 438. 21. Report of the Hyderabad Chloroform Commission, 6. 22. Lawrie, “Hyderabad Chloroform Commission,” 601–2. 23. Report of the Hyderabad Chloroform Commission, 11. 24. Lancet 134 (December 7, 1889): 1183. 25. Thomas, “Chloroform,” 726. 26. As quoted in Masson, Wilson, and Hovell, “Edward Lawrie,” 1006. 27. Report of the Hyderabad Chloroform Commission, 25. To give a few examples: “Complete, or almost complete, asphyxia, as by forcibly closing the nose and mouth” (19); “smothering by holding the mouth and nose tightly closed, . . . smothering again while the animal was well under chloroform, smothering again when it was just about to come out of chloroform . . . [given chloroform again] . . . smothering again. These observations were accompanied by very violent struggling, and the smothering was consequently ineffective . . . smothering again . . . chloroform was then pushed until respiration ceased, and the animal died in spite of artificial respiration” (151). 28. “The Report of the Second Hyderabad Chloroform Commission,” Lancet 135 (June 21, 1890): 1369. However, the findings of the commission were ultimately rejected in London. In a short time physiologists had devised experiments that seemed to demonstrate errors in the Hyderabad methods, and the medical press asserted that human beings continued to die in England under chloroform from paralysis of the heart and ether was the better alternative. By the early twentieth century it was banned in most Western nations. “American Medical Association Committee on Anaesthesia” (1912). Some of the important chloroform committees and commissions were: Royal Medico-Chirurgical Society (1864), The Glasgow Committee (1877), British Medical Association Anaesthetics Committee (1891), British Medical Association Special Chloroform Committee (1901). See Thomas, “Chloroform,” 723. In India until 1928, chloroform was the only anaesthetic used. It was cheap and easy to induce. 29. Brunton, Fayrer, and Rogers, “Method of Preventing Death,” 327–33. Fayerer’s classic work on Indian snakes and snake venom was Thanatophidia of India. 30. Quoted in Fye, “T. Lauder Brunton,” 228. 31. Acton and Knowles, “Studies on the Treatment of Snake-Bite: Part III,” 126. 32. Brunton, Fayrer, and Rogers, “Method of Preventing Death,” 331. 33. Report on the Effects of Artificial Respiration, i–lxvii. 34. Stokes, English Utilitarians and India, 311. 35. Mitra, Life of Colesworthy Grant, 20–23. 36. Stillman, “Prevention of Cruelty to Animals,” 150. 37. As quoted in Mitra, Life of Colesworthy Grant, 19. 38. Ibid., 20. 39. In colonial Africa, stories about dogs were indeed narratives of colonialism. See Gordon, “Fido,” 240–54; and Palsetia, “Mad Dogs and Parsis,” 13–30. 40. J. L. Kipling, Beast and Man in India, 306–7. 41. Ballhatchet, Race, Sex.

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42. “Soldier’s Dogs in India,” CMG, March 20, 1890, 6. 43. CMG, December 15, 1890, 7. 44. “Letters to the Editors,” by “Only a Private,” CMG, January 31, 1890, 6. 45. Akhbar-i-Am, Lahore (November 9, 1898), Selections from the vernacular newspapers published in the Punjab, 1898, p. 726, L/R/5/182, APAC. 46. “Hydrophobia,” Pioneer Mail, February 12, 1890, 226–27. 47. “Pasteur Institutes,” CMG, February 19, 1890, 3. 48. “The Dog Question” by “Anti Rabies,” CMG (March 6, 1896): 5. 49. Pioneer Mail, February 25, 1892, 7. 50. “Prevention of Hydrophobia” by “Civil Servant,” Pioneer Mail, January 29, 1890, 165. 51. “A Pasteur Institute for India,” IMG 27 (1892): 96; “Rabies in the Punjab,” IMG 34 (1899): 134; “The Dog Nuisance in Bombay,” and “Hydrophobia in Bombay,” IMG 27 (1892): 95; “Mad Dogs at Surat,” IMG 31 (1896): 376. 52. “Mad Dogs at Surat,” 376. 53. “Letters to the Editor,” IMG 31 (1896): 377. 54. Letter, March 8, 1889, “Destruction of Mad Dogs in Shimla I,” Municipal Corporation, Shimla, 1884–1906, B. no. 3, S. no. 21, A-3, pp. 6–8. State Archives, Himachal Pradesh, Prabhat Sadan, Shimla, India (Hereafter, Shimla Archives). 55. A. Newnham to the President, Municipal Committee, Municipal Office, Shimla, June 5, 1885, “Destruction of Mad dogs in Shimla,” 1885–1906, B. no. 3, S. no. 21, A-4, vol. 1, pp. 15–16, Shimla Archives. 56. “The Dog Question” by “Anti Rabies,” CMG, March 6, 1896, 5. 57. “Letters to the Pioneer,” Pioneer Mail, February 20, 1896, 27. 58. Burgat, “Nonviolence toward Animals,” 225. 59. “Imperial Rickshaw Works, Shimla, 20 December 1932,” “Destruction of Mad Dogs in Simla,” volume 3, case 4, Municipal Office, Shimla, 19-16-1932, serial no. 23, Sanitation and Public Health, Shimla Archives. 60. “Cruelty to Animals. [H. L.] A Bill Intituled an Act to Amend the Law Relating to Cruelty to Animals, Bill, Act to Amend Law Relating to Cruelty to Animals,” 1876 (168), vol. 1, p. 3. House of Commons, Parliamentary Papers, UK. 61. Bannerman, “Report on the Treatment of Snake-bite,” 153. 62. Kenneth Anderson, Man-Eaters and Jungle Killers, 102. 63. “Bill Submitted by the Government of Bengal for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals,” February 6, 1869, Home-Public, 170 B, NAI. 64. Bailkin, “Indian Yellow,” 206. 65. Mitra, Life of Colesworthy Grant, 23. 66. “A Bill for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals,” January 21, 1890, Public and Judicial Departmental Papers, p. 218, L/PJ/6/270, APAC. 67. Hotchkiss, “Jungle of Eden,” 438. See also Mark Brown, “Race, Science,” 345–68. 68. Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, 199–226. 69. Quoted in Mitra, Life of Colesworthy Grant, 16–17. 70. Skuy, “Macaulay,” 513–57. 71. Father of Rudyard Kipling and professor of architectural sculpture at the J. J. School of Art in Bombay. 72. J. L. Kipling, Beast and Man in India, 1 (hereafter cited in text).

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73. See also, Hotchkiss, “Jungle of Eden,” 438. The same year, 1890, his son Rudyard Kipling published a haunting story about a British civilian named Fleete, who in an inebriated state had defiled a Hanuman temple and was nuzzled in the breast by a strange, faceless, half-human and half-beast “silver man.” Overnight, Fleete, the cursed man, turned into a “beast.” “The Mark of the Beast,” Pioneer Mail, July 16, 1890, 85–87. 74. Lord Dufferin in his final speech in 1888 stressed the need for British rule in India in these words: “They [Indians] ought to feel that there is no greater blessing to a country than the existence of an external, dispassionate, immutable, authority, whose watchword is ‘Justice,’ who alone possesses both the power and will to weld the rights and status of each separate elements of the Empire into a peaceful, coordinated, and harmonious unity.” “Latest Intelligence” (from our Correspondents) Lord Dufferin of India, Calcutta, Times, December 3, 1888, L/PJ/6/241, File 1978, APAC. 75. See, e.g., Editorial, CMG, April 8, 1890, 3. 76. “Zanzibar: Order Bringing into Operation the (Indian) Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1890, March 17, 1892,” L/PJ/6/315, File 344, APAC. 77. “The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals” Pioneer Mail, March 30, 1893, 16–17. 78. Copland, “What to Do about Cows,” 60. 79. “A Bill for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals,” January 21, 1890, Public and Judicial Departmental Papers, p. 218, L/PJ/6/270, APAC. 80. Muthiah, “An Old-Age Home.” The Bombay Pinjrapole was established in 1834 to prevent the indiscriminate slaughter of dogs by the municipality. See Lodrick, Sacred Cows, 157. 81. Pioneer Mail, January 7, 1892, 9. See also, “Hospital for Animals,” Pioneer Mail, September 29, 1892, 17. 82. Burton, Prevention of Cruelty, 3. 83. “India in the Parliament,” CMG, June 23, 1893, 7. Haffkine did conduct an autopsy on a guinea pig to demonstrate the presence of comma bacilli in the peritoneal cavity during his lecture at the Calcutta Medical College on March 24, 1893, Editorial, IMG 28 (1893): 100. 84. Letter from Frances Power Cobbe, Pioneer Mail, May 25, 1892, 20–21. 85. Cobbe, “Philo-Zoologists,” Pioneer Mail, August 3, 1892, 23. 86. Willis, “Unmasking Immorality,” 348–66. 87. Miller, “Necessary Torture,” 333–72. 88. Letter from Benjamin Bryan, Pioneer Mail, October 19, 1893, 24. 89. See Chakrabarti, Western Science in Modern India, 166–218. 90. “Vivisection,” The Indian Spectator, March 6, 1892, 193. 91. “Memorials from the antivivisection Society Calcutta, protesting against the establishment of a Pasteur Institute in India,” Home-Medical, October 1896, Part B, 104–7, NAI. Underlining in the original. 92. Preece, “Darwinism, Christianity,” 399–419. 93. Quoted in ibid., 401. 94. As quoted in Mitra, Life of Colesworthy Grant, 78 and 89. 95. Lodrick, Sacred Cows, 170. 96. The Bengal Pasteur Institute Committee had a fair share of Bengali Hindus, Muslims, Marwaris, Jains, Parsis, and Christian missionaries: the Maharaja of Ajud-

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hia, Chunilal Bose, Chatterton, Sheo Prasad Jhunjunwla, Maharaja of Kuch Bihar, Father Lafont, A. F. M. Abdur Rahman, Babu Lakshmi Narayan Shroff, W. J. Simpson, Jotindra Mohan Tagore, etc., CMG, February 19, 1894, 5. 97. Copland, “What to Do about Cows,” 62. 98. Fisher, “Indirect Rule,” 393–428. 99. A few years earlier, the Prince of Dholpur made an offer for establishing a Pasteur institute. The British Resident had made regular complaints about his mismanagement of funds, once writing quite menacingly, “I do not think that anything will ever awaken this will o’ the wisp Rana to an adequate consideration of the responsibility of his position or a passably sufficient discharge of his duties as a ruler. Consequently I look on the smash as inevitable.” W. J. C. (W. J. Cunningham) to WHC, December 18, 1890, “Arrangements for the Liquidation of the Details of the Dholpur State, and Proposals for the Appointment of a Diwan,” 1891, Foreign Department, Secret-I, Pros. January 1891, No. 10, p. 3, R/1/1/113, APAC. Manu Bhagwan suggests that the adoption of modernity in the case of the princely state of Baroda was to counter Curzon’s interventionist policy; see “Demystifying the ‘Ideal Progressive,’” 385–409. 100. Bharati Ray, Hyderabad and British Paramountcy. 101. Masson, Wilson, and Hovell, “Edward Lawrie,” 1005. 102. Pioneer Mail, December 3, 1891, 746–48. 103. Report of the Hyderabad Chloroform Commission, 234–35. 104. Divekar and Naik, “Evolution of Anaesthesia in India,” 149–52. 105. Chemist and Druggist, December 17, 1898, 964. 106. “Indian Humanitarian Society,” from J. Clayton, Secretary, Humanitarian League, London, to the Editor, Amrita Bazar Patrika, February 27, 1905, 8. For a detailed account of the Humanitarian League, see Weinbren, “Against All Cruelty,” 86–105. 107. The publications of the Humanitarian League in India concentrated essentially on vegetarianism and cow protection: Sundara Ram, Cow Protection in India; Jani, Romance of the Cow; S. H. Hart, Food and Character; Motiwala and Gokhale, Rationale of Vegetarianism; and Manker, Testimony of Scriptures against Animal Sacrifice. 108. “Correspondence,” from Lallubhai Gulabchand Jhaveri, Honorary Manager, Shri Jiva Daya Gnan Prasarak Fund, Bombay, September 19, 1914, Indian Medical Record 34 (1914): 69. 109. The term “Sanskritization” was used by the sociologist M.  N. Srinivas to explain a process of social change in India by which lower or middle Hindu castes adopted Brahmanical values and practices such as ritual purity and vegetarianism to claim higher caste status. See Srinivas, Social Change in Modern India, 1–48. 110. Burgat, “Nonviolence towards Animals.” 111. Tansey, “Protection against Dog Distemper,” 1. 112. Burgat, “Nonviolence towards Animals,” 225. 113. For an elaboration of this point, see Chakrabarti, Western Science in Modern India, 180–248; and Nandy, Alternative Sciences. 114. CMG, January 18, 1890, 5. 115. Lord Marquis to Governor General of India, November 17, 1892, HomeMedical, 1893, P/4345, APAC. 116. “A Vivisection Act for India,” CMG, July 8, 1893, 2–3.

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117. Pioneer Mail, February 12, 1890, 226–7. 118. CMG, January 29, 1890, 4. 119. Lawrie to the First Assistant Resident, Hyderabad, October 30, 1895, HomeMedical, 1896, p. 185, P/4963, APAC. 120. Note from W. A. C. Roe, Surgeon-Lt-Colonel, Officiating Sanitary Commissioner, Punjab, July 27, 1893, Home-Medical, August 1894, p. 347, P/4554, APAC. 121. Surgeon General, Government of Bombay, to Secretary, Government of Bombay, October 10, 1893, Home-Medical, August 1894, p. 295, P/4554, APAC. 122. “Proposed Legislation against Vivisection in India,” J. M. Campbell to Bombay Government, September 2, 1893, Home-Medical, August 1894, Home-Medical, August 1894, p. 293, P/4554, APAC. 123. “Minute Recorded by the Honourable Mr Justice Starling on the draft of the Bill to make further provision for the prevention of cruelty to Animals,” HomeMedical, August 1894, pp. 294–95, P/4554, APAC. 124. T.  D. Beighton to the Chief Secretary, Government of Bengal, October 3, 1893, Home-Medical, August 1894, p. 313, P/4554, APAC. 125. J. F. Norris to the Chief Secretary, Government of Bengal, January 19, 1894, Home-Medical, August 1894, p. 319, P/4554, APAC. 126. “An Appeal and a Warning to the People of India,” November 15, 1893 [by Society for the Protection for Animals from vivisection, London], B. Bryan, Secretary, Home-Medical, August 1894, p. 373, P/4554, APAC. 127. B. Harrison, “Animals and the State,” 792. 128. “Memorial of the Scottish Society for the Total Suppression of Vivisection praying that the practice of vivisection may not be legalised in India,” December 23, 1893, pp. 371–72, P/4554, APAC. 129. Willis, “Unmasking Immortality.” 130. “The Pasteur Institute and Vivisection,” IMG 30 (1895): 49–57. 131. Hankin to the Inspector General of Civil Hospitals, NW Provinces and Oudh, September 2, 1893, p. 328, P/4554, APAC. 132. Ibid. 133. Elgin, G. S. White, A. E. Miller, H. Brackenbury, C. B. Pritchard, J. Westland, A. P. MacDonnell to Secretary of State for India, Shimla, August 28, 1894, pp. 375–76, P/4554, APAC. 134. “Vivisection Act for India,” H. T. Fowler, Secretary of State for India, to Governor General of India in Council, December 6, 1894, Home-Medical, 1895, p. 95, P/4752, APAC. 135. Evans’s letter, April 26, 1895, Home-Medical, 1895, p. 176, P/4752, APAC. Also, Roe to Inspector General of Civil Hospitals in Punjab, March 4, 1893, p. 343, P/4345; Roe to Junior Secretary, Government of Punjab, April 29, 1895, p. 185, P/4963, APAC. 136. Elgin and Council to George Hamilton, Calcutta, March 25, 1896, pp. 199– 200, P/4963, APAC. 137. “Despatch from the Secretary of State, no. 57 (Revenue),” May 21, 1896, Part B, pp. 39–40, P/4963, APAC. 138. For a brilliant account of violence in British social life in India, see Bailkin, “Boot and the Spleen,” 462–93.

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139. H.  E.  M. James to Bombay Government, August 10, 1893, p. 290, P/4554, APAC. 140. Dirks, “Crimes of Colonialism,” 172. 141. For a study of royal hunting sprees in the empire causing moral outrage at home, see A. Taylor, “Pig-Sticking Princes,” 30–48. 142. Rangarajan, “Raj and the Natural World.” See also Annual Reports on the Destruction of Wild Animals in India, L/PJ/6/459, File 2182; L/PJ/6/2, File 66, L/ PJ/6/24, File 1462, L/PJ/6/2, File 66, L/PJ/6/113, File 2255, L/PJ/6/192, File 15, L/PJ/6/334, File 2071, L/PJ/6/430, File 1767, L/PJ/6/362, File 2275, L/PJ/6/430, File 1767, L/PJ/6/648, File 2106, L/PJ/6/636, File 1043, L/PJ/6/682, File 1406, L/ PJ/6/723, File 1484, L/PJ/6/893, File 3661, APAC. 143. See, for example, “Mortality from Snake-Bite,” CMG, June 27, 1890, 3; also Pioneer Mail, November 17, 1892, 8. 144. Vernacular Press Reports L/R/5/79, United Provinces, 1902, pp. 95–96, APAC. 145. J. L. Kipling, Beast and Man in India, 252. 146. The camels were not deserted. Most of them died in the long marches through the treacherous terrains of Afghanistan and from lack of food and supplies. Private William Atkinson, who had recently joined the army and went on to the Afghan campaign, witnessed many of these deaths that he described in his diary: 24 March 1879, During the march we had many of our poor baggage camels drop on the road side and die for want of food and sheer exhaustion as the poor animals had been on the continued march for several long days they were completely fatigued and worn out. The camel is a very hardworking animal and will go as long as the poor thing can get one leg before the other, and fall down and die rather than shirk their work. . . . And the camels which had dropped down would remain where it had fallen to be torn to pieces by the wild jackals, and other wild beasts and large birds of prey, who would very soon have the whole of its flesh stripped from their bones and leave their skeleton frame glaring in the trailing sun. These sceneries was [sic] witnessed daily by me and my comrades and most particular round about our camping ground where there was always scores of dead carcasses of camels and bullocks in all stages of mortification. And the stench which arose from the dead carriage of war was something most terrible to mention. We found every encampment in the same way in which I have spoken of. “Journal, completed 1883, of Private William Atkinson, H. M. 67th (South Hampshire) Regiment,” Mss Eur D1093, pp. 29–30, APAC. 147. “Typescripts of different versions of articles by Sir Torick Ameer Ali on Frederick Sleigh Roberts, 1st Earl Roberts (1832–1914), John Lockwood Kipling (1837– 1911) and the Second Afghan War,” Ch (6), Mss Eur C336/10, pp. 16–17, APAC. 148. Grant, Sketches of Oriental Heads. See “Thugs & Budhuk Dacoits.” Lithograph by Colesworthy Grant from Sketches of Oriental Heads, P/2572, Prints & Drawings, British Library. See also C. Anderson, Legible Bodies, 26. 149. As shown by Rangarajan, “Raj and the Natural World,” 272. 150. Dennis Fitzpatrick’s Minute, May 5, 1893, Home-Medical, 1893, pp. 350–51, P/4345, APAC. 151. J. DeC. Atkins, Secretary, Government of Bombay, January 10, 1900, HomeMedical, vol. 1, January–June 1900, p. 749, P/5878, APAC.

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152. Letter no. xiv, Elgin to Hamilton Shimla, May 25, 1897, Elgin Papers, Mss Eur F 84/15, p. 38, APAC. 153. Elgin and his Council to Secretary of State, March 17, 1897, Home-Sanitary, January to March 1897 (i), P/5188, APAC. 154. G. Hamilton to the Governor General in Council, May 13, 1897, P/5188, APAC. 155. “Parliamentary Question and Answers Regarding the Formation of Pasteur Institute in India.” Home-Medical, Part B, September 1896, No. 102, NAI. 156. “The Pasteur Institute of India,” CMG, December 18, 1893, 3. 157. Elgin and His Council to Secretary of State, March 17, 1897, pp. 1151–52, P/5188, APAC. 158. Note by W. S. Morris (May 5, 1903), “Proposed Establishment in Madras Presidency of the Institution for Treatment of Hydrophobia Similar to Pasteur Institute at Kasauli,” Home-Medical, June 1903, Ref. 22–24, Part A, p. 2, NAI,. 159. Ibid., 3. 160. W. M. Young to Curzon, Kasauli, October 26, 1900, Curzon Papers, 1900, vol. 2, no. 162, p. 175, APAC. 161. Pioneer Mail, April 19, 1901, 5. 162. “The Indian Pasteur Institute,” Times, December 18, 1900, 5. 163. Dewey, “Government of India’s,” 215–50. 164. This differs from suggestions made by M. Harrison about the role of Curzon in supporting bacteriological research in India; see Public Health in British India, 157. 165. Letter no. 1, Curzon to Secretary of State, George Hamilton, Calcutta, January 12, 1899, p. 5. Curzon Papers, MSS EUR F111/158, APAC. 166. Note by Risley (May 6, 1903), “Proposed Establishment in Madras Presidency of the Institution for Treatment of Hydrophobia Similar to Pasteur Institute at Kasauli,” Home-Medical, June 1903, nos. 22–24, Part A, pp. 3–4, NAI. 167. Ibid., 3–4; 4. 168. Note by Curzon (May 7, 1903), Home-Medical, June 1903, nos. 22–24, Part A, p. 4, NAI. 169. “Pasteur Institutes in India,” Times, October 28, 1907, 4. 170. “Restrictions Enforced in India in Regard to Experiments on Living Animals,” Home-Medical, August 1907, nos. 43–57, NAI. 171. J.  T. Leslie to the GOI, June 14, 1907, Home-Medical, August 1907 nos. 43–57, p. 4, NAI. 172. See, e.g., Cunningham, Brown, and Iyengar, “Preparation of Vaccines,” 1–18, Report of the King Institute of Preventive Medicine, 1932, ii and Report of the King Institute of Preventive Medicine, 1940, 34. 173. “Vivisection in India: The Shelving of an Important Question, a Native Protest,” Correspondence between Mr. K. J. Tarachand, BA, and the Secretary of State for India in Council, September 1911–January 1912, published by the British Antivivisection Society (British Union), for circulation in India; London: British Antivivisection Society (British Union), [1912], APAC. 174. Ibid. 175. Letter, November 2, 1911, India Office, Whitehall, London, “Vivisection in India: The Shelving of an Important Question, a Native Protest,” APAC. 176. Letter from R. Ritchie, December 13, 1911, APAC.

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177. Tansey, “Protection against Dog Distemper,” 1–4. 178. Rogers, Happy Toil, 250. 179. Rogers, “Prophylactic Inoculations,” 565–66. Among his several writings against antivivisectionists in London that make use of research done in the tropics are: Truth about Vivisection; “The Saving in Life and Suffering Due to Medical and Veterinary Research with Special Reference to the Tropics”; and“The Case against the Anti-vivisectionists: Their Anti-public Health and Anti-war Efforts and Their Cruelty to Animals,” Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital Journal, 1941, SA/RDS/G/51, Leonard Rogers papers, Archives and Manuscripts, Wellcome Library, London. 180. Rogers, Happy Toil, 253. 181. “Research Defence Society,” BMJ 2580 (June 11, 1910): 1423–26. 182. Ibid., 1425. 183. It was precisely these laboratories that became sites of animal abuse in India; see Animal Experimentation in India.

Chapter Four 1. Moulin, “Patriarchal Science,” 312. 2. Inspector General to Junior Secretary, Government of Punjab, March 3, 1893, Home-Medical, 1893, p. 341, P/4345, APAC. 3. “Mortality from Snake-Bite,” CMG, June 27, 1890, 3. 4. Ex-Commissioner, Destruction of Life by Snakes, Hydrophobia, 6–8. 5. Ibid., 84. 6. Acton and Knowles, “Studies on the Treatment of Snake-Bite: Part II,” 48–53. 7. Rudyard Kipling, Plain Tales from the Hills, 35. 8. Rudyard Kipling, Nursery Rhymes for Little Anglo-Indians. 9. See, e.g., Williams, “On the Cure of Persons,” 323–30; and Boag, “On the Poison of Serpents,” 103–27. 10. Russell, Account of Indian Serpents. 11. Hawgood, “Life and Viper,” 1295–304. 12. Lewis, Life of John Thomas, 407. 13. Beaglehole, Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks. 14. Roth, Ethnological Studies. 15. Russell, “Account of the Tabasheer,” 273–83; Macie, “Account of Some Chemical Experiments,” 368–88; and Kunz, “Madstones,” 286–87. 16. Theobold, “Catalogue of Reptiles,” 1–88. 17. Report on the Effects of Artificial Respiration. 18. Jones, “Discourse,” xii–xiii. 19. For a detailed study of the complex project of the Asiatic Society in studying both the cultural and natural world of India, see Chakraborty, “Asiatic Society,” 1–32. 20. Fayrer, “Destruction of Life,” 187. 21. Ibid., 189. 22. Fayrer, Thanatophidia of India. 23. Pedler, “On Cobra Poison,” 17. 24. MacLeod, “Pedler, Sir Alexander.”

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25. A. J. Wall, Indian Snake Poisons. 26. Frank Wall, “Monograph of the Sea-snakes (Hydrophiinae),” 169–251; and Frank Wall, Ophidia Taprobanica. 27. Ex-Commissioner, Destruction of Life by Snakes, Hydrophobia, 10–11. 28. Brunton and Fayrer, “On the Nature and Physiological Action of the Poison of Naja tripudians and other Indian Venomous Snakes: Part II,” 132–33. It was referred to in Oliver P. Brown, Complete Herbalist, 455. But this too was with a caution as it contained arsenic. 29. Brunton and Fayrer, “On the Nature and Physiological Action of the Poison of Naja tripudians and other Indian Venomous Snakes: Part II,” 132–33. 30. Ex-Commissioner, Destruction of Life by Snakes, Hydrophobia, 96–98. 31. Elliot, “Contribution to the Study.” 32. August 10, 1898, Bombay Presidency Medical 1898, p. 124, P/5540, APAC. Kanthack unfortunately died by the end of that year. 33. “The Bengal Snake Laboratory,” Pioneer Mail, December 22, 1892, 5. 34. “Experiments with Snake Poison,” Pioneer Mail, April 14, 1892, 16. 35. “Bengal Snake Laboratory,” 5. 36. “Professor Cunningham and the Cure of Snake-Bite,” Indian Medical Record 10 (December 1, 1896): 378. 37. D. D. Cunningham, Physiological Action of Snake-Venom. 38. Ibid., 1–2. 39. A. J. Wall, “On the Differences,” 333–62. 40. Nicholson, Indian Snakes, 148–49. 41. Fayrer, Thanatophidia of India, 75. 42. Waddell, Are Venomous Snakes Auto-toxic? 43. “The New Cure for Snake-Bite,” a letter from “&c IMS,” December 16, 1896, Indian Medical Record 10 (1896): 443. 44. The Hooded or Spectacle Snake (Naja tripudians), a very venomous serpent found in India and adjacent countries, remarkable for its power of dilating the neck and sides of the head when irritated so as to produce the resemblance of a hood. 45. Brunton, “On the Nature,” 358–74. 46. Brunton, Fayrer, and Rogers, “Method of Preventing Death.” 47. “Addendum by Leonard Rogers,” September, IMG 39 (1904): 332–33. 48. V. Richards, Landmarks, 22 (hereafter cited in text). 49. Fayrer, “Destruction of Life,” 192. 50. Fayrer’s letter, December 16, 1889, Judicial and Political Files, File 2144, November 28–December 17, 1889, pp. 800–801, L/PJ/6/266, APAC. 51. Fayrer, “Destruction of Life,” 191. 52. Rangarajan, “Raj and the Natural World,” 272. 53. Fayrer, Royal Tiger of Bengal. 54. “Mortality from Snake-Bite,” CMG, June 27, 1890, 3. 55. Ex-Commissioner, Destruction of Life by Snakes, Hydrophobia, 99. See also, “Mortality from Snake-Bite,” CMG, June 27, 1890, 3. 56. Philip, Civilizing Natures, 24. 57. “The Pasteur Institute of India,” Lancet 169 (May 18, 1907): 1377. 58. Ex-Commissioner, Destruction of Life by Snakes, Hydrophobia (hereafter cited in text).

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59. Butter to the Editor, Times, May 21, 1873, in Butter, Snake-Bite, 4–6. 60. Guénel, “Beginning of the First Overseas Pasteur Institute,” 16. 61. The Saturday Review, June 9, 1883, 743. 62. J. L. Kipling, Beast and Man in India, 349. 63. However, it is not certain whether Calmette actually received the award. See “From the British Consul at Saigon, dated 30th January 1892. Enquires what prizes it is proposed to offer in India for works regarding remedies for snake-bite, and forwarding a copy of certain notes by Dr Calmette on the subject,” Home-Medical, March 1892, Part B, NAI. “Informing Her Britannic Majesty’s Consul at Saigon in No. 139, dated March 10, 1892, that it is not in contemplation to formally offer any prizes for works suggesting remedies for snake-bite, but that the Government of India will be prepared to suitably acknowledge the labours of any gentleman who can propose a satisfactory remedy” (ibid.). 64. Guénel, “Beginning of the First Overseas Pasteur Institute,” 17. 65. “The New Cure for Snake-Bite,” Indian Medical Record, 10 (1896): 443. 66. Chung and Biggers, “Albert Léon Charles Calmette,” 382–83. 67. Frankland, “New Cure,” 76. 68. “Report by Major RWS Lyons, IMS, on a visit to the Pasteur Institute at Lille to the Secretary, Revenue Dept, India Office,” February 15, 1899, Home-Medical, vol. 1, January–June 1899, pp. 1137–39, P/5644, APAC. 69. Ibid., 1152. 70. “Snake Bite and Pasteurism,” Pioneer Mail, March 6, 1894, 3. 71. Ibid. 72. “Snake-Bite Mortality,” CMG, December 11, 1890, 7. 73. Ibid. The success of the destruction program in Bombay did surprise the correspondent, as he or she wrote, “Meanwhile it would be interesting to learn how it is that out of all the snakes killed in India nine-tenths are destroyed in the Bombay Presidency alone. What is the system in force there?” (ibid.). 74. “Snake Venom and Its Antidote,” Pioneer Mail, September 24, 1896, 4. 75. Hawgood, “Doctor Albert Calmette,” 1248. Calmette was particularly keen on promoting his medical discoveries in India. On another occasion, in his correspondence with W.  G. King regarding the suitability of Madras as the site for a Pasteur institute, he wrote, “Do you have many cases of tetanus of new-borns in your country? If yes, you could make a great service to your indigenous population by spreading in India the method I proposed for the prevention of this tetanus in children, through the dressing of the umbilical cord with powder of anti-tetanus serum. I make free of attracting your attention to this point, because I think it presents a lot of interest for the South of India.” [Translated from French], Dr. A. Calmette to W. G. King, Sanitary Commissioner for Madras, August 18, 1903, Memorandum of King, July 1, 1903, Home-Medical, 1903 (2), pp. 1372–79, P/6579, APAC. 76. Calmette, “On the Curative Power,” 1253–54. 77. Hewett to Provincial Governments, July 12, 1897, July 1897, Home-Medical, 1897, p. 527, P/5185, APAC. 78. Pioneer Mail, August 14, 1899, 1. 79. Hawgood, “Doctor Albert Calmette,” 1248. 80. “Supply of eight doses of Dr. Calmette’s antivenene in exchange for the three grammes of dry snake venom,” July 1901, no. 128–30, APAC [Later increased to 12

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doses by letter from Government of Bombay dated October 29, 1901, November 1901, no. 88, Part B] Home-Medical, 1902, p. 981, P/6347, APAC. 81. Hewett, Secretary to the GOI, to Chief Secretary, Government of Madras, Secretaries to Government of Bombay, Bengal, United Provinces, Medical Department, Punjab, Burma, Central Provinces, Assam, Chief Commissioner of Coorg, Honorable Resident at Hyderabad, July 18, 1901, Home-Medical, 1902, pp. 982–84, P/6347, APAC. 82. Acton and Knowles, “Studies on the Treatment of Snake-Bite: II,” 51. 83. Newspaper cutting (undated), “Cures for Snakebite: Major Lamb’s Discovery,” Excerpts from W.  B. Bannerman’s piece in the Mangalore Magazine, Lamb Papers, Mss Eur D893, APAC. 84. “Supply of Dr. Calmette’s Antivenomous Serum,” June 1902, nos. 97–99, Letter from Dr. A Calmette to Lamb, December 8, 1901, Lille, Home-Medical, 1902, pp. 596–97, P/6347, APAC. 85. Hanna and Lamb, “Case of Cobra-Poisoning,” 2–26. 86. “New Cure for Snake-Bite,” Indian Medical Record, 10 (1896) 443–44. 87. “Professor Cunningham and the Cure of Snake-Bite,” Indian Medical Record 10 (1896): 378. 88. Fraser, “Rendering of Animals,” 1309–12. 89. Ibid., 1309. 90. White, “Fraser, Sir Thomas Richard.” 91. Fraser to the Editor, BMJ 1824 (December 14, 1895): 1527. 92. Fraser, “Rendering of Animals.” 93. O’Gorman, “Dose of Antitoxins,” 36. 94. IMG 38 (1903): 227. 95. Young to Curzon, October 26, 1900, vol. 2, July to December, No. 162, Curzon Papers, 1900, no. 162, p. 175, APAC. 96. “Transfer from the Plague Research Laboratory, Bombay, to the Pasteur Institute Kasauli, of certain animals, snake-venoms and apparatus for manufacturing antivenene for Government Institutions,” from R. Nathan, Officiating Deputy Secretary, GOI, March 12, 1903, to the Secretary, Government of Bombay, March 1903, HomeMedical, 1903 (1), p. 267, P/6578, APAC. 97. “Letter dated April 29, 1903 from W. S. Marris, Undersecretary, GOI, to DG, IMS.” From now on the Pasteur Institute was to manufacture snake antivenene, not the Parel Lab. April 1903, Home-Medical 1903 (1), p. 363, P/6578, APAC. 98. IMG 42 (1907): 66. 99. Editorial comment on the annual report of the Pasteur Institute, Kasauli, May 1905, Indian Medical Record 40 (1905): 186–87. 100. Rogers, “On the Physiological Action,” 488–89 (hereafter cited in text). 101. Hawgood, “Sir Joseph Fayrer,” 179. 102. Stevenson, “The Preparation of an Antivenomous Serum,” 310. 103. Acton and Knowles “Studies on the Treatment of Snake-Bite. II,” 47. 104. Pardey Lukis to Secretary, GOI, Home Department, March 13, 1915, Supply to the Director, Central Research Institute, Kasauli, of reports showing the results of the treatment of snakebite by antivenene, Home-Medical, April 1915, nos. 141–42, p. 3, NAI.

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105. League of Nations-Health Organization Conference on Biological Standardization 1935, Report by Col. A. J. H. Russell, IMS, EHL-Health, 1936, 34-4/36-H, p. 5, NAI. 106. “Distribution of Colour Plates of the Species of Poisonous Snakes in the Punjab in Order to Give Wider Publicity for the Destruction of Venomous Snakes, Enquiries about the Copyright of Dr. Fayrer’s “Thanatophidia,” Home-Public, 1929, F. 195/29, NAI. 107. Wynter Blyth, “Poison of the Cobra de Capello,” 207. 108. Brunton, “Remarks on Snake Venom,” 2. 109. Fayrer, London to the Under Secretary to India, May 7, 1904, PP/ROG/C.5, f. 15, Rogers papers. 110. Letter from Horace Walpole, India Office, August 26, 1904, f. 17, Rogers papers. 111. “The Snake Poison Lancet,” Times of India, January, 10, 1905. 112. Fairley, “Snake Bite: Its Mechanism and Modern Treatment,” 1093. 113. N. M. Basu, “On the Action of Cobra Venom,” 328–49. 114. Chopra, Indigenous Drugs of India. 115. Calcutta, April 14, 1931, Diary of Dr. Heiser’s World Trip, October 23, 1930– May 18, 1931, p. 191, RAC. 116. Heiser, Doctor’s Odyssey, 348. 117. Sokhey, Indian Drug Industry; and P. C. Ray, Life and Experiences. 118. Panikkar, “Indigenous Medicine,” 287–308. 119. For the links between Orientalist and nationalist (under P. C. Ray) traditions of identifying the antiquity and authenticity of Indian medicine, see Chakrabarti, “Science, Nationalism,” 185–213. For a general discussion of the Orientalist discovery of Hindu antiquity, see Rocher, “British Orientalism,” 215–49. 120. See, for example, the experiments on the Hyderabad Tabasheer sent by Patrick Russell; in Macie, “Account of Some Chemical Experiments,” 368–88. 121. Chopra, Indigenous Drugs of India, 5 and 12. 122. Chopra, De, and Chowhan, “Experimental Investigation,” 391; Chopra and Chowhan, “Action of the Indian Daboia,” 493–506; and Chopra and Roy, “Some Observations on the Hæmolysis,” 21–3. 123. Acton and Chopra, “Nature and Pharmacological Action,” 235–50. 124. Chopra and Chowhan, “Snake Venoms in Pharmacology,” 445–50 (hereafter cited in text). 125. Chopra and Chowhan, “Cobra Venom in Therapeutics,” 339–48. 126. Chopra, Indigenous Drugs of India, 474. 127. Chopra and Chowhan, “Snake Venoms in Medicine,” 578. 128. Chopra and Chowhan, “Cobra Venom in Therapeutics,” 348. 129. Chopra, Indigenous Drugs of India, 8. 130. Ibid., 606. 131. Chopra, “Problems and Prospects,” 1–8. 132. For an account of the hegemonic trends in the Indian nationalist invention of its traditional medicine, see Panikkar, “Indigenous Medicine.” The more recent trend, however, has been to highlight the pluralistic (and global) rather than the hegemonic aspects of Ayurveda. See the articles in Dagmar Wujastyk, Modern and Global Ayurveda.

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133. Report of the Committee in Indigenous Systems of Medicine, Technical Report. 134. Dominik Wujastyk, “Evolution of Indian Government Policy on Ayurveda,” 63. 135. Alirol et al., “Snake Bite in South Asia,” 4–5. 136. Swaroop and Grab, “Snakebite Mortality in the World,” 35–76. 137. Chippaux, “Snake-bites,” 519, figure 4. 138. Warrell, “Venomous and Poisonous Animals,” 547. 139. Foulkes, “Rabies and Snake Bite Care Boost.” 140. Note by J. A. Shillidy, May 26, 1928, “Abolition of the Annual Reports on the Destruction of Wild Animals and Venomous Snakes,” Home-Public, 1928, File No. 269, p. 2, NAI. 141. Letter from the India Office, May 22, 1929, “Abolition of the Annual Reports on the Destruction of Wild Animals and Venomous Snakes,” Home-Public, 1928, File No. 269, p. 8, NAI. 142. Rudyard Kipling, “Poison of Asps,” 32.

Chapter Five 1. “Pasteur’s Method,” Pioneer Mail, August 12, 1896, 26–27. 2. Latour, Pasteurization of France, 80–86. 3. For a brilliant critique of this aspect of Latour’s work, see Schaffer, “The Eighteenth-Century Brumaire of Bruno Latour.” 4. Geison, “Pasteur, Roux, and Rabies,” 341–65; Pelis, “Prophet for Profit,” 595– 96; Löwy, “From Guinea Pigs to Man”; Bornside, “Waldemar Haffkine’s Cholera Vaccines,” 399–422; and Linton, “Was Typhoid Inoculation Safe,” 101–33. 5. Blower et al., “Live Attenuated HIV Vaccines,” 3618–23. 6. Manchester, “Louis Pasteur,” 513. 7. Selwyn, “Sir John Pringle,” 266–74. 8. Quoted in Paget, Pasteur and After Pasteur, 30. 9. Bornside, “Waldemar Haffkine’s Cholera Vaccines,” 408. 10. Moulin, “Patriarchal Science,” 309. 11. Manifold, “Report of a Case of Inoculation,” 101–3. 12. Löwy, “From Guinea Pigs to Man,” 298. Bornside described Haffkine’s cholera vaccination campaigns with live vaccines as “heroic”; see “Waldemar Haffkine’s Cholera Vaccines,” 409. 13. Bornside, “Waldemar Haffkine’s Cholera Vaccines” 405. 14. Hankin, “Remarks on Haffkine’s Method of Protective Inoculation against Cholera,” 569. 15. Löwy, “From Guinea Pigs to Man,” 299; and Bornside, “Waldemar Haffkine’s Cholera Vaccines,” 403. 16. Löwy, “From Guinea Pigs to Man,” 300. 17. Haffkine, Protective Inoculation against Cholera, 84. He also had to weaken his vaccine because of apprehensions about its side effects. In his experimental inoculations in Europe, a dose of 1/8 of a culture tube was used for each adult. In the first inoculations in Agra, he reduced the dose to 1/12 of a culture and later to 1/20. He added, “The necessity of using weak doses has been still more impressed on me when

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I arrived in Delhi, where I could start the inoculations exclusively on condition of using reduced doses of vaccines.” IMG 30 (1895): 38. 18. Diary of W. M. Haffkine, 1895, box 2, roll 1, MS Film 36, Haffkine collection. 19. Colebrook, “Almroth Edward Wright,” 297–314. 20. Worboys, “Almroth Wright at Netley,” 87–88. 21. “Sir Almroth Wright,” BMJ 4505 (May 10, 1947): 647. According to Worboys, this move to using dead vaccines established Wright’s approach to immunity to that of a physiologist rather than a bacteriologist. Worboys, “Almroth Wright at Netley,” 88. 22. Colebrook, “Almroth Edward Wright,” 298–99. 23. “Sir Almroth Wright,” BMJ 4505 (May 10, 1947): 647. 24. Linton, “Was Typhoid Inoculation,” 101–33. 25. Matthews, “Major Greenwood,” 35–36. 26. Chen, “Laboratory as Business, 253. 27. A substance called opsonin in the patients’ serum. 28. Matthews, “Major Greenwood,” 35–36. Chen, “Laboratory as Business,” 264–66. 29. This idea was popularized by Wright and Alexandre Besredka. See Matthews, “Major Greenwood,” and Löwy, “Terrain Is All,” 257–82. 30. Keating, “Vaccine Therapy,” 290. 31. Cope, Almroth Wright. 32. Colebrook, “Almroth Edward Wright.” 33. Wright, “Prophylactic Inoculations” (January 3, 1914): 5. 34. Wright, “Prophylactic Inoculations” (January 10, 1914): 95. 35. Wright, “Prophylactic Inoculations” (January 3, 1914): 9–10. 36. Ibid., 10. 37. Wright, “Prophylactic Inoculations” (January 10, 1914): 94–95. 38. Semple, “Preliminary Note,” 1668–69. According to him, the principle of opsonic index helps “in setting in motion the machinery which elaborates the products of immunisation” (1669). 39. Worboys, Spreading Germs, 81. 40. Lawrence, “Lister”; Cheyne, “Lister,” 923. 41. Kingston, “Antibiotics, Invention, and Innovation,” 680. 42. Semple, “Preliminary Note,” 1668–69. 43. “Notes from India,” Lancet 161 (April 18, 1903): 1130. 44. Semple, “Preparation and Use of Antirabic Serum,” 1611–18. 45. Ibid., 1613. 46. Semple, Preparation of a Safe and Efficient Antirabic Vaccine, 27 (hereafter cited in text). 47. His recommended dosage was dilutions of 4 percent and 8 percent rabies virus in 1 percent carbolic acid. Wright had argued for the same advantages of the carbolized vaccines in 1893, while discussing Haffkine’s cholera vaccine. “The living vaccines present the advantage of possessing a more powerful vaccinating power. The carbolised vaccines on the other hand present the advantage of being perfectly safe to handle or leave about. Further, they appear not to be appreciably impaired by keeping. They could thus be sent out for use from any central bacteriological laboratory.” In Wright and Bruce, “Haffkine’s Method,” 228. 48. Webster, Rabies and Antirabic Treatment in India, 6.

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49. Haffkine, Protective Inoculation against Cholera, 82–83. 50. Haffkine, “Preventive Inoculation,” 258–59. 51. Ibid., 259. 52. Lawrie to Muhammad Aziz Mirza, Home Secretary of Hyderabad state, May 10, 1899, Home-Sanitary, May to July 1899, p. 4023, P/5650, APAC. 53. Ibid., 4025–29. 54. Pelis, “Prophet for Profit,” 595–96. 55. Cunningham, Brown, and Iyengar, “Preparation of Vaccines,” 13–15. 56. Haffkine, Protective Inoculation, 82. 57. Bhattacharya, Harrison, and Worboys, Fractured States, 146–230. 58. Lukis, “Opportunities for Original Research,” 392. 59. “A Safe and Efficient Antirabic Vaccine,” Lancet 178 (July 15, 1911): 173. 60. The Pasteur Institute of Southern India, Coonoor, Third Annual Report, 1910, 19. 61. Calcutta Medical Journal 18 (1924): 585 (hereafter cited in text). 62. Ukil, “Work of the Pasteur Institutes of India,” 494. 63. Webster, Rabies and Antirabic Treatment in India, 6. 64. Morrison to Director, Bombay Bacteriological Laboratory, May 8, 1923, General Department, G.D. file no. 4761 (I), ff, 5–7, MSA. 65. The Pasteur Institute of Southern India, Coonoor, Eighteenth Annual Report, 1925, 6. 66. “India,” BMJ 3382 (October 24, 1925): 765–66. 67. Gelfand, “11 January 1887,” 698–718; and Geison, “Pasteur, Roux, and Rabies,” 341–65. 68. “Report of Rabies and Hydrophobia by Surgeon Major A. Barclay,” HomeSanitary, October 1889, pp. 634–35, P/3429, APAC. 69. Ibid., 638. 70. Ibid., 636. 71. “A Pasteur Institute for India” [By Bryan Benjamin, Secretary, Society for the Protection for Animals from Vivisection, 20 Victoria Street, London], Home-Medical, August 1894, pp. 373–74, P/4554, APAC. 72. Gelfand, “11 January 1887,” 710. 73. Semple, Preparation of a Safe and Efficient Antirabic Vaccine, 30. 74. Ibid., 2. 75. Cornwall and Beer, “Occurrence of Paralysis,” 467; and Cornwall, “Recent Advances of Knowledge,” 121–23. 76. H. G. Dennehy, Officiating Secretary to GOI to the Undersecretary of State, December 9, 1926, p. 1, L/E/7/1465, APAC. 77. “Note on the International Rabies Conference held in Paris April 1927,” by Lieut. Colonel J. Taylor, IMS delegate of the GOI, p. 3, L/E/7/1465, APAC. 78. Cornwall and Beer, “Occurrence of Paralysis,” 467–74. 79. Ibid. 80. Ibid., 4; 6. 81. Marie, Remlinger and Vallée, International Rabies Conference, 48. 82. Ibid., 97–98. Remlinger’s own work was mainly on the paralytic accidents from rabies. See Baer, Natural History of Rabies, 15–16. Remlinger, “Accidents paralytiques”; “Rage experimentale”; and “Rage de laboratoire.” 83. “Anti-rabies Vaccination and the Public Authorities,” in Marie, Remlinger and Vallée, International Rabies Conference, 154–57.

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84. Marie, Remlinger and Vallée, International Rabies Conference, 7. 85. Ibid., 8. 86. “Note on the International Rabies Conference held in Paris April 1927,” p. 4, L/E/7/1465, APAC. 87. Turner, Undersecretary of State, to the Secretary to the GOI, July 15, 1927, p. 6, L/E/7/1465, APAC. 88. “Extract from private a letter from Col. Graham to Mr. Donaldson, 22/9/27,” International Rabies Conference 1927: Participation of India, p. 6, L/E/7/1465, APAC. 89. “Further note on the antirabic treatment position,” pp. 2–3; 5, L/E/7/1465, APAC. 90. Quoted by Graham, ibid., 3. 91. Ibid., 4–5. 92. Arthur Hirtzel (undersecretary of state), January 17, 1928, India Office, to the Medical Adviser, L/E/7/1465, APAC. 93. J. B. Smith to Graham, December 22, 1927, L/E/7/1465, APAC. 94. Harvey and Acton, “Examination into the Degree of Efficacy,” 1020–77; and R. Knowles, “Some Problems in Rabies,” 389–93. 95. Morrison to Smith, January 10, 1928, E&O 269/28, L/E/7/1465, APAC. 96. “Extract from Official Report of the Assam Legislative Council Debates,” April 9, 1928, p. 482, L/E/7/1465, APAC. 97. Annual Reports of the Public Health Commissioner with the Government of India, 1925, 61–62. 98. Minutes of a meeting of a medical committee held in the office of the director-general, Indian Medical Service, on September 28, at 11 a.m., “Inadvisability of extending anti-rabic treatment by present carbolised vaccine to district areas in India until results of investigations are known,” EHL, Medical, 1926, 95–96 B, p. 6, NAI. 99. Ibid., 6–7. 100. Anderson G. McKendrick was a mathematician, epidemiologist, and army officer belonging to the IMS (1901). He was the director of the Pasteur Institute, Kasauli (1914–20). He also served as the superintendent of the Research Laboratory, Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh (1920–41). 101. McKendrick to Cunningham, December 13, 1925, E.15, JC Papers. 102. Cunningham to Alivisatos, February 18, 1926, Cunningham to Hempt, February 18, 1926, E.15, JC Papers. 103. “Further Note on the Antirabic Treatment Position,” pp. 1–6, L/E/7/1465, APAC. 104. “Note on the International Rabies Conference held in Paris April 1927” by Lieut. Colonel J. Taylor, IMS, delegate of the GOI, pp. 5–6, L/E/7/1465, APAC. 105. “Fifth Analytical Review of Reports from Pasteur Institutes on the Results of Antirabies Treatment,” Quarterly Bulletin, Health Organisation of the League of Nations, 613–53. He had changed this position slightly in his 1940 report. 106. Notes on Literature on Rabies, A.14, JC Papers. 107. Linton, “Was Typhoid Inoculation Safe,” 101–33. 108. Harvey and McKendrick, The Theory and Practice of Anti-rabic Immunisation, 47. 109. Ether Experiments, I, Resistance to Ether 1926–27, Ether Experiments, III, E.3, JC Papers. Human Cases Treated with Ether Virus, 1926–27. Note 10/8/1926,

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“It has been decided to treat the worst human cases attending the Institute with ether vaccine” (E.5). 110. Cunningham to Graham, January 22, 1926, copy to JKS Fleming, Secretary, Pasteur institute of India, E.5, JC Papers. 111. The colorless, light, volatile liquid (C4H10O) resulting from the action of sulphuric acid upon alcohol. It is an anaesthetic, and capable of producing extreme cold by its evaporation. 112. Wilkinson, “Development of the Virus Concept,” 29. 113. Cunningham to Graham, January 22, 1926, copy to JKS Fleming, Secretary, Pasteur institute of India, E.5, JC Papers. 114. “Antirabic Inoculation,” Lancet 207 (February 20, 1926): 405. 115. W. Keyworth to King, Mardan, March 3, 1926, E.6, JC Papers. 116. Patient Post card, to the Director, Pasteur Institute, Kasauli, Delhi, January 14, 1926, E.6, JC Papers. 117. Cunningham to Graham, March 2, 1926, E.6, JC Papers. 118. Cunningham to Graham, August 26, 1926, E.15, JC Papers. 119. Graham to Cunningham, September 14, 1926, E.15, JC Papers. 120. Cunningham to Acton, November 3, 1926, E.15, JC Papers. 121. Cunningham to Fleming, September 16, 1926, E.15, JC Papers. 122. Cunningham to the Secretary Pasteur Institute of India, September 1, 1926, p. 1–8 E.15, JC Papers. 123. Civil Surgeon, Jodhpur, to Cunningham, January 27, 1927, E.6, JC Papers. 124. Cunningham to Fleming, January 4, 1927, 1–4, E.6, JC Papers. 125. Cunningham to McKendrick, February 9, 1927, pp. 3–4, E.15, JC Papers. 126. Ibid. 127. Report by Cunningham to the League of Nations, pp. 3–4, E.19, JC Papers. 128. McKendrick to Cunningham, May 11, 1927, p. 5, E.16, JC Papers (hereafter cited in text). 129. Reply from Cunningham, Pasteur Institute, Kasauli, July 1, 1927, to McKendrick, E.16, JC Papers. 130. McKendrick to Cunningham, Edinburgh, November 12, 1928, E.19, JC Papers. 131. E.17, p. 15, JC Papers. 132. Carl Prausnitz to Cunningham, August 19, 1927, Breslau, E.18, JC Papers. 133. Prausnitz to Cunningham, October 24, 1927, E.18, JC Papers. 134. Letter to Prausnitz from Cunningham, February 10, 1928, pp. 1–2, E.18, JC Papers. 135. Cunningham to Graham, January 31, 1928, pp. 1–4, E.18, JC Papers. 136. Report by Cunningham to the League of Nations, “Note on Para 2 Letter of July 14, 1928 from the Medical Director, League of Nations, to the Public Health Commissioner with the Government of India, Dealing with Resolution No. 11.5 of the International Rabies Conference 1927,” p. 4, E.19, JC Papers. The Semple vaccine was to be standardized later, even in India, into a single dosage. 137. Correspondences and Reports, August 1928, Including Rabies Conference, Calcutta, December 1928, p. 3, E.19, JC Papers.

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138. “A Note on the Present Position of Anti-rabic Treatment in India” by Colonel W. H. C. Forster, IMS, President, Central Committee, Pasteur Institute, Burma, for the conference, 2, E.19, JC Papers. 139. Cunningham to Secretary, Scientific Advisory Board, IRFA, January 10, 1929, E.20, JC Papers. 140. Malone to Cunningham, August 29, 1929, E.21, JC Papers. 141. Cunningham to Graham, September 19, 1929, E.21, JC Papers. 142. Graham to Cunningham, June 5, 1929, E.20, JC Papers. 143. McIntosh, “Modern Trend,” 137–46. 144. Malone’s Interim Report, prepared December 13, 1929, “An Investigation into the Comparative Values of Carbolised and Etherised Vaccines in Antirabic Treatment,” pp. 7–8 and 18–19, E.21, JC Papers. 145. Mahone to Cunningham, April 11, 1929, E.9, JC Papers. 146. Ibid., 19. 147. Cunningham, Nicholas, and Lahiri, “Investigation into the Value. Part I,” 506. 148. Cunningham, Nicholas, Lahiri, “Investigation into the Value. Part II,” 85–88. 149. Cunningham, Nicholas, and Lahiri, “Investigation into the Value. Part III,” 245–51. 150. Wilkinson, “Development of the Virus Concept,” 22–29. 151. Boycott, “Transition from Live to Dead,” 60. 152. Bristow, Barrowcliffe, and Bangham, “Standardization of Biological Medicines,” 281. 153. Malone’s Interim Report, prepared December 1929, pp. 7–8, E.21, JC Papers. 154. Stuart and Krikorian, “Studies in Anti-rabies Immunisation,” 1–34; “Appearance and Persistence in Rabbits’ Blood,” 414–22; and “Rabicidal Antibody Content,” 489–93. Malone was skeptical of their research, as he wrote to Cunningham, “Everything works out too evenly [in their paper] and the results are too good to be true.” Malone to Cunningham, January 9, 1930, E.21, JC Papers. 155. Observations by the directors of the Pasteur Institutes of India on the report by Cunningham and Malone entitled “An Investigation into the Comparative Values of Carbolised Vaccine and Etherised Vaccines of Alivisatos and Hempt in Anti-rabic Treatment, carried out at the Pasteur Institute, Kasauli,” E.21, JC Papers. 156. Summary of the Recommendations by Rabies Committee Convened in December 1929, during the Research Workers Conference at Calcutta, Together with a Copy of Resolution No. 7, Relating to Anti-rabic Treatment in India, EHL, Health, 341–44 B, 1930, p. 5, NAI. 157. Ibid., 5–6. 158. Malone (in Rangoon as officiating director of the Pasteur institute) to Cunningham, April 27, 1931, E.21, JC Papers. 159. Webster, Rabies and Antirabic Treatment in India, 6. 160. “An Investigation into the Value of an Etherised Vaccine in the Prophylactic Treatment of Rabies,” Mss Drafts, tables relating to work on rabies,” E.22, JC Papers. 161. “An Investigation into the Value of an Etherised Vaccine in the Prophylactic Treatment of Rabies,” Mss Drafts, tables relating to work on rabies, table 4, pp. 16–17, E.22, JC Papers.

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162. Cunningham to Hempt, from Edinburgh, February 15, 1934, pp. 1–2, E.24, JC Papers. In reply to Hempt’s letter of November 23 where Hempt had read their report very carefully and raised some objections, “Comments by A. Hempt, Pasteur Institute of Navisad, Yugoslavia, on Kasauli Experiments, and Correspondences Arising,” 1934, E.24, JC Papers. 163. Cunningham wrote to Hempt, “I am also interested to read that both Alivisatos and yourself have lowered your dosage considerably . . . but our results proved beyond any reasonable doubt that the dose of carbolised vaccine being used prior to our investigation was insufficient for the serious cases which came to our Institution.” Ibid., 4. 164. Shortt, Malone, and Craighead, “Investigation into the Relative Immunizing Value,” 1. 165. Ibid., 2. 166. “Prophylactic Treatment in Rabies,” BMJ 3778 (June 3, 1933): 979–80. 167. Draft of article: “Rabies” by J. Cunningham, Medical Supt., Astley Ainslie Hospital, Edinburgh, E.25, JC Papers. 168. Editorial (by R. Knowles), March, “Anti-rabic Policy in India,” IMG 65 (1930): 156. 169. Shortt, Malone, and Craighead, “Investigation into the Relative Immunizing Value,” 7. Otten-van Stockum in Bandung in the Dutch East Indies noticed very similar improvements with her formalized vaccines prepared from monkey brain in 1916. She used monkey brain as it was cheaper and provided more brain matter per animal than the rabbit brain. See “Rabies Research in the Netherlands Indies.” 170. The Pasteur Institute of Southern India, Coonoor, Thirty Eighth Annual Report, 1940, 15. 171. “Progress of Antirabic Treatment,” BMJ 3619 (May 17, 1930): 924. 172. Greval, “Against Orthodoxies in Rabies,” 71. 173. Ibid., 73. 174. Ibid. 175. Pasteur Institute of Southern India, 1940, 17. See also Veeraraghavan, “Phenolized Vaccine Treatment,” 789–96. 176. Webster, Rabies and Antirabic Treatment in India, 7. 177. Editorial, “Will India Need Inactivated Poliovirus Vaccine (IPV) to Complete Polio Eradication?” IJMR 122 (2005): 365–67. 178. Blower et al., “Live Attenuated HIV Vaccines.” 179. Geison, “Pasteur, Roux, and Rabies,” 358. 180. Gelfand, “11 January 1887,” 710. 181. Brain, “Neurology,” 355. 182. “Antirabic Treatment Paralysis,” American Journal of Public Health 20 (1930): 412. 183. McKendrick, “Ninth Analytical Review,” 31. 184. Baer, Natural History of Rabies, 576. 185. “The Treatment of Rabies,” BMJ 4683 (October 7, 1950): 823. 186. Meslin and Kaplan, “General Considerations in the Production and Use of the Brain Tissue and Purified Chicken-embryo Rabies Vaccines for Human Use,” in Meslin, Kaplan and Koprowski, Laboratory Techniques in Rabies, 223–33, 224. 187. Pait and Pearson, “Rabies Vaccine Encephalomyelitis,” 877.

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188. Turner, “Rabies Vaccines,” 136. 189. Kaplan, “Rabies Vaccines,” 228. 190. Pará, “Outbreak of Post-Vaccinal Rabies,” 177–82. 191. WHO Expert Committee on Rabies: Sixth Report, 17. 192. “Rabies Vaccination in Man,” BMJ 5897 (January 12, 1974): 45. 193. Sulkin, Zarafonetis, and Goth, “Influence of Anesthesia on Experimental Neurotropic,” 277–92. See also Sulkin, Zarafonetis, and Goth, “Influence of Anesthesia on Experimental Western,” 53–54. 194. Meyer, “Effectiveness of Live or Killed,” 653–66. 195. Swaddiwuthipong et al., “High Rate of Neurological Complications,” 472. 196. Strategies for the Control and Elimination of Rabies in Asia, 3. 197. WHO Expert Consultation on Rabies: First Report, 13. The suckling mouse brains were first tried in the 1960s for antirabic vaccine. See Fuenzalida and Borgoňo, “Antirabies Antibody Response,” 431–36. 198. Kuhn, “Essential Tension,” 139–58.

Chapter Six Epigraph. Annual Reports of the Sanitary Commissioner with the Government of India, 1896, 126. 1. Lawrence and Weisz, Greater Than the Parts; and Quirke and Gaudillière, “Era of Biomedicine.” For an overview of this “ecological holism” in twentieth-century medicine, see W. Anderson, “Natural Histories of Infectious Disease.” 2. M. Harrison, “Question of Locality,” 133–59. 3. Jameson, Report on the Epidemick Cholera Morbus; Corbyn, Treatise on the Epidemic Cholera; Macpherson, “On the Early Eeats of Cholera”; Murray, “Action of the Cholera-Poison on the Body” (April 9, 1870); and Murray, “Action of the Cholera-Poison on the Body” (April 16, 1870). 4. Rousseau and Haycock, “Coleridge’s Choleras.” 5. Hardy, “Cholera, Quarantine.” 6. On the social impact of cholera in Europe and the United States, see Rosenberg, Cholera Years; Delaporte, Disease and Civilisation; Evans, Death in Hamburg, and Briggs, “Cholera and Society.” 7. Hamlin, Cholera. 8. Spooner, “Contagion of Asiatic Cholera.” See also Howard-Jones, “Cholera Nomenclature and Nosology. 9. M. Harrison, Public Health in British India, 99. 10. Rosenberg, Cholera Years, 1. 11. Moore, “Cause of Cholera,” 270–73. 12. Shapter, History of the Cholera, 178. 13. M. Harrison, Public Health, 100–102. 14. Rudyard Kipling, “A Germ Destroyer,” CMG, May 17, 1887, 5. 15. Ernest A. Hart, “West Indies as a Health Resort,” 1098. 16. Rogers, “Conditions Influencing the Incidence and Spread of Cholera,” 59. 17. W. C. Ross, Transmission of Cholera.

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18. John Snow, Mode of Propagation of Cholera. 19. Hamlin, Science of Impurity. 20. “Cholera and Indian Water Supplies,” BMJ 1681 (March 18, 1893): 600–601. Cholera has been also referred to be as a “seaborne” disease; see Hardy, “Cholera, Quarantine,” 251. 21. Murray, “Remarks on M. Pettenkofer’s Views,” 219. 22. M. Harrison, “Question of Locality.” 23. Murray, “Remarks on M. Pettenkofer’s Views,” 219–21. 24. Ernest A. Hart, “Cholera,” 1. 25. Ogawa, “Uneasy Bedfellows,” 671–707. 26. Bryden, Vital Statistics of the Bengal Presidency. 27. Ogawa, “Uneasy Bedfellows.” 28. Isaacs, “D. D. Cunningham.” 29. Löwy, “From Guinea Pigs to Man,” 272. 30. Curzon to Arthur Godley, May 24, 1899, Letter no. 22a, p. 92c, Curzon Papers, 1899, MSS EUR F111/158, APAC. 31. “Inoculation against Cholera: Mr. Haffkine at Agra,” CMG, April 25, 1893, 2. 32. Haffkine, “On Preventive Inoculation,” 254. 33. Ibid. Emphasis added. 34. Haffkine, “Anti-choleraic Inoculations in India,” 39. 35. Haffkine, Protective Inoculation against Cholera, 68–9. 36. Interestingly, E. D. W. Greig had earlier worked at the Parel laboratory under Haffkine, but had in fact complained to the surgeon-general of Bombay about Haffkine’s ways of running the laboratory. Greig to Surgeon-General of Bombay, March 29, 1903, Home-Medical, 1904 (1), January 1904, p. 6, P/6811, APAC. 37. “Note by the Sanitary Commissioner with the Government of India on the Arrangements for Bacteriological Research in India,” Shimla, June 20, 1907; Proposals for an Addition to the Number of Officers Employed in the Bacteriological Laboratories of India, Home-Sanitary, June 1907, nos. 335–41, p. 17, NAI. 38. Greig, “Investigation on the Occurrence,” 44. 39. Nichols, “Experimental Observations,” 497–514. 40. Ibid., 511. 41. Gradmann, “Robert Koch,” 232–40. As Paul Weindling has shown, in Eastern Europe Jews were considered as carriers of typhoid and subjected to brutal sanitary measures. Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide, 6. 42. Latour, Science in Action, 115–16. 43. M. Harrison, “Racial Pathologies,” 173–95. 44. M. Harrison, Climates and Constitutions, chapters 2–3. 45. Murray, “Action of the Cholera-Poison,” 383–84. 46. Murray, “Remarks on M. Pettenkofer’s Views,” 221. 47. Ibid., 219. 48. Murray, “Review of Dr. Cuningham’s Report,” 71–74. 49. Mary Mallon, also known as “Typhoid Mary,” was the first person in the United States to be identified as a healthy carrier of typhoid fever in 1906. Over the course of her career as a cook, she is known to have infected fifty-three people, twenty-three of whom died from the disease. See Leavitt, Typhoid Mary. 50. “Hankin’s Report on the Agra Lab,” Pioneer Mail, June 9, 1897, 5–6.

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51. On Koch’s discovery, see Coleman, “Koch’s Comma Bacillus,” 315–42. 52. Semple, An Enquiry on Enteric Fever in India, 1–2. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 2. 55. “Annual Meeting of the Governing Body of the Indian Research Fund Association,” IJMR 1 (1913–14): 3. 56. Quoted in Greig, “Investigation on the Occurrence,” 44. 57. Ibid., 42–46. 58. Greig, “Vitality of the Cholera Vibrio,” 502. 59. Ibid., emphasis added. 60. Ibid., 503. See also Greig, “Enteric Fever in India,” 312–15. 61. Greig, “Vitality of the Cholera Vibrio,” 503. 62. Greig, “Note on a Cholera ‘Carrier,’” 926–33. 63. Ibid., 932. 64. A. D. Stewart, “Edward David Wilson Greig,” 764–65. 65. Annual Reports of the Sanitary Commissioner with the Government of India, 1917, 42–43. 66. Grosöschel and Hornick, “Who Introduced Typhoid Vaccination,” 1251–54. 67. Read and Pandit, “Distribution of V. cholerae,” 413–18; and Venkataraman and Krishnasawmi, “Occurrence of Vibrio El Tor,” 419–24. 68. Walter G. King, “Applied Hygiene,” 14. 69. Pamela K. Gilbert, Mapping the Victorian Social Body. 70. E. W. Gilbert, “Pioneer Maps,” 172–83. 71. Hamlin, “Providence and Putrefaction.” 72. A. J. H. Russell, “Statistical Studies in the Epidemiology of Cholera,” 131; see also by the same author, “Epidemiology of Cholera in India, 1”; and “Epidemiology of Cholera in India, 2.” 73. Fry, “Cholera in Bengal,” 301. 74. M. Harrison, “Tropical Medicine,” 308. 75. Hehir, Malaria in India, 16. 76. Ibid., 25. 77. Edney, Mapping an Empire. 78. Ogawa, “Uneasy Bedfellows,” 681. 79. Rogers, “Conditions Influencing the Incidence,” 59–93 (hereafter cited in text). 80. Emphasis added. 81. Rogers, “Progress in Control of Cholera,” 1219–20. 82. Ibid., 1219. 83. “Cholera Vaccine Manufactured by Commercial Firms,” Department of Health and Education, Health, 1940, file no. 36-7/40-H, p. 4, NAI. 84. Arnold, Colonizing the Body, 116–58. 85. Quoted in Rogers, “Conditions Influencing,” 92. 86. BMJ 2009 (July 1, 1899): 17. According to him, large-scale inoculation was impossible in India because of the massive infrastructural requirements. 87. Arnold, “Cholera and Colonialism,” 149. Although there was a steady decline in mortality numbers in the late 1930s (see figure 6.3), the figure of 1939 is misleading, as the mortality for the previous year, 1938, was rather high, 236,143. See Annual Reports of the Public Health Commissioner with the Government of India, 1938, 25.

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88. Statistical Appendices to Annual Reports of the Public Health Commissioner, 80. 89. W. C. Ross, Transmission of Cholera, 2 (hereafter cited in text). 90. J. Taylor, Cholera Research in India, 23 (hereafter cited in text). 91. M. Harrison, Public Health, 60–98. 92. The GOI did send two members of the IMS to the Pasteur Institute in Warsaw in 1925 to learn about the first oral cholera vaccine developed by Besredka. “As to the visit of two Indian Medical Service officers to Warsaw in order to study method of preparation of anti-cholera vaccine for oral administration,” August 5, 1925–June 23, 1926, File 4987, L/E/7/1408, APAC. However, the vaccine was not used widely before the 1940s. 93. J. Taylor, Cholera Research in India, 3. 94. As suggested by W. Anderson, “‘Where Every Prospect Pleases,’” 522–25. 95. Pollitzer, Cholera, 171. 96. Ibid., 181–82. 97. Read et al., “Growth and Survival of V. cholerae,” 1. 98. Pollitzer, Cholera, 184 (hereafter cited in text). 99. Pollitzer and Swaroop, “Cholera Studies: 2,” 311–58. 100. May, “Map of the World Distribution of Cholera,” 272–73. 101. Ibid. 102. Cockburn and Cassanos, “Epidemiology of Endemic Cholera,” 791–804. 103. Patel, Isaäcson, and Gouws, “Effect of Iron and pH,” 175–77. 104. De, “Experimental Study of the Mechanism,” 559–62; De, “Enterotoxicity of Bacteria-Free Culture-Filtrate,” 1533–34; and De, Cholera. 105. De, Cholera, 105. 106. Ibid., 102. 107. van Heyningen and Seal, Cholera, 95–113. 108. Nair and Narain, “From Endotoxin to Exotoxin,” 237–40. 109. De, Cholera, vii. 110. Ibid., 29–39. 111. Ibid., 27. 112. Garfield, “Mapping Cholera Research,” 107. 113. Ibid. 114. Arnold, “Cholera and Colonialism,” 150. 115. Haffkine, “Anti-choleraic Inoculations,” 39. 116. Pollitzer, “Cholera Studies: 10,” 839. 117. George Smith, “Commentary,” 920–32. 118. De, Cholera, 39. 119. Statistical Appendices to Annual Reports of the Public Health Commissioner, 80. 120. May, “Medical Geography,” 9–41. 121. Pascual, Bouma, and Dobson “Cholera and Climate,” 237–45. 122. Kanungo et al., “Cholera in India,” 185–91. 123. Ravindran, “Water Privatisation.” 124. Kirigia et al., “Economic Burden,” 1–14. 125. Barbara Fraser, “Haiti Still Gripped,” 1813–14. 126. Chin, “Origin,” 33–42. 127. Enserink, “Haiti’s Outbreak,” 738–39. 128. Panchang, “Haiti,” 5–6.

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129. Leavitt, “‘Typhoid Mary’ Strikes Back,” 612. 130. Ibid., 613–19. 131. Smith, Lingas, and Rahman, “Contamination of Drinking Water,” 1093–1103. 132. Anbarci, Escaleras, and Register, “From Cholera Outbreaks to Pandemics.” 133. Hall, “A De in the Life of Cholera,” 148. 134. Global Task Force on Cholera Control. 135. WHO Position Paper on Cholera Vaccines, 117–24.

Conclusion 1. Chaudhuri, “Tropical Medicine,” 429. 2. Cinalli, Rangan, and Lehmann, “Germ Cells Are Forever,” 559–62. 3. Mcmillen and Brimnes, “Medical Modernization,” 180–209. 4. Madhavi, “Vaccine Policy in India,” 0387–91. 5. The Global Burden of Disease: 2004 Update. See also, King and Bertino, “Asymmetries of Poverty,” 1–10. 6. Operational Research in Tropical and Other Communicable Diseases. 7. Farmer, Infections and Inequalities, 185. 8. Mathers, Ezzati, and Lopez, “Measuring the Burden,” 1–15.

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Index Page numbers followed by a t indicate a table. Account of Indian Serpents Collected on the Coast of Coromandel (Patrick Russell), 116, 117 Acton, Hugh W., 116, 134, 135, 160, 168 acts: British Cruelty to Animals Act (1876), 90, 94, 102–5, 109, 124; Bengal cruelty act, of 1869, 95, 105, 106, 109; Criminal Tribes Act, 106; Indian Cruelty Act, of 1890, 95, 96–97, 104, 105, 106 Afghan war, account of camel deaths, 106, 237n146 Africa, 21, 208, 216 Agra laboratory. See bacteriological laboratories/institutes: Agra Ainslie, Whitelaw, 138 Aligarh, Haffkine’s anticholera vaccination campaign, 40–41 Alivisatos live etherized vaccine, 158, 160, 161, 165, 166, 167, 171; comparative analysis, 170t; John Cunningham’s experiments with, 158, 164; mortality rates, 163t, 164, 168, 169 All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), 84 All-India Medical Research Institute, Starling’s plan for, 81 American Geographical Association, map of world distribution of cholera, 205 American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, 91 Ampthill, Lord, 41 Anderson, Warwick, 3, 18, 19 Andrews, R. N., 32

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animal experimentation, 14, 20, 23, 86, 88, 90, 91, 109, 102, 112, 214; antivivisection movement and, 86, 87, 99, 102; British attitude toward, 20; British Cruelty to Animals Act (1876) and, 90, 94, 102, 103, 104, 106, 109, 124; colonial legislation against, 102–3, 109 (see also Indian Cruelty Act (1890) below); critique of, 98–99; in England, justification for, 111; Frances Cobbe’s opposition to, 98; Hyderabad chloroform commissions and, 89–90, 100–101, 102, 103, 232nn27–28; Indian cruelty act (1890) and, 95, 96–97, 104, 105, 106; legislation in England, 87 (see also British Cruelty to Animals Act above); legitimization in colonial India, 86, 87; Pasteur institutes and, 98; RSPCA and, 104. See also animals animals: British attitude toward, 86, 88; as colonial resource, 86, 88, 106, 112; and colonial state, 88–89, 91; cruelty toward, and Indian social practices, 103, 104, 105–6; Hindu nationalist politics and, 88, 97–102; and humans, relationship between, 87–88, 95–96; imperial attitude toward, duality in, 94; sacrifice of, among lower castes, 101; as scientific resource, 87, 103; SPCA and, 94–95; sport and, 88, 89; wild, state sponsored destruction of, 106, 113, 125, 126, 141, 213. See also animal experimentation

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Annesley, James, 188 anthrax, 33, 40, 42, 47; Pasteur’s vaccine for, 18, 26, 30, 144, 222n52; vaccine, experiments in India, 39–40 antirabies vaccination: Coonoor Pasteur institute statistics, 172t; decentralization of (see Decentralization of antirabies vaccination); in hills, nationalists critique of, 151; John Cunningham’s gradation method of, 164–65, 178; McKendrick’s report on, 175; out centers for, 152, 165; Pasteur Institute, Kasauli as center for, 67–68 antirabies vaccine, 19; acceptance in India, 108; Alivisatos live etherized vaccine (see Alivisatos live etherized vaccine); brain matter and mortality rates, connection between, 168–69, 169t, 170, 170t, 171, 172, 173, 175; carbolized dead (see carbolized dead antirabies vaccine); carbolized etherized dead, 162, 163, 164, 168, 169, 170t, 171; comparative analysis, 170t, 171; dead (see dead vaccines); etherized live (see etherized live antirabies vaccines); Hempt’s (see Hempt, Adolf); Malone’s experiments with, 165, 166–67, 168–69, 169t; Pasteur and, 16, 26, 37, 42–43, 48, 142, 148–49, 152, 153; Pasteur institutes and, 8, 60, 73, 128 (see also Pasteur Institute, Kasauli); and postvaccinal paralysis (see postvaccinal paralysis); Semple’s (see Semple’s vaccine); Shortt’s report on, 170t, 171. See also Cunningham, John anticontagionism, 16, 23, 33, 184, 221n45; and cholera theories, 182, 183, 191, 200 antiseptics, 36, 144, 145, 148 antisnake venoms. See antivenene; snake venom research antivenene, 113, 115, 140–41, 214; Albert Calmette’s discovery of, 11, 128–29; introduction in India, 128, 129–31; research and manufacture at Kasauli

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Institute, 132–33, 135; standardization, difficulty in, 135 antivivisectionists/antivivisection movement, 107; animal experimentation, opposition to, 86, 87, 99, 102, 104; in Britain, 104; and cow protection movement, 98, 99–100; in India, 99, 100, 110; Leonard Roger’s attack on, 111; Pasteur, opposition to, 37, 87, 107, 108, 174; RSPCA and, 104 Antivivisection Society of Calcutta, 99 Antivivisectionist Society of Britain, 98 Armstrong, H. H., 118 Arnold, David, 49, 197, 206 Asiatic cholera, 4, 179, 180, 203. See also cholera Asiatic Society of Bengal, 118, 119, 137 Asiatick Researches, 117 Australia: bacteriological research in, 3; snakes of, Joseph Bank’s report on, 117 Áuyrvedavijnana, 41 Ayurveda: and germ theory, 42; and Hindu national identity, 139; laboratory research on, 140 bacteria, 8 Bacteriological Department, 35, 76–77, 78, 80, 145, 211 bacteriological laboratories/institutes, 5, 10, 35, 38, 61–66, 112, 211, 212; Agra, 5, 39, 73, 189, 211; animal experimentation in (see animal experimentation); Bombay, 73, 129, 130, 152 (see also Plague Research Laboratory); Central Research Institute Kasauli, 5, 9, 21, 70–71, 170, 211; Haffkine’s campaign for, 48; Imperial Bacteriological Laboratory, Poona, 5, 33, 46, 211 (see also Poona Veterinary laboratory); Indian Medical Service and, 76–77, 78, 80; location of, 70, 73–74, 85, 160, 161; provincial, establishment of, 72, 73; as sites of imperial privilege, 76. See also Pasteur institute; Indian Pasteur Institute; laboratory; colonial laboratory

index bacteriological research, 11, 43, 45, 46, 50, 76, 214; in Australia, 3; on cholera (see cholera); and climate, 22, 23, 62–63, 65, 66, 67, 70, 71, 81–82, 150, 178, 211; imperial control over, 80 (see also Indian Medical Service); in India, 8–9, 22–23, 38–39, 46, 63, 94, 115, 211; and Indian Medical Service (see Indian Medical Service); in tropics, 2, 3, 6, 212. See also bacteriology; bacteriological laboratories; Pasteur institutes bacteriological surveys, 39–40, 213, 214 bacteriology, 8, 10, 26, 48, 59; and colonial medicine, 6, 10, 16, 24, 25, 60, 212, 213, 214–15; European versus colonial practice of, 212; French and, 8, 11; and imperialism, 60, 80; in India, 5, 6–7, 11, 22–23, 25, 26, 35, 37–38, 84, 85, 211 (see also individual entries); Koch’s definition of, 8; and morality, 6, 11, 12–17, 23, 25, 36, 214–15; and public health, 15, 25, 209; and race, 61–62; in tropical colonies, 2, 3, 6, 16, 20, 23–24, 61–62, 63, 70, 213–14; tropical diseases, eradication of, 3, 13, 47–48, 216 (see also cholera); and tropical medicine, 38 (see also tropical medicine). See also individual entries Bainbridge, G, 55–56, 57 Banks, Joseph, 117 Bannerman, W. B., 57, 59, 130, 149 Barclay, A., 12, 37–38 bazaars, as source of disease, 63, 64 BCG vaccination, in postcolonial India, 215 Beast and Man in India (J. L. Kipling), 92, 95 Beighton, T. D., 103 Bengal, 207; Haffkine’s cholera inoculations in, 1–2, 185–86 (see also Haffkine); as home of cholera, 21, 180, 181, 183, 194, 195; Taylor’s report on cholera in, 199–200, 201t Bengal cruelty act (1869), 95, 105, 106, 109

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Bengal Snake Laboratory, Calcutta, 122–23, 130 Bengal tiger, 125 Bergh, Henry, 91 Bharat Jiwan, 106 Bharti, report on Pasteur’s hydrophobia treatment, 42–43 Bhore, Joseph, 84 Bhore Committee report, 84 biliary disorders as cause of disease, 188 biomedicine, 14, 16, 20, 195 Blyth, Alexander Wynter, 135 BMA. See British Medical Association BMJ. See British Medical Journal BMU. See Bombay Medical Union Bombay laboratory, 73, 129, 130, 152 Bombay Medical Union, 79 Bombay plague, 48–57, 59, 186, 197; British management of, 49; and colonization of the body, 49, 50; Indian response to management of, 49–50; origin of, 51; and sanitary regulations, 49, 50, 51, 55; and vaccination campaigns, 49, 50, 51, 54, 55–56, 57; and vaccine research, 49, 50, 51–52. See also plague Boycott, Arthur E., 167 Brantlinger, Patrick, 95 British Cruelty to Animals Act (1876), 90, 94, 102, 103, 104, 109, 124 British Imperialism, 6, 7, 26, 88, 211; and colonial medicine, 16; moral agenda of, 13, 27–28; and Pasteurism, 60 British Institute of Preventive Medicine, 40, 87, 104 British Medical Association, 90, 129; Indianization of Indian medical service, opposition to, 79–80 British Medical Journal, 29, 37, 38, 42, 48, 53, 77, 78, 80, 129, 171, 173, 176, 183 British naturalists: indigenous drugs, interest in, 139; snakes and venoms, study of, 113, 116 British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, 110 Browne, H. S., 45

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Bruce, David, 111 Brunton, Thomas Lauder, 37, 91, 94, 122, 211; chloroform, experiments on, 90; snake poison lancet of, 135– 36; snake venom, research on, 90, 123, 124; Tanjore pill, experiments with, 119 Bryan, Benjamin, 99, 104 Bryden, James L., 182 Burma, out centers for rabies treatment, 165 Burton, Isabel, 98 Busson, B., 160, 174 Butter, Donald, 126 Bynum, William, 8 Calcutta: Antivivisection Society of, 99; Bengal Snake Laboratory at, 122–23, 130; cholera research in, 202, 205–7 (see also Greig, Major Edward David Wilson); Cholera Research Laboratory at, 211; Haffkine’s anticholera vaccination campaign in, 1–2, 3, 11, 16, 145, 185–86, 197, 206; hospital, 36; Indian Medical Congress at, 38, 45; Indian rabies conference at, 164; Medical Club, 79; Medical College, 11, 36, 119, 136, 234n83; medical research workers conference, 168; Museum of the Asiatic Society at, 118; Pasteur committee, 66; Pasteur Institute, 5, 65–66, 73, 151, 17; Presidency College, 118, 123, 136; School of Tropical Medicine, 7, 78 137, 138–39, 140; snake venom research in, 118, 122, 123–24, 130, 133, 138, 141, 150 (see also School of Tropical Medicine above); SPCA, 91, 94–95, 97, 99, 103–4 Calcutta Medical Journal, 151 Calmette, Albert, 32, 70, 71, 144, 162, 165, 241n75; antitoxic serum, introduction in India, 129–30; antivenene, 11, 127–28, 129–31, 133, 140–41; scientific recognition in Britain, 128; and snake venom research, 113, 123, 127–28

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Chamberlain, Joseph, 34 Campbell, J. M, 103 carbolic acid, 147–48, 153, 159, 221n45 carbolized dead antirabies vaccine, 149, 150, 162, 164, 170t, 177; advantages of, 148; etherized (see carbolized etherized dead antirabies vaccine); J. D. Graham’s opposition to, 154–55; Malone’s experiments with, 165, 166–67, 168–69, 169t; postvaccinal paralysis and, 160, 162; as universal antirabies vaccine, 171, 173. See also Semple’s vaccine carbolized etherized dead antirabies vaccine, 162, 163, 164; comparative analysis, 170t, 171; mortality rate, 168, 169; Paris Conference resolution on, 154. See also carbolized dead antirabies vaccine Carter, W. S. 82, 83 cattle plague, in Punjab, 39 Central Board of Health, 196–67 Central Medical Research Institute, 80–82 Central Pasteur Institute Committee, 45 Central Research Institute, Kasauli, 5, 9, 21, 70–71, 170, 211 Chamberlain, Joseph, 34–35 Chaudhuri, R. N., 215 chaulmugra oil, 8 Chloroform commissions, 89–90 Choksy, Nusservanji H., experiments with plague vaccines, 53–55, 59 cholera, 2, 3, 4, 14, 26, 47, 48, 179, 180, 203, 205, 206, 207; Africa as home of, 208; as airborne disease, 182–83; and annual pilgrimages, link between, 196–97; anticontagionism and, 182, 183, 191, 200; as Asiatic disease, refutation of theory, 205–6; Asiatic home of, 179–80, 181–82, 183; Bengal as home of, 21, 180, 181, 183, 194, 195, 199–200, 201, 201t, 205, 207; causes, 182, 188–89; and climate, link between, 182, 192, 194, 195, 196–97, 109–10, 198, 199, 203; climatic determinism and, 180; climatic versus human factor theory, 21 (see also

index climate, link between, above; healthy carriers theory below); and contingent contagionism, theory of, 183; D. D. Cunningham’s research on, 184. 194; as disease of locality, 179–80, 183, 184, 185, 207; disengagement from western world, 181, 182, 206, 210; in England, 182; epidemic outbreaks of, 10, 30, 182, 196, 197; epidemiological mapping of, 185–86, 198, 200, 202; epidemiological research on, 21, 181, 192, 193–94, 195, 209; European legacy of, 180, 194; eradication through sanitation and hygiene, 210; and germ theory, 181; Grieg’s research on, 186–87, 190–92, 199, 205; Haffkine’s vaccination campaign in Calcutta, 1–2, 3, 11, 16, 98, 145, 185–86, 197, 206, 244n17, 206; healthy carrier theory of, 189, 190, 191–92, 199, 205–6, 209; human body as site of infection, 188–90, 198; and humidity, link between, 196; and idea of home, 179, 182, 196; and imperial morality, 183–84; India as home of, 1–2, 22, 205, 206 (see also Bengal as home of above); and institutionalization of medical research, 35; international research on, 202; John Murray’s theory of, 188–89; as local infection, 205; maps, 194; mortality statistics in British India, 203, 204t; and oral rehydration therapy, 205; outbreak in Haiti, 208–9; and poverty, connection between, 206–7, 208, 209; and public health development, 180, 194, 200; research, 21, 22, 39, 192, 195, 205–6, 207, 209, 214 (see also epidemiological research above); Robert Pollitzer’s report on, 202–3, 210; Sambhu Nath De’s research on, 205–6; and spatiality, 179–80; and temporality, 181; toxin, identification of, 181, 205, 206; and tropical climate, link between, 192, 196–97, 198, 199 (see also climate above); tropical roots of, 14, 194, 195 (see also tropical climate above); in

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twentieth century, 181, 203; under reporting of cases in India, WHO report, 207; as universal problem, redefinition, 206; vaccination against, 196–98 (see also Haffkine); vaccine, 2, 8, 181 (see also Haffkine); as waterborne disease, 182, 183, 184, 198–99; western fear of, 202; WHO, discouragement of cholera vaccines, 210. See also cholera vibrio cholera vibrio, 1, 21, 179, 184, 189, 194, 202, 214; human body as site of, 187, 188, 190, 191, 199, 205, 209; research on survival of, 199, 202–3. See also cholera Cholera Research Laboratory, Calcutta, 211 Cholera: Its Pathology and Pathogenesis (Dr. Sambhu Nath De), 205 Chopra, Ram Nath, 137, 138, 139; Ayurveda medicines, revival of, 139–40; and indigenous remedies for snakebites, 115, 136–40 Chowan, J. S., research on snake venom, 138, 139 Chowdhury, Dr., 1, 59 Christophers, Samuel R., 9 Civil & Military Gazette, 11, 46, 47; antivivisectionists, criticism of, 107; colonial medical practice, critique of, 30, 31; hills as site of Indian Pasteur institute, support for, 66; Pasteur institute in India, campaign for, 30–31, 33, 34, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48; scientific education of Indians, comment on, 29; snake destruction, report on, 129; Veterinary Institute, Poona, criticism of, 31 Cleghorn, Colonel James, 45 climate: bacteriological research and, 22, 23, 62–63, 65, 66, 67, 70, 71, 81–82, 150, 178, 211; British and, 85 (see also spatial exclusivity); and cholera (see under cholera); and germs, link between, 9–12, 14, 19, 25, 26, 36, 61, 173, 178, 181, 200, 211, 212, 213; and Pasteurian science, 69, 70. See also tropical climate

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Cobbe, Frances, 98, 104 cobra, 120, 240n44 cobra venom, 131, 139; Alexander Pedler’s work on, 118–19, 122; effect of, 124, 133; Lambs’ antivenin against, 133, 135; research on, 118– 19; Thomas Fraser’s research on, 119, 131. See also snake venom research Colebrook, T. H., 41, 42 Collins, Harry M., 17–18 colonial bacteriologists, 74–79, 214 colonial laboratory, 17–23; autonomous development of, 35; and colonial society, 17, 19, 20, 23; elitism of, 21, 22; sociological approach to, 18. See also bacteriological laboratory; laboratory; laboratories colonial medicine, 6, 7, 16, 28; and anticontagionism and (see anticontagionism); and bacteriology, 6, 10, 16, 24, 25, 60, 212, 213, 214–15; British monopoly over, 29–30; elitism in, 21, 22; germ theory and, 26 (see also germ theory); internationalism in, 16, 17; and morality, 30, 36; Pasteur as symbol of change in, 33–34 (see also Pasteur); reductionism in, 20, 21; Worboy’s definition of, 16. See also tropical medicine; bacteriology, laboratory medicine contingent contagionism, Pettenkofer’s theory of, 183 Cooke, T., 62 Coonoor Pasteur Institute, 5, 71, 72, 73, 108, 150, 153; antirabies vaccination statistics, 152, 171–72; Semple’s vaccine, report on, 171, 172, 173 Cooper, John, 39, 40 Cornwall, J. W., 153, 159 cow protection movement, 23, 86, 88, 97, 98; and antivivisectionist movement, 99–100; Gandhi and, 101–2; Hindu nationalism and, 99–100; Humanitarian League and, 101 CRI. See Central Research Institute, Kasauli Criminal Tribes Act, 106

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cruelty acts, 95–97; Bengal cruelty act, of 1869, 95, 105, 106, 109; Indian Cruelty Act, of 1890, 95, 96–97, 104, 105, 106. See also British Cruelty to Animals Act (1876) CSTM. See Calcutta: School of Tropical Medicine Cummins, Lyle, 145 Cuningham, J. M., 189 Cunningham D. D., 35, 39, 192, 211; antivenin, doubts regarding efficacy of, 130; cholera vibrio, research on, 184, 194; snake venom, research on, 122, 133 Cunningham, John, 154–55, 156–68, 171, 192, 194, 211, 250n163; carbolized vaccine, opposition to, 164–65, 178; decentralization of antirabies vaccination, opposition to, 155, 159, 160–61, 165; departure from India, 165; ether as attenuating agent, preference for, 159, 176; etherized live antirabies vaccines, experiments with, 154–55, 156, 158, 159, 160, 161–62, 164, 166, 167 (see also live antirabies vaccines below); GOI support for, 161; and Indian rabies conference, 164–65; live antirabies vaccines, experiments with, 143, 163, 164–65, 166, 178 (see also etherized live antirabies vaccines above); rabies vaccination, gradation method of, 164–65, 178; Semple’s vaccine, skepticism regarding, 159–60 Curzon, Lord, 108–9 Darjeeling, as site of Indian Pasteur institute, 38 De, Dr. Sambhu Nath, and cholera research, 205–7 dead vaccine(s) 14, 19, 23, 145, 146, 153–54, 162, 168, 214; Alivisatos vaccine as, 171; ambiguity regarding, 165–68, 171; Cunningham’s apprehension regarding, 159–60; debates around, 178; and decentralization

index of vaccine treatment (see decentralization of antirabies vaccination); durability of, 148, 149; European shift toward, 152; First International Rabies Conference, focus on, 153–54, 155; French Pasteurists and, 149, 162; Haffkine and, 149; Hempt and, 162, 164; live vaccines versus, 142–55, 165, 171, 177, 178 (see also live vaccines); as moral category, 143, 144, 166, 178; and postvaccinal paralysis (see postvaccinal paralysis); Rabies Committee support for, 169; safety of, 142, 145, 165, 169, 178; transferability of, 148, 149; weaker immunity of, 149. See also carbolized dead antirabies vaccine; carbolized etherized dead antirabies vaccine; Semple’s vaccine Deb, Raja Radhakanta (Bahadur), 42 decentralization of antirabies vaccination, 149, 150–52, 156, 162, 171; John Cunningham’s opposition to, 155, 159, 160–61, 165; Rabies Committee support for, 169 Dehra Dun, imperial institutions at, 82 Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, 81 Dhanwantari, 41, 42 diphtheria, 47, 181 Dirks, Nicholas, 105 Dougall, J., 8 dried lymph vaccine, experiments with, 150 DSIR. See Department of Scientific and Industrial Research Dufferin, Lord, 234n74 dysentery, 47, 187 ecology, 14, 15, 179, 194, 203; and disease, link between, 194, 195; and germ theory, 61, 181, 200. See also germ theory EKR. See Robinson, E. Kay Elgin, Viceroy, 40, 56, 57, 97, 107; and Vivisection Act of 1876, 105 Ellis, F. W., 41, 42 encephalitis, 142, 165, 175–76, 177

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encephalomyelitis, 175 enteric fever, 47, 48, 69, 73, 147, 148, 186, 190, 203 environment, and disease, link between, 22, 179. See also ecology; climate epidemiology, 20, 179, 195, 214; and cholera research, 21, 179, 181, 186–87, 194, 195, 200; World Health Organization and, 202 ether, 89, 159, 176–77, 248n111 etherized live antirabies vaccines, 153, 155, 158; Alivisatos, 158, 160, 161, 165, 166, 167, 171; comparative analysis, 170t; John Cunningham’s experiments with, 154–55, 156, 158, 159, 160, 161–63, 164, 178; mortality rates, 163t, 164, 168, 169 Ewart, Joseph, 124 Farmer, Paul, 216 Fayrer, Joseph, 90, 91, 106, 118, 119, 122, 125, 133; snake destruction, advocacy of, 124–25; The Royal Tiger of Bengal, His Life and Death, 125; Thanatophidia of India, 118, 120, 121, 125, 135; venom research, 123–24 Fergusson, J. C., 71 fermentation, 9, 10, 25, 26, 144 Ferran, Jaime, 145 Fitzpatrick, Dennis, 46, 107 Fletcher, Walter, 81, 82, 230n102; Central Medical Research Institute, plan for, 81–82; Indian Research Fund Association, report on, 83; political intervention in imperial medicine, opposition to, 83, 84 Forster, Colonel William C. H, 165 Fox, E. C. R, 171 Framjee Dinshaw Petit Laboratory for Scientific Medical Research, 39 Fraser, Thomas, 122, 123, 124; and cobra venom research, 119, 131 French bacteriologists, 68 French Pasteur Institute(s), 2; and French imperialism, 36; location of, 65, 70, 74, 151; in Saigon, 69, 70. See also French Pasteurism

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French Pasteurism, 35–36; British Pasteurism versus, 63, 69, 74, 85; in India, 16; tropical climate and, 71; universality of, 74. See also French Pasteur Institute(s) Friedberger, Ernst, 158, 166 Fry, A. B, 195

Greig, Major Edward David Wilson, 21; and cholera research, 186–87, 190–92; and human carrier theory of cholera, 190, 191–92, 199 Greval, Shiva Deval Singh, 173 Guérin, Camille, 144 Gurjon oil, 8

Gamaleya, Nikolai, 38, 145, 222n52 game hunting, 75 Gandhi, M. K., 82, 101–2 Ganges, self-purificatory quality of, 22 Geodetic Branch of the Survey of India, 82 geogens, 207 “Germ Destroyer” (R. Kipling) 182 Germ theory, 3, 6, 9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 36; and Ayurveda, 42; and colonial medicine, 26; in colonies, 20; duality in, 6; and imperial expansion, 60; in India, 11, 84, 190; and pathologization of tropics, 12–13; and public health morality, 12–13; tropical ecology and, 10, 12–13, 61, 181, 200, 213; and Unani medicine, 42. See also germs German Cholera Commission, 189 germs, 3, 8, 15, 19, 20; antiseptics and, 36, 147–48; and climate, link between (see also tropics below); and disease, link between, 3, 25, 64; human body, as carriers, 187; idea of, 10; native bodies as site for (see native bodies); research in twentieth century, 215; and tropics, 9–12, 14, 19, 25, 26, 36, 61, 173, 178, 200, 211, 212, 213; universality of, 61, 195, 207. See also germ theory Gill, Clifford A., 196 Gopala Charlu, Pandit D., 42 Gordon, R. J., 91 Gorman, P. W. O., 131 Gradmann, Christoph, 75 Graham, J. D., 80, 165, 197; carbolized dead vaccine for India, opposition to, 154–55 Grant, Colesworthy, 91, 95, 99, 106 Grant Medical College, 39, 51, 149

Haffkine, Waldemar M. 1–2, 3, 8, 13, 21, 22, 32, 35, 50, 60, 64, 65, 179, 197, 206, 211; antivenin distribution, role in, 129–30; and Bannerman, dispute between, 57; and British medical establishment, 23; bacteriology, views on, 48; campaign for bacteriological laboratories, 48; cholera inoculation experiments in Bengal, 1–2, 3, 16, 98, 180, 185–86, 187, 244n17 (see also cholera vaccination in Calcutta below); cholera vaccination in Aligarh, 40–41; cholera vaccination in Calcutta, 1–2, 3, 11, 16, 145, 185–86, 197, 206; dead vaccines, use in antiplague inoculations, 149; live vaccines, preference, for, 145; and Pasteur movement, 47–48, 65; and plague research, 50, 51, 52, 53, 56, 187; and plague vaccination, Bainbridge’s objection to, 55–56, 57; and plague vaccine, 23, 55–56, 58, 59 (see also Mulkowal incident); support for, 59 Haiti, cholera outbreak in, 208–9 Halford, George B., 127 Hall, Col Geoffrey, 58 Hamilton, George Francis, 79, 105, 107 Hamlin, Christopher, 180 Hankin, Ernest H., 12, 22, 32, 33, 45, 76, 109, 211; and British Cruelty to Animals Act (1876), 104–5; and human carrier theory of cholera, 189; Pasteur institute in India, campaign for, 33, 47–48 Harrison, Mark, 9, 35, 49 Hart, Ernest A.: British medicine in India, critique of, 38, 39; Indian Pasteur institute, campaign for, 38, 44–45

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index Harvey, Robert, 45, 104, 197 Harvey, W. F., 145, 159 Haughton, Edward, 33 healthy carrier, theory of, 187, 189, 190, 191–92, 199, 205–6, 209, 214 Hehir, Patrick, 195 Heiser, Victor, 82, 137 Hempt, Adolf, 154, 158, 160, 161, 162, 163t, 164, 165, 166, 168, 169t, 170t, 171 Hendley, T. H., 65, 66 Herbert J. Reid, 102 Hewett, J. P., 62 Hill, A. V., 230n106 hilltop laboratories, 74, 85, 160, 161. See also Indian Pasteur Institute, location of Hirtzel, Arthur, 155 History of Hindu Chemistry (Ray), 137 Hitavadi, 220n16; critique of plague vaccinations in Bombay, 52–53 Hong Kong plague, 50 hook swinging, 105 Houstan, A. G., 191 Höyges’ dilution method, mortality risks, 158 human body: as carrier of germs, 187–88; and disease, 189, 190, 195; as site of cholera vibrio, 188–89, 190, 191. See also native bodies human carrier theory: Hankin and, 189 (see also human body); Koch and, 187; Latour and, 187–88 Humanitarian League, 101 Hume, Edward H., 57 Hunter, William G, 195 Hyderabad, 100 Hyderabad chloroform commission, 89–90, 100–101, 102, 103 hydrophobia. See rabies Ibbetson, D. C. J., 109 ICMR. See Indian Council of Medical Research IMG. See Indian Medical Gazette

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Imperial Bacteriological Laboratory, Poona, 5, 33, 46, 211. See also Poona Veterinary laboratory Imperial Forest Research Institute, 82 imperial medicine, 6, 13, 16, 17, 61, 76, 80, 84, 111; and bacteriology, 60, 75; in India, 28; Indian nationalists and, 78–79; as moral enterprise, 28, 34–35; and Pasteurism, 34, 38; and tropical medicine, 6–7 IMR. See Indian Medical Record IMS. See Indian Medical Service India Office Medical Board, London, 78 Indian Association, 29 Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, 27 Indian Council of Medical Research, 84 Indian Cruelty Act (1890), 104, 95, 96–97, 104, 105, 106 Indian Humanitarian Committee of London, 109 Indian Medical Congress, First, 29, 38, 45, 47, 104 Indian Medical Gazette, 51, 93; Pasteur institute in India, campaign for, 33–34, 43; research laboratories, plan for, 48 Indian Medical Record, 43, 93, 130; Pasteur institute in India, campaign for, 43 Indian Medical Service (IMS), 28–29, 35, 76, 77, 78, 80, 85; abolishment in postcolonial India, 84; autonomy, demand for, 77; and Bacteriological Department, 5, 35, 76–77, 78; bacteriological posts, monopolization of, 76–77, 78; and bacteriological research, 76–77, 78; British recruits in, 77, 79, 80; elitism in, 21; inclusion of Indian doctors in, 79; Indianization of, 78, 80; Pasteurian science and, 32; plague vaccination in Bombay, opposition to, 55; racial character of, 79 Indian nation building and elitism, 21–22 Indian Pasteur committee, 47, 48

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Indian Pasteur Institute(s), 5–6, 59–60, 61, 85, 200, 211, 213–14; AngloIndian support for, 44–45; animal experimentation in, 86, 98 (see also animal experimentation); antivivisectionist opposition to, 98, 99; British scientists and, 11, 12; Calcutta as site of, 66; career opportunities for British medical men, 32; as center for antirabies treatment, 46; cholera research and, 197; Civil & Military Gazette campaign for, 11, 30–31, 33, 34, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48; and colonial morality, 47; Calcutta, 5, 151, 211; colonial state, noninvolvement with, 107, 108, 110; Coonoor, 5, 71, 72, 108, 150, 152, 211; Curzon’s apprehension regarding, 108–9; decentralization of, 65; diversification in movement for, 47–48; elitism in establishment of, 21; GOI reluctance for establishment of, 46; government involvement in, Risley’s support for, 109; Haffkine and, 47–48, 65; Hankin’s support for, 33; Hart’s appeal for establishment of, 38; Indian elites and, 11, 12, 44; Indian Medical Gazette campaign for, 33–34, 43; Indian protest against, 99; indigenization of, 151; Kasauli, 5, 66–68, 71, 107–8, 110, 132–33, 135, 211; Khusru J. Tarachand’s protest against, 110–11; Lingard’s plan for, 62–63; location of, 23, 61, 65–66, 67, 68; in Madras, W. G King’s appeal for, 69–70; Medical Congress resolution and, 47; and medical research, 38; movement for, and imperial morality, 26–27, 60; movement for establishment, 6, 11, 26, 30–32, 33, 35, 37–38, 39, 43–45, 46, 60, 115; Pioneer Mail campaign for, 11, 40, 43, 44–45; Poona as location for, 62–63; as private institutes, 110; Rangoon, 5, 211; scale of, debates within Pasteur committees, 46; second, hills as site of, 70; Shillong, at, 5, 211; support in India, 100;

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treatment of tropical diseases, 46–49; vaccination programs of, 5; vaccine research and production, focus on, 8; venom research in, 11, 115, 128, 131–33. See also individual Pasteur institutes Indian People, report on Mulkowal incident, 57–58 Indian Plague Commission, 37, 48, 49 Indian Plague Commission (IPC), Report of, 71–72 Indian rabies conference, Calcutta, 164 Indian Research Fund Association, 5, 77, 78, 84, 85, 211; epidemiological mapping of Cholera, 193–94, 195, 200; epidemiological research and, 21; and Medical Research Council, comparison between, 83, 230n106; survey maps of, 198; Walter Fletcher’s report on, 83 Indian Retrenchment Committee, 77, 81 Indian Science Congress (1954), Hyderabad, 215 Indian scientists, 39, 137; British control over bacteriological institutes, opposition to, 61; British monopolization of Indian Medical Service, opposition to, 79; imperial patronage, lack of, 29, 220n16 Indian Snake Poison Commission, 91, 124 Indigenous drugs: British naturalists’ interest in, 139; and European pharmaceuticals, 137. See also Chopra, Ram Nath Indigenous Drugs of India (R. N. Chopra) 136, 137 IRFA. See Indian Research Fund Association Jamaica, cholera epidemic in, 182 James, H. E. M., 105 Jhaveri, Lallubhai Gulabchand, 101 Johnson, James, 4, 188 Jones, William, 11, 118, 138 Joyce, Patrick, 219n76 Kala-azar, 9, 30, 47, 73

index Kangra cattle epidemic, 30 Kanthack, Alfredo A., 122 Kaplan, C., 176 Kasauli, 66–68; Central Research Institute (CRI) at, 5, 73; Pasteur Institute. See Kasauli Pasteur Institute Kasauli Pasteur Institute, 5, 66–68, 71, 108, 110, 143, 211; antirabies research in, 153, 154, 169 (see also Cunningham, John); antirabies treatment at, 67–68, 73; centralization of antirabies treatment in, 155, 161; closure of, 170; King’s criticism of, 71; as private institution, 107–8. See also Indian Pasteur institute Khan, Nizam Mahbub Ali, 100–101 King W. G., 41, 42, 65, 168; Lingard, criticism of, 71; Pasteur institute at Madras, appeal for, 69–71; Semple’s hill laboratories, criticism of, 70, 71 Kings Institute, Madras, 41, 211 Kipling, J. L., 92, 106, 127, 233n71; Beast and Man in India, 92, 95; humananimal relationship in India, view of, 95–96 Kipling, Rudyard, 43, 96, 116, 141, 234n73; “A Germ Destroyer,” 182 Kitasato, Shibasaburo, 50 Knowles, Robert, 116, 134, 135 Koch, Robert, 5, 6, 10, 30, 48, 179, 181, 194, 195, 211; anthrax, experiments in, 221n45; bacteriology, definition of, 8; cholera germ, research on, 184, 189–90; D. D. Cunningham’s attack on, 184; enteric fever, research on, 190; game hunting and, 75–76; theory of “carrier state,” 187 Kohler, Robert, 17 Krikorian, K. S, 168 Kumar, Deepak, 58 laboratories: Bacteriological Laboratory, Agra, 5, 39, 73, 189, 211; Bacteriological Laboratory, Bombay. (See Plague Research Laboratory); Bengal Snake Laboratory (see Bengal Snake laboratory); Bombay Laboratory (see Plague

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Research Laboratory); Framjee Dinshaw Petit Laboratory for Scientific Medical Research, 39; Imperial Bacteriological Laboratory, Poona, 5, 33, 46, 211 (see also Poona Veterinary Laboratory); Lahore Laboratory, 38–39; Plague Research Laboratory, Bombay (see Plague Research Laboratory); Poona Veterinary Laboratory (see Poona Veterinary Laboratory); provincial, 72, 73 laboratory, 8–9, 15, 22, 26–27, 60, 84–85, 214–15; animal experimentation in (see animal experimentation); colonial (see colonial laboratory); and field studies, link between, 15–16, 18; location of, 22, 23, 63, 64, 74, 81, 85, 160, 161; nationalists and, 23, 27, 29; in plains, advantages of, 70, 71; and public health, 15; as reductionist institution, 17; and research, in prePasteur India, 38–39; scientists versus historians view of, 14–15; social history of, 17–18; as symbols of scientific progress, 102; tropics as, 3, 18. See also bacteriological laboratories Laboratory Life, 18 laboratory medicine, 48, 209, 214; expansion of, 16–17; introduction in colonies, 3; reductionism in, 14, 16, 17; in tropics, 209, 212–13. See also bacteriology; colonial medicine laboratory rabies (rage du laboratoire), 143–44, 161, 174–77; ambiguity regarding, 175–76; etiology of, 174– 75; and live vaccines, link between, 143–44, 152–53, 176; postvaccinal paralysis and, 176. See also postvaccinal paralysis Laha, Govind Chandra, 122 Lahore laboratory, 38–39 Lamb, George, 67, 130, 145; anti-Daboia (viper) serum, 133, 135; anti-Naja (cobra) serum, 133, 135; antivenin versus Calmette’s, difference between, 133; venom research and, 132–33

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Lancet, 37, 44, 45, 53, 126; and chloroform debate, 89–90; Chosky’s experiments, objection to, 54, 55; Semple’s vaccine, comment on, 150, 159 Latour, Bruno, 18–19, 219n73, 219n76; Pasteur, critique of, 143; Pasteurian population, concept of, 187; social, concept of, 18, 19; social agency, concept of, 19, 20 Lawrie, Edward, 36, 100; chloroform experiments, 89; Haffkine’s dead vaccine, modifications to, 149; Vivisection Act (1876) in India, opposition to, 102–3 Leavitt, Judith W., 15 Lee-Warner, William, 28 Leishman, William B., 9 leprosy, 8 Leslie, J. T. W., 77 Lind, James, 4, 144 Lingard, Alfred, 39, 65, 82; Indian Pasteur institute, support for, 33; Mukteswar, move to, 64, 65; Pasteur Institute at Poona, plan for, 62–63; Poona as site of bacteriological research, objection to, 62, 63–64; Poona Veterinary Laboratory, objection to location of, 63; Rinderpest, research on, 64; W. G. King’s criticism of, 71 Lister, Joseph, 36, 37, 51, 144, 221n45; carbolic acid as antiseptic, use of, 147–48; Haffkine’s plague vaccine, approval of, 59 Listerism, 36–37 live vaccines, 14, 19, 145, 165–66, 168, 176, 214; Alivisatos (see Alivisatos live etherized vaccine); ambiguity regarding, 165–68, 171; anthrax vaccine as, 144; Cunningham’s experiments with. (see Cunningham, John); dead vaccines versus, 142–45, 165, 171, 177, 178 (see also dead vaccines); decomposition in tropical climate, 142; etherized (see etherized live antirabies vaccines); Haffkine and, 145; Hankin and, 145; as ideological

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and moral category, 143, 144, 166, 178; and laboratory rabies, 143–44, 152–53, 176; postvaccinal complications, 156, 158, 159, 162, 164, 165, 176, 177; potency of, 142, 144, 158, 159, 163, 178; rabies committee condemnation regarding, 169; safety of, 158–59; tuberculosis vaccine as, 144; WHO Expert Committee on Rabies, directive on, 176 Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, 8, 11, 73 Livingstone, David N., 61; moral climatology, concept of, 221n44 London Antivivisection Society, 102 London School of Tropical Medicine, 8, 11, 34, 73 LSTM. See London School of Tropical Medicine Lukis, Pardey, 32, 77, 135, 150 Lustig, A., 211; plague serum, 51, 52, 53–55 Lyall, C. J., 46 Lyons, Robert W. S., 12, 32, 128 Mackie, F. P., 68 Madras, as site of second Pasteur institute, 69–70 Madras Cholera Clock, 193, 194 Madras Courier, 41 Madras Mail, 41 Madras Pasteur committee, 45, 65, 66, 227n22 malaria, 4, 7, 8–9, 47, 48, 163, 195 Malaria in India (Patrick Hehir), 195 Mallon, Mary, 15, 189 Malone, R. H., 170, 249n154; antirabies vaccine experiments, 165, 166–67, 168–69 Manson, Patrick, 7, 8, 11, 61 Marie, A. C., 153 Marquis, Lord, 102 Martin, C. J, 67 Masurika (chickenpox), treatment in ancient India, 42 McIntosh, James, opposition to live vaccines, 165

index McKendrick, Anderson Gray, 156, 161, 166, 247n100; antirabies vaccination report, 175; Report on First International Rabies Conference, at Paris, 158, 162–63 McLeod, Kenneth, 12, 32, 36 Medical Research Council (UK), 81, 83; and Indian Research Fund Association, comparison between, 83, 230n106 Medical Workers Research Conference, 168 medicine, holism in, 14–15, 17 medicine and morality, 12, 14, 27–28 Metin, Dr. M., 69–70 Montague-Chelmsford reforms, 78 moral climatology, concept of, 61, 221n44 morality, and medicine, 12, 14, 27–28 Morley, John, 77 Morris, W. S., 108 Morrison, J., 152, 156 Moulin, A. M., 35 MRC. See Medical Research Council Mulkowal incident, 50, 57–58, 59, 70 Murray, John, theory of cause of cholera, 188–89 Museum of the Asiatic Society of Calcutta, 118 Naia bungarus, 134 Naja naja venom. See cobra Naja tripudians. See cobra Naoroji, Dadabhai, moral critique of British imperialism, 28, 220n9 nation building and elitism, 21–22 nationalism, 53, 85, 137; cow protection movement and, 99–100; and imperial medicine, 78–79; and indigenous medicines, study of, 137 (see also Chopra, Ram Nath); and snake venom research, 11, 115, 136–40; and Victorian animal ethics, 101, 102. See also nationalists nationalists: Central Medical Research Institute, opposition to, 83; colonial scientific policy, critique of, 39; hill-

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top laboratories, critique of, 23, 74, 151; and imperial medicine, 78–79; and laboratories, establishment of, 23, 27, 29; modern science, critique of, 102; movement for laboratories and technical institutes, 29, 220n16; and Pasteur, 109; and western science, 27, 100. See also nationalism native bodies, 188; as carriers of disease, 13, 25, 36, 187, 190, 212, 213; as object of scientific research, 19, 88 Natural History Museum, London, 118, 119 neurology, 174 Nicholson, Edward, 123 Nicolle, Charles, 149 Norris, John F., 103 Nunn, J. A., 45 opsonisation, Wright’s theory of, 146, 147, 148 Orientalists, 11, 117, 119, 122; classical Indian texts, study of, 41, 115, 137, 149; indigenous snakebite remedies, study of, 117, 119, 138; tropical nature, interest in, 11, 113, 117, 122 Pait, Charles, 175 parasites, 8 parasitology, 11, 16; and tropical medicine in Britain, 7–8 pariah dogs, 93, 102, 113; British attitude toward, 91–93; destruction of, 94; as experimental objects, 94, 103; hydrophobia and, 93, 94 Pasteur, Louis, 5, 9–10, 14, 16, 18–19, 30, 35, 37, 60, 159, 195; anthrax vaccine, 18, 26, 30, 144, 221n35; antirabies vaccine, 16, 26, 37, 42–43, 48, 142, 148–49, 152–53; antivivisectionists opposition to, 37, 40, 46, 87, 174; attenuated live viruses, experiments with, 9–10, 18, 19, 26, 144, 146; British opposition to, 98, 99, 107, 110; Bruno Latour’s critique of, 143; colonial government’s interest in, 39; dried cord vaccines,

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Pasteur, Louis—(cont’d) experiments with, 162, 171, 172; fermentation, idea of, 25; germ theory and, 6 (see also germ theory); ideology of causation and cure, 14, 16; Indian nationalists and, 109; and laboratory rabies, 143–44, 152, 153, 174; and live vaccines, 166; microbes, engagement with, 143, 144; opposition in Europe, 87; pasteurization process, 9–10, 26, 144; popularity in India, 42–43, 58–59, 104, 110; as symbol of change in colonial medicine, 33–34; universality of vaccines, 74. See also Pasteurian science/ bacteriology; Pasteurism Pasteur committees, 43, 45, 46 Pasteur Institute, Calcutta, 5, 151, 211 Pasteur Institute, Coonoor, 5, 71, 72, 108, 150, 152, 211 Pasteur Institute, Kasauli, 5, 66–68, 71, 108, 110, 211; Indian support for, 108; King’s criticism of, 71; postvaccinal paralysis cases at, 173; as private institution, 107–8; rabies treatment at, 67–68; research and manufacture of antivenine, 132–33, 135; Semple’s work on antirabies vaccine, 148 (see also Semple, David) Pasteur Institute, Paris, 2, 36, 37, 43, 44, 63, 99, 162, 185 Pasteur Institute, Rangoon, 5, 211 Pasteur Institute, Saigon, 36 Pasteur Institute, Shillong, 5, 211 Pasteur institutes: establishment in tropical colonies, 2–3; absence in Britain, criticism of, 31; French, and French imperialism, 36. See also Indian Pasteur institute(s) Pasteurian science/ bacteriology, 12, 16, 26, 34, 35, 36, 38, 48, 127, 143; antivivisectionists’ hostility toward, 107, 108; British in India and, 26; British tropical medicine and, 35, 38; British medical men in India and, 31–32; and climate, 69, 70; and colonial germs, 36; commercial benefits, 39;

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disease eradication in India, 47; in France, 35–36; hostility toward, 33; and imperial morality, 13–14; Indian Medical Service and, 32; in India, 26, 30, 34, 47, 107, 108; and rabies, 142 (see also rabies); universality of, 69. See also Pasteur; Pasteurism Pasteurian population, Bruno Latour’s concept of, 5, 187 Pasteurism, 35; in Britain, 110; debates within Pasteur committees, 46; French (see French Pasteurism); growth of, 16; and imperial medicine, 34; in India, 11, 12, 26, 40; in plains, 69–70, 71, 227n46; and scientific modernity, 60; and tropical medicine, 61; in tropics, 3, 68, 69; universality of, 69, 70, 71. See also Pasteur; Pasteurian science/bacteriology pasteurization, 9–10, 26, 144 Pasteurization of France (Bruno Latour), 18 Patel, Khan Bahadur Barjorjee D., 43, 44, 45 pathological mapping in India, racial connotations, 187–88 Pearson, Harold, 175 Pedler, Alexander, work on Cobra poison, 118–19, 122 Peter, Michel, Professor, 152 Petit, D. M., 98 Pettenkofer, Max Joseph von, 23; cholera theory, John Murray’s criticism of, 188–89; contingent contagionism, theory of, 183 Pfeiffer, Richard, 146 pharmacology, 137 Pharmacopoeia of India, 136 Phoosra, 135 Piarroux, Renaud, 208 Pinjrapole, 94, 97–98, 99, 100 Pioneer Mail, 11, 32, 93, 98; colonial medical practice, critique of, 30; Haffkine plague vaccine, criticism of, 58; Haffkine’s anticholera vaccination, report on, 41; inoculation against snakebites, report on, 128;

index Pasteur institute, Kasauli, comment on, 108; Pasteur institute in India, campaign for, 40, 43, 44–45; Vivisection Act in India, opposition to, 102–3 plague, 3, 10, 30, 50; in Bombay (see Bombay plague); and institutionalization of medical research, 35. See also plague vaccination; plague vaccine Plague Commission (Indian), 37, 48, 49, 71–72 Plague Research Laboratory, 5, 39, 51, 57, 59, 211. See also Bombay Bacteriology Laboratory plague vaccination, 49, 50, 51, 54, 55, 57; Bainbridge’s opposition to, 55–56, 57; Indian Medical Service opposition to, 55 plague vaccine, 50; Alexandre Yersin and, 50, 51; Choksy’s experiments with, 53–55, 59; experiments in Bombay, 50–55; Haffkine’s, 23, 55–56, 58, 59. See also Mulkowal incident; Lustig and, 51, 52, 53–55; Paul-Louis Simond and, 51, 52, 53; and race, idea of, 50–1; vernacular newspapers’ critique of, 52–53; WHO apprehension regarding, 177. See also plague vaccination “Poison of Asps” (R. Kipling), 141 poisons and potions, link between, 11, 41, 140 polio, 3, 143, 144, 168, 173–74, 216 Pollitzer, Robert H., 202–3, 206, 210 Poona, 63; bacteriological research in, Lingard’s objection, 62, 63–64 Poona Veterinary Conference, 39, 64 Poona Veterinary laboratory, 31, 39, 40, 62–63, 64 postvaccinal paralysis, 154t, 162, 173, 174, 175t, 176; ambiguity regarding, 174–76; dead vaccines and, 176, 177; as form of encephalomyelitis, 175; laboratory rabies and, 176 (see also laboratory rabies); live vaccines and, 156, 158, 159, 162, 164, 165, 176,

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177; Semple’s vaccine and, 154t, 160, 162, 168, 173, 177, 154 Prausnitz, Dr. Carl, 164 Presidency College, Calcutta, 118, 123, 136 Pringle, John, 144 provincial laboratories, 72, 73 provincial medical service, proposal for, 80 Punjab, 65; cattle plague in, 39; mortality rate of snake bites and rabies, comparison, 114t, 115; plague vaccination campaign in, 57–59; Pasteur committee, 66; Indian Pasteur institute, movement for, 32, 43–44, 65 putrefaction, 3, 25, 51; antiseptics and, 36, 144; tropical climate and, 4, 10, 37 rabies, 3, 10, 19, 22, 33, 46, 47, 67, 113, 115, 116, 141, 163; pariah dogs as carriers of, 93, 94 (see also pariah dogs); Pasteur and (see Pasteur); and snakebites, comparative mortality rates, 114t, 115, 116, 141; Surat epidemic, 93; treatment, at Pasteur Institute, Kasauli, 67–68, 73; vaccination against (see antirabies vaccination); vaccine (see antirabies vaccine); virus, ambiguity regarding nature of, 167 rabies committee, medical workers research conference, 169 Rabies Conference, First International at Paris, 153–54, 156, 161, 165; dead carbolized and etherized vaccines, resolution favoring, 154, 155; live versus dead vaccines, debates regarding, 162; McKendrick’s report on, 158, 162–63 race, idea of, 4, 64, 85; bacteriology and, 61–62; and immunity, 147; and opsonisation theory, 146, 147, 148; plague research and, 50–51. See also racial pathology racial pathology, 16, 60, 188. See also race Rage du laboratoire. See laboratory rabies Railway Institute and Telegraph Headquarters, 82

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Rangoon Pasteur Institute, 73 Ray, Prafulla C., 137 RDS. See Research Defence Society reductionism, 18; and colonial medicine, 20, 21; and laboratory medicine, 14 Remlinger, Paul, 153–54, 159, 162 Report from Select Committee of House of Lords on Rabies in Dogs, 37 Research Defence Society, support for animal experimentation, 111 Retrenchment Committee, 77 Revolt, of 1857, 95, 110–11 Richards, Vincent, 91 Rinderpest, Lingard’s research on, 64 Risley, Herbert H., 59, 70, 109 Rivaz, Charles, 57, 58 Robinson, E. Kay, 43–44, 45, 46 Rockefeller Foundation, 17, 82, 230n102 Roe, W. A. C., 12, 32–33, 37–38, 44, 103 Rogers, Leonard, 7, 78, 82, 83, 91, 111, 190, 192, 205, 211; animal experimentation in England, support for, 111; cholera, report on, 196–97; compulsory vaccination, support for, 196–97; Indianization of Indian Medical Service, opposition to, 78; venom research, 123, 124, 133, 135 Ross, Ronald, 7, 8, 9, 11 Ross, W. C., 198 Roth, Walter Edmund, 117 Rouwolafi a serpentine, 139 Roux, 51, 53, 146, 159, 162, 181 Royal Commission on the Public Services in India, 79 Royal Indian Military College, 82 Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society, 90 Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (UK), 96, 99, 104 Royal Society of Arts, 123, 124, 125 Royal Tiger of Bengal, His Life and Death, The (Joseph Fayrer), 125 Royle, J. F., 41, 138 RSPCA. See Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Ruffer, Marc A., 37

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Russell, Patrick, 116–17, 205 Russell’s viper, 116–17, 121, 132 Sabdakalpadruma, 42 Sabin, Albert Bruce, 174 Saigon Pasteur Institute, 36 Salk, Jonas, 168 Sambon, Luigi, 36, 61 Sandhurst, Lord, 56 Sanskritization of lower castes, 101, 235n109 Sarpa visha, 138, 139 Scharlieb, Mary, 111 Science, 37 science: and Brahmanical sentiments, 101; and morality, 27; and nationalism, 27, 100; Pasteurian. See Pasteurian science; Pasteurism Second Royal Commission on Animal Experimentation, 111 Semple, David, 12, 22, 32, 65, 66, 73, 76, 132, 145, 147, 159, 166; antirabies serum, experiments with, 148; carbolized antirabies vaccine (see Semple’s vaccine); enteric fever, research on, 190; hills as site of bacteriological research, choice of, 70; King’s criticism of, 70, 71; Madras as site of second Pasteur institute, objection to, 70; Pasteur’s live antirabies vaccine, opposition to, 148–49, 153 Semple’s vaccine, 142, 143, 147–50, 152, 155, 158, 160, 166, 173, 177, 178; advantages in India, 148–49, 155; carbolic acid, as germ killing agent, 147, 148, 159; comparative analysis of, 169; Coonoor Pasteur Institute report on, 171–73; and decentralization of antirabies vaccination, 160, 162; First International Rabies Conference, endorsement at, 153–54; and Hempt’s vaccine, difference between, 164; John Cunningham’s apprehension regarding, 159, 160; making of, 168–73; Medical Research Workers Conference, support at, 168–69; mortality rates, Malone’s

index report on, 168, 169t; popularity of, 150; and postvaccinal paralysis, 154t, 160, 162, 168, 173, 177, 154; safety of, 153–54; standardization of dosage in India, 171, 173; suitability in tropics, 178; as universal antirabies vaccine, 171, 173 Sen, Prasanna Kumar, 29 Seventh Congress of the Far Eastern Association of Tropical Medicine, 80 Shapin, Steven, 17–18 Shikar/game hunting, 75 Shillidy, J. A., 141 Shortt, H. E., 75, 76, 170, 171 Shri Jiva Daya Gnan Prasarak Fund, 101 Simond, Paul-Louis, 51, 52, 53, 129, 211 Sircar, M. L., 27 smallpox, 8, 22, 41, 43, 58 Smith, J. B., 77, 155 Smith, Samuel, 107 Smyth, John, 227n22 snake commission, 118 snake venom: as antidote, 123; British engagement with, 113, 116, 119; effect of, 123; medicinal value, in ancient Hindu tradition, 138–39. See also snake venom research snake venom research, 113, 117, 118–19, 129, 133, 141; Alfred John Wall and, 119, 122; bacteriology and, 140; and Bengal snake laboratory, 122–23, 130; in Britain, 123–24; Calmette’s research on (see Calmette, Albert); Cunningham and (see Cunningham, D. D.); in Europe, 126, 127; George Lamb and, 132–33; Indian Pasteur institutes and, 11, 128, 132–35; Joseph Fayrer and, 118, 123–24; Lawrence Augustine Waddell and, 119, 122, 123, 131, 133; Leonard Rogers and, 123, 124, 133, 135; metropolitan character of, 122, 124; nationalism and, 136–40; Pasteurian intervention in, 127–28 (see also Calmette, Albert); post-Pasteurian, 115; Ram Nath Chopra and (see Chopra, Ram Nath); Thomas Fraser and, 119, 131; univer-

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sal antidote, search for, 133, 135, 136. See also antivenene snakebites, 47, 113, 116, 118; antivenoms for (see antivenene); bacteriology and, 127, 128 (see also Calmette, Albert); decline in mortality, causes of, 141; destruction of snakes, colonial policy of, 124–27, 135, 141, 241n73; and hydrophobia, comparative mortality rates in Punjab, 114t, 115; indigenous remedies, British interest in, 113, 116, 117, 119; indigenous remedies, R. N. Chopra’s study of, 136–40; permanganate of potash as treatment for, 135; vaccination against, 128–29 snakes: Australian, Joseph Bank’s report on, 117; British engagement with, 113, 115, 116, 119; destruction of, 124–27, 135, 141, 241n73; religious prejudice against killing of, 128–29. See also snakebites; snake venom research Snow, John, 182, 183, 194 social agency, Latourian concept, 18, 19, 20 society, Bruno Latour’s definition, 19 Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Indian), 91, 97, 99, 102; animal cruelty, legislation against, 94–95; Vivisection Act (1876) in India, opposition to, 103–4 Sokhey, Sahib S., 137 South Africa: cholera outbreak in, 208; Wright’s research in, 146–47 spatial exclusivity: British desire for, 64, 67, 69, 85; of Kasauli, 67; and laboratory research, 74, 85 (see also hilltop laboratories); postcolonial nation building and, 84 SPCA. See Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Starling, E. H., 80–81 Starling, Justice, 103 Statement Exhibiting the Moral and Material Progress of India, 27–28 Steevans, G. W., 88

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Stuart, G., 168 Surat, rabies epidemic in, 93 Surveyor, Dr. Nasawanji F., 32 Sutphen, Mary, 49 Swaroop, S., 201, 205, 206 Sydenham, Thomas, 4 tabasheer, 117 Tamamcheff, Georgi, 145 Tanjore pills, 117, 119 Tarachand, Khusru J., protest against Pasteur institutes in India, 110–11 Taylor, Colonel J., 153, 154, 161, 168; cholera-Bengal link, report on, 199– 200, 201t, 202; Greig’s human carrier thesis, rebuttal of, 199 tetanus, 47, 181 Thanatophidia of India, The (Joseph Fayrer), 118, 120, 121, 125, 135 Thuggee and Dacoity Department, 106 Tilley, Helen, 21 Tomes, Nancy, 12 tropical climate: and bacteriological research, French versus British perspective, 62–63; and bacteriology (see also under tropics); and cholera, link between, 192, 196–97, 198, 199; and disease, link between, 4–5, 21, 22, 23, 36, 195. See also tropical disease; and germs, link between, 9–12, 19, 25, 61, 211, 212, 213; and morality, 61; vaccine decomposition and, 142, 144. See also tropics/tropical colonies tropical disease, 28; bazaars, as source of, 63, 64; and climate, link between, 4–5, 21, 22, 23, 36, 195 (see also tropical climate); and climatic theories in twentieth century, 200; and environment, link between, 22, 179, 194; eradication through bacteriology, 3, 9, 47–48; germs as cause of, 25(see also germs); home of, ambiguity regarding, 195; native bodies, as carriers of, 13, 187–88, 190, 213; and Pasteurism, 3, 46–48; and poverty, connection between, 5, 208, 215; R. N. Chaudhuri’s concept of, 215; social back-

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wardness and, 4; soil, as source of, 212; water, as source of, 212 tropical medicine, 3, 6–9; and bacteriology, convergence of, 38; and imperial medicine, 6–7; as invented tradition, 7; and morality, 12–13; and racial pathology, 187; Ross’ definition of, 7–8. See also colonial medicine; laboratory medicine tropics/tropical colonies, 3–4, 10, 18, 23, 60, 194, 212, 216; bacteriology in, 2, 3, 6, 10, 12–14, 16, 20, 23–24, 61–62, 63, 70, 212, 213–14; British prejudice against, 82; cholera in, 14, 194, 195, 182 (see also cholera); colonial idea of, 6; climate of, and disease, 4–5, 21, 22, 23 (see also tropical climate; tropical disease); diseases in, and global capitalism, 208; European colonization of, 3–4, 10, 25, 36; GBD report on disease in, 216; germ theory and, 10, 61, 213 (see also germ theory); and germs, link between, 9–12, 19, 25, 61, 211, 212, 213; human body as carriers of disease in, 13, 187–88, 190, 213; idea of, 3–5, 212, 213, 215; imperial engagement with, duality in, 125; medicine and morality in, 27; medicine in, 6–9 (see also tropical medicine); Orientalist interest in, 11, 113, 117, 122; Pasteur institutes in, 2–3 (see also Pasteur institutes; Indian Pasteur Institute); pathologization of, 61, 12–13, 200, 202; vaccination campaigns in, 3, 19 (see also vaccination); virulence of virus in, 142, 144 trypanosomiasis, 111, 187 tuberculosis, 3, 26, 47; spread in marginalized groups, 216; vaccine, 144 Turner, E. J., 154 Turner, G. S., 176 Turner, James, 87 Twining, William, 188, 195 typhoid, 3, 26, 187, 189, 191; human carriers, and public health, 209; research, in Europe, 192; vaccine, 146

index Typhoid Mary. See Mallon, Mary Ukil, A. C., 151 UNICEF, 216 USA, theory of healthy carriers, and public health initiatives, 209 vaccination, 19, 211, 214, 215; acceptance by Indians, 41, 50, 55, 58; ambiguity regarding, 57, 58, 59; in ancient India, 41–42; antirabies (see antirabies vaccination); BCG, in postcolonial India, 215; Bombay plague and, 49, 50, 51, 54, 55–56, 57; centralization of, conflict over, 160; cholera, Haffkine’s campaign in Bengal, 1–2, 3, 11, 16, 98, 145, 185–86, 197, 206, 244n17; cultural and social opposition to, 23; decentralization of (see decentralization, of antirabies vaccination); Pasteur institutes and, 5 (see also Pasteur institutes); in postcolonial India, 215–16 vaccine(s), 3, 5, 25, 26; Alivisatos (see Alivisatos live etherized vaccine); anthrax (see anthrax); antirabies (see antirabies vaccine); cholera (see under cholera); dead (see dead vaccines); decomposition in tropical climate, 142, 144, 177; heat killed, 146, 149, 158–59; India, as testing ground for, 38; Indian response to, 23; live (see live vaccines); as moral crusade against tropical disease, 13, 14; mortality rate, 168, 169; Paris Conference resolution on, 154; Pasteur and, 9–10, 30 (see also Pasteur); plague (see plague vaccine); polio, 168, 173–74; potency versus safety, debates regarding, 144 (see also live vaccines; dead vaccines); preservation of, 25, 150; production in India, 110, 211; research, 14, 49, 50, 51–52, 142, 150, 215, 216; and tropical climate, link between, 10, 19, 212 vaccine therapy, Wright and, 146, 147, 148

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veterinary institutions, Indians’ role in establishment of, 98 veterinary laboratory, Poona. See Poona Veterinary Laboratory veterinary research in India, 39 violence, as means of colonial governance, 88 viper poison, 139; Lamb’s antivenin against, 133, 135 Vipera russelli or Russell’s viper, 116–17, 121, 132 Vivisection Act, of 1876, 102–5 Voelcker, John A., 29 Waddell, Lawrence Augustine, 122, 128, 131, 133; research on snake venom, 119, 122, 123, 133 Wall, Alfred John, research on snake venom, 119, 122, 123, 128, 133 Wall, Frank, 119 Wallich, Nathaniel, 138 Warrell, David, 141 water: and disease, 212; privatization of, and epidemics, 208; as source of cholera, 182, 183, 184, 198–99 Webster, L. T., 175 Webster, William Joseph, 149, 173 Welch, William, 90 Weldon, James, 108 WHO. See World Health Organization below Witwatersrand Native Labour Association, 146–47 World Health Organization: cholera eradication policy and, 210; and epidemiology, 202; and Expanded Programme on Immunization, 216; Expert Committee on Rabies, directive on live vaccine use, 176; Global Burden of Disease (GBD), report of, 216; live plague vaccines, apprehension regarding, 177; and polio eradication program, 174; and Pollitzer’s report on cholera, 202–3; postcolonial vaccination programs in India, 216; underreporting of cholera cases in India, report of, 207

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wildlife destruction, colonial policy of, 113, 125, 126, 141, 213. See also snakes, destruction of Worboys, Michael, 6–7, 10, 16 Wright, Almroth, 71, 228n46; carbolized vaccines, support of, 245n47; dead vaccines, use of, 145– 46; opsonisation, theory of, 143, 146, 147, 148, 150; pneumonia vaccine, work on, 146; racial categorization of

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immunity, 146–47; vaccine therapy, 146, 147, 148 yellow fever, 4, 36, 213, 216 Yersin, Alexandre, 53, 181, 211; plague research, 50, 51 Young, Mackworth, 108 zymotic theory, 25