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² Sir Patrick Manson and others held that ‘tropical medicine’ came into being with Laveran's identification of the parasite causing malaria. See Manson, , ‘Address to BMA tropical diseases section’, Journal of Tropical Medicine (hereafter JTM) (08 1898), 22Google Scholar; JTM (02 1906), 38, editorial.Google Scholar

³ The current tendency is to view ‘tropical disease’ as an artificial categorization, imposed by colonial medical men on diseases which, in reality, bear more relation to poverty than to geographical location. See, for example, Patterson, K. D., Health in Colonial Ghana: Disease, Medicine and Socio-Economic Change, 1900–1955, Waltham, Mass., 1981.Google Scholar

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⁸ Grove makes a similar case for botany in India prior to 1857: see Grove, R. ‘Conservation and Colonial Expansion: A Study of the Evolution of Environmental Attitudes and Conservation Policies on St. Helena, Mauritius, and in India, 1660–1860’ (University of Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, 1988)Google Scholar. Geology in early and midnineteenth-century India, however, provides a classic instance of a science directed almost entirely from the metropolis. See Stafford, R. A., The Empire of Science: Sir Roderick Murchison, Scientific Exploration and Victorian Imperialism, Cambridge, 1989.Google Scholar

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¹⁰ For a discussion of Burkean philosophy and Company administration see Bearce, G. D., British Attitudes Towards India, 1784–1858, London, 1982, 14–33Google Scholar. Respect for indigenous cultures, however, was by no means a universal feature of the ‘Enlightenment’ as a whole. Turgot and Smith, for example, viewed most indigenous societies as being in a state of barbarism compared with European society, while Rousseau and Herder were far more critical of the idea of history as progress. See Meek, R. L., Social Science and the Ignoble Savage, Cambridge, 1976.Google Scholar

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¹⁹ For example Lind, James, Essays on the Diseases Incidental to Europeans in Hot Climates, 1st edn, London, 1768Google Scholar. The publication date of this treatise suggests that it is misleading to credit Maclean, solely, with the introduction of ‘anticontagionist’ theory into Britain.

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²¹ Johnson, J., The Economy of Health or the Stream of Human Life from the Cradle to the Grave, with Reflections Moral, Physical and Philosophical on the Successive Phases of Human Existence, the Maladies to which They are Subjected, and the Dangers that may be Averted, 2nd edn, London, 1837, 81, 119Google Scholar. For a discussion of phrenology as a vehicle of liberal/radical ideology see Cooter, R., The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science. Phrenology and the Organisation of Consent in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Cambridge, 1984.Google Scholar

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²⁶ Johnson, , op. cit. (22), 401Google Scholar; Johnson, , A Practical Treatise on Derangements of the Liver, Digestive Organs and Nervous System to which is added an Essay on the Prolongation of Life and Conservation of Health, London, 1818, 11.Google Scholar

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³⁷ Ibid., 456–7.

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⁴⁷ William Bentinck, Governor-General of India 1828–35, implemented a series of reforms which applied the Benthamite principles of efficiency to most aspects of administration in India. For the first time, the Company began to interfere directly in the cultural and religious practices of the Indian people. There were attempts to abolish sati (the cremation of Hindu widows) and other customs, which were now regarded as medieval superstition. See Bearce, , op. cit. (10), 69–78Google Scholar; Stokes, E., English Utilitarians and India, Oxford, 1959.Google Scholar

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⁴⁹ DNB. SirMartin, James Ranald (1793–1874)Google Scholar. Son of a minister on the Isle of Skye. Admitted as a student at St George's Hospital, London in 1813 and MRCS in 1817, whereupon he joined the Bengal Medical Service. After three years in Orissa he began civil practice in Calcutta. Martin left India in 1843 and was admitted FRCS in the same year; in 1845 he was elected FRS. He was knighted in 1860.

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⁵² Ibid., 24, 27–8.

⁵³ Cf. Douglas, M., Purity and Danger. An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London, 1966, 2Google Scholar: ‘In chasing dirt… we are not governed by anxiety to escape disease, but are positively re-ordering our environment, making it conform to an idea’. Curiously, Martin's respect for his mentor, James Johnson, was such that he did not erase Johnson's references to indigenous hygiene from his re-writing of Johnson's classic text in 1856. See Martin, J. R., The Influence of Tropical Climates on European Constitutions, including Practical Observations on the Nature and Treatment of the Diseases of Europeans on their return from Tropical Climates, London, 1856.Google Scholar

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⁶¹ Murchison, Charles's classic Treatise on the Continued Fevers of Great Britain, 1st edn, London, 1862Google Scholar, bears many resemblances to Martin's Medical Topography in terms of its historical approach and its quantification of medical, geographical, and meteorological phenomena. Murchison, a graduate of Edinburgh University, had, like Martin, served in the EIC's medical service in Bengal and Burma. Murchison's explanation of the causes of continued fevers also owed much to observations he had made in India. See Pelling, , op. cit. (14) 288–9.Google Scholar

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⁶⁴ Snow, J., On the Mode of Communication of Cholera, 2nd edn, London, 1855Google Scholar, On Continuous Molecular Changes, more particularly in their relation to Epidemic Diseases, London, 1853Google Scholar; Stewart, A. P. and Jenkins, E., The Medical and Legal Aspects of Sanitary Reform, 1866–69, London, 1869, 10.Google Scholar

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⁶⁸ Ibid., 21–2, 36, 47–8, 158, 432. However, acceptance of specific modes of putrefaction did not necessarily entail the implementation of more specific preventive measures. As Christopher Hamlin has put it, ‘The zymotic analogy made it plausible to think of the entire insanitary environment as contributing… [to epidemic disease], while the perpetual threat to health of putrefaction was the basis on which Simon and his medical inspectors harried local officials into removing filth’: Hamlin, C., ‘Providence and putrefaction: Victorian sanitarians and the natural theology of health and disease’, in Energy and Entropy. Science and Culture in Victorian Britain (ed. Brantlinger, P.), Bloomington, Indiana, 1990, 93–123.Google Scholar

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⁷⁰ Ibid., 132–6. A small minority continued to believe that the Hindu diet was the diet best suited to life in tropical climates. See Fink, G. H., ‘Food of the natives of India’Google Scholar, JTM (10 1906), 310–12Google Scholar. But Fink wrote as a retired medical man, a representative of an out-moded viewpoint. In the 1860s nutrition was becoming an important area of chemical research, a consequence of the perception that there was a common ground between the organic/inorganic, animate/inanimate realms.

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⁷² DNB; obituary, Trans. Epid. Soc. (1906–1907), 26, 78–9Google Scholar. SirFayrer, Joseph (1824–1907)Google Scholar, born in Plymouth, the son of a Commander in the Royal Navy. After a brief study of engineering, Fayrer made a voyage to the West Indies and South America as a midshipman on a West Indian steampacket. In 1843 he sailed with his father to Bermuda, where his experience of an outbreak of yellow fever inclined him towards medicine. After entering Charing Cross Hospital in 1844, Fayrer was admitted MRCS in 1847 and gained a commission in the medical service of the Royal Navy. Soon afterwards, Fayrer resigned his commission to travel around Europe in the company of Lord Mount-Edgcumbe. He ended his tour at Rome, where he resumed his study of medicine and, in 1849, obtained its MD degree. In 1850 Fayrer left Europe to take up the post of Assistant Surgeon in the Bengal Medical Service, where he busied himself in medical and cultural activities, becoming President of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1867. He was instrumental in setting up a zoological society and the zoological gardens in Calcutta. In 1869 Fayrer became personal surgeon to the new Viceroy Lord Mayo but, in 1872, returned to Britain because of ill health, whereupon he was appointed President of the India Office Medical Board. Fayrer was widely respected in Britain, becoming personal physician to the Prince of Wales and President of the Epidemiological Society in 1879. He was made CSI in 1868 and a baronet in 1896. A prolific writer on medicine, climatology and venomous snakes, Fayrer was one of the last exponents of the ‘universalistic’ approach to medicine which typified the IMS in the first half of the nineteenth century.

⁷³ Fayrer, J., The Natural History and Epidemiology of Cholera, London, 1888, 6.Google Scholar

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