Medizin und Herrschaft

Medizin und Herrschaft, a contribution to a burgeoning historical literature on malaria in Africa and the wider world, principally examines five urban cases of Imperial German campaigns to eradicate malaria in its colonies of Cameroon and German East Africa and its northwestern periphery of East Frisia. The case studies are all port cities, and all were in various ways manifestations of state modernization projects. Bauche argues that the malaria campaigns under study empowered state authority in Imperial Germany’s peripheries, and state authority in turn was key to the implementation of the campaigns. Because Bauche’s focus is the injection of German authority into global peripheries, rather than the history of medicine or colonialism as such, the disease under study could have been many others, such as cholera, typhus or plague, which, like malaria, were not exclusively tropical or colonial. In about 1900, Western breakthroughs in understanding germ theory, biomedicine, disease vectors, chemical therapies, microscopic examination and immunization spurred on medical interventions. Shortly before then, Robert Ross had demonstrated the anopheles mosquito vector of malaria, allowing researchers to experiment with methods of mosquito control that influenced urban planning and segregation.

Ancient history · Archaeology · Civilization · Colonialism · Ethnology · Geography · German · Malaria · Modernization theory · Plague (disease) · Political science · State (computer science) · Typhus · African history and culture studies · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · History of Medicine and Tropical Health · Law · Medicine

• Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and Decolonization

  Open Access•Matthew P Fitzpatrick•Central European History•2018

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