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Chapter 4 - The Boy Doctor of Empire

Malaria and Mobility in Rudyard Kipling's Kim

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 December 2018

Jessica Howell
Affiliation:
Texas A & M University
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Summary

In his early writings, Rudyard Kipling employs the medical discourse of sanitation as a method to manage the 'natives'. Therefore, after the discovery of malaria’s transmission in 1897, Kipling could have created fictions of disease containment and mastery by depicting the mosquito as a definitive foe, as did the authorities of tropical medicine such as Ronald Ross and Patrick Manson. Instead, Kipling uses the transformative potential of the novel to emphasize the cyclical changes wrought on bodies by malaria over time. Kipling uses certain markers of malaria illness narrative—cyclical temporal and spatial imagery, repeated feverish states, and bodily change—to create a fantasy community of 'seasoned' Anglo-Indian expats, at home in, but also ruling over, colonial India. In Kim, the fact that the Anglo-Indian boy has survived malaria makes him the prototype of a seasoned colonist, whose physical adaptability may enable ongoing British political dominance. This chapter analyzes the impact of episodes of fever in Kipling’s autobiographical writing on his fiction. It concludes by placing Kipling’s work in dialog with analysis of contemporary illness narrative, arguing that we must keep in mind the ties between narratives of disease ‘remission’ and the history of colonial medicine.
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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  • The Boy Doctor of Empire
  • Jessica Howell, Texas A & M University
  • Book: Malaria and Victorian Fictions of Empire
  • Online publication: 14 December 2018
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108693226.005
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  • The Boy Doctor of Empire
  • Jessica Howell, Texas A & M University
  • Book: Malaria and Victorian Fictions of Empire
  • Online publication: 14 December 2018
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108693226.005
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • The Boy Doctor of Empire
  • Jessica Howell, Texas A & M University
  • Book: Malaria and Victorian Fictions of Empire
  • Online publication: 14 December 2018
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108693226.005
Available formats
×