Current opinion tends to see Stoics and Epicureans as unlikely bedfellows, but in the sixteenth century this was not so. As a matter of fact, Seneca, the great auctoritas on Stoic ethics in the Renaissance, was also considered something of a spokesman for Epicurean thought.

In one of his Essais Montaigne gives us a telling insight into the way Seneca's moral philosophy was viewed at the time. For this sixteenth-century reader, the classical authors that best combined the useful and the pleasurable were Plutarch and Seneca. The reason why these two authors in particular suit his temperament best, Montaigne explains, is that the knowledge he seeks is there treated in bits and pieces (“à pièces décousues”) that do not require long hours of reading for which he has neither time nor inclination (“qui ne demandent pas l'obligation d'un long travail, dequoy je suis incapable”).

Concentrated short passages are for Montaigne also most useful, especially in the case of Seneca's correspondence with Lucilius, which forms “the most beautiful and profitable part of his writings” (“la plus belle partie de ses escrits, et al plus profitable”). Another advantage in reading Seneca and Plutarch, Montaigne argues, is that little effort is involved in getting started, and that these authors allow him to break off wherever he feels like it (“II ne faut pas grande entreprinse pour m'y mettre; et les quitte où il me plaît”). Furthermore he finds their teaching simple but relevant (“d'une simple faqon et pertinente”), as each represents the cream of philosophy (“cresme de la philosophic”).

In Boyle's published works there are many references to Epicurean atomism and atheism. He refused to pronounce publicly on the first but was willing to pronounce decidedly on the second. He did not, however, publish any sustained piece directly on atheism, though he seems to have continued to work on the topic of atheism throughout his life. His firm belief in Christianity began early – he underwent a conversion from unthinking to committed Christianity at the age of thirteen – and continued until his death. In his will he left a sum of money to fund an annual series of lectures against atheism, the intent being to refute infidels (with a caution against internecine quibbling), spread the word, and soothe serious doubts. The eleventh sheet of his will reads in part,

INTRODUCTION

In the last edition of his Opticks Isaac Newton had this to say about the ultimate particles of matter. “It seems probable to me, that God in the Beginning form'd Matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable Particles, of such Sizes and Figures, and with such other Properties, and in such Proportion to Space, as most conduced to the End for which he formed them.” Newton also observed that the primitive particles never wear out or break, and their permanence guarantees that nature will be “lasting,” with the “Changes of corporeal Things … placed only in the various Separations and new Associations and Motions of these permanent Particles.”

Those phrases seem at first glance to place Newton firmly in the Epicurean camp – to align him fully with the doctrines of the ancient atomists, who argued for indestructible solid bodies, or atoms, that might vary in weight, shape, and size. But that simple view of Newton's position must rapidly be modified on four counts: the first, religious and theological; another, scientific; the next, historical; the last, philosophical. Although the four categories overlap to a certain extent, one may treat them separately for purposes of analysis, and in this chapter I shall argue that Newton accepted only a very incomplete and partial version of Epicureanism. Probably the most significant modifications of ancient atomism effected by Newton in his system of the world derived from Stoicism, and it will be profitable later to explore the tension and synthesis in Newton's thought between discreteness and continuity in the natural world: in other words, between the atomistic ideas of discrete particles in Epicureanism and the tonic continuum pervading the whole world in the Stoic pneuma.

By the seventeenth century in France, as Nannerl Keohane eloquently argues, the ideal of civic responsibility and commitment characteristic of the later Renaissance was being replaced by an advocacy of the private life. This trend was particularly strong among the libertines, the French freethinkers who challenged traditional intellectual authorities, who “took seriously the Epicurean counsel to avoid the business of the world. They conformed to its demands as far as necessary, and found their true pleasure in the company of friends.”

The most prominent Epicurean in France, Pierre Gassendi, joined his libertine friends in believing that philosophy could flourish only if it were free from the restraints of both the world and authority. To Gassendi, living a retired life freed the wise man from the time-consuming demands of the public life and at the same time allowed him to philosophize freely, obligated to no one but himself. In 1637, Gassendi wrote a remarkable letter to Galileo, telling the Italian to regard his house arrest as a “most desired and fortunate retirement” and that “wise men desire nothing more than to be removed from the turbulence of the court and the tumults of the city, and … from the profane crowd, which like a many-headed beast knows nothing human, and hopes for nothing but lying, invidiousness, perfidy, and other such things.”

As early as his first published work, an anti-Aristotelian tract entitled the Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos (Grenoble, 1624), Gassendi had indicated that the moral teachings of Epicurus held a special fascination for him, particularly the Epicurean principle that pleasure, or the tranquillity of the soul, is the highest good.

As soon as he received written acceptance of his terms, Koch wrote to the London office of the B.S.A.C., on December 22, 1902 to suggest that he should travel to Bulawayo not by the fast mail ship from London to Cape Town, but via a slower route, along the east coast of Africa to Beira. He recommended that he take that route because the disease had apparently broken out in Beira and spread from there. Moreover, “I could institute researches into the occurrence of this or similar diseases at the different stopping places at which the steamer may touch.” He added “I shall be glad if you will send me the report on Texas Fever or Redwater in Rhodesia by Mr. Gray and Mr. Robertson and any other reports upon diseases affecting human beings and cattle.” Koch thus asked, explicitly, for a copy of the final joint report in which Gray and Robertson had given a detailed picture of clinical and post-mortem findings, had carefully re-described the “juvenile form” of the parasite and had noted that the juvenile form had been seen in hundreds of cases, only twenty of which also showed the typical pear-shaped parasite. That report, discussed in chapter 3, was published as a pamphlet in August, 1902, and had been reprinted in the November issue of the Agricultural Journal of the Cape of Good Hope.

At the stormy meeting held in Bulawayo on July 29, 1902, Kotzé finally promised that he would take steps to obtain an outside expert. He said that he would act as soon as he had consulted the London office; he also wanted to consult Duncan Hutcheon, who was expected to arrive in Salisbury soon. Kotzé did not know that the matter had already been taken out of his hands. On July 22, alarmed by the death of the Natal cattle, the Resident Commissioner, Marshall Clarke, had urged the High Commissioner, Alfred Milner, to obtain an expert to act on behalf of Rhodesia and the South African colonies and Milner had agreed to do so.

During the search that followed, the Chartered Company often acted without telling Clarke or Milner what it was doing, and Milner often failed to tell the Chartered Company what he had done. For that and other reasons the search repeatedly brought the Chartered Company into conflict with the Colonial Office. On December 19, 1902, the choice finally fell on Robert Koch, who was not necessarily the best candidate. From the point of view of the relations between the center and the periphery of the empire, which are discussed again in chapter 12, the search was such a disaster as to be worth documenting in detail. This chapter offers a case history on how not to search for an expert; the reader who is more interested in science than in its governance may wish to turn to chapter 5.

In late October, 1902, Joseph Chamberlain tried and failed to prevent Robert Koch from being employed to investigate East Coast fever in Rhodesia. If that brief episode were all that Chamberlain had to do with science or the empire at the turn of the century, he would hardly deserve even this short chapter. But he was involved in the study of rinderpest, he was involved in Rhodesian and South African policies, he was involved in the Jameson raid, which influenced so many later events, and he and Milner were involved in the events that led to the Boer War, in the war itself, and in the reconstruction that followed it. And in him and in his career, an interest in science and a belief in empire were united as they seldom have been in one person before or since.

Who was Joseph Chamberlain, apart from being the father of Neville Chamberlain? Why, in 1902, was he so bitterly opposed to the Chartered Company's proposal to employ a German bacteriologist? Why did he express his opposition to the employment of Koch by using a phrase associated with trade and manufacturing: “made in Germany?” And why, on October 27, 1902, was he certain that if an English alternative to Koch existed, that alternative could be identified by the Royal Society?

The brief answers to those questions are that Joseph Chamberlain was, in 1902, Colonial Secretary, as he had been since 1895.

The study of East Coast fever and of other diseases caused by theilerial parasites has continued without interruption since 1910 and is very active today. I have touched very briefly on immunity and the efforts to produce a vaccine in chapter 7. Other areas of research have involved the study of the life cycle of the parasite in the tick and in the infected animal, the cultivation of the parasite in vitro, the taxonomic classification of the parasite and the study of the way in which the parasite actually causes the disease. Each of these studies has overlapped with and involved the others but I have separated from them, somewhat artificially, a series of results that has led to the present-day view of how Theileria parva kills an infected animal.

Since the material reviewed in this chapter is unavoidably technical, for the reader who does not care to struggle through it, here is the bottom line: cattle suffering from East Coast fever develop what amounts to an acute leukemia combined with tumors called lymphomas and, because of the destruction of the normal lymphocytes, develop immune deficiency and become susceptible to bacterial infection. Although I must use many technical terms, I often try to define them; even when I do not I hope that the gist of the argument can be grasped anyway.

Throughout most of 1902, Charles Gray and the Rhodesian government took the position that the new disease was only a form of redwater and that cattle that had once been immune to redwater had lost their immunity and were now liable to reinfection. As Orpen said on April 17, 1902, since a general infection of Rhodesia by redwater had taken place long ago, the disease would break out again, wherever local conditions were favorable. Thus no legislation could check its spread. On May 22, Robertson reported that since “all Rhodesia is infected with ticks, I do not think any cordon or barrier can be of any avail.” In the same report Gray attacked those who “lay all blame for the spread of the disease at the door of the Agricultural Department without taking into consideration the fact that the apparent epidemic nature of the disease may be the natural cumulative result of long established infection.” On May 12, 1902, Gray had even written to Orpen that the cordon between Salisbury and Bulawayo “was instituted temporarily to allay public unrest in Bulawayo, fomented by those who declined to accept… that the disease was redwater.” Thus, Gray said, as soon as Robertson had confirmed his views, the cordon was withdrawn.

The disease was new, at least in Rhodesia, and it was spread by a tick, the brown tick.

An anti-heroic history of East Coast fever might go something like this: in 1901 East Coast fever invaded Rhodesia. Well-trained veterinarians failed to recognize that it was a new disease. That failure did not really matter because before anyone could have identified it as being new, the disease had entrenched itself so thoroughly that it was eradicated only after fifty years of intensive work. Robert Koch did recognize that the disease was new, and Charles Lounsbury and Arnold Theiler did identify the tick that transmits the parasite, and did characterize the parasite. None of that mattered very much, because, without a treatment or a vaccine, the fifty years devoted to controlling the disease had to rely largely on long-established techniques such as quarantine, fencing and slaughter of infected animals. Since the search for an expert was badly handled, Koch missed a whole season in which to study the disease, but that did not really matter, because Arnold Theiler and Charles Lounsbury were already at work. Koch might have reached Rhodesia sooner than he did and identified the disease as being new sooner than he did, but that did not matter because the disease had become entrenched long before any expert was invited and because Lounsbury, Theiler and Hutcheon were becoming increasingly convinced that the disease was a new one. Bruce might have been a better choice than Koch but even Bruce could not have discovered a cure or a vaccine or reversed the spread of the disease.

The terms “native cattle” and “European cattle,” as used in early reports, had, perhaps unintentionally, a double meaning. “Native cattle” meant the cattle owned by the African peoples of the country, but those herds were also made up of strains of cattle that had been in the country for many years. The “European cattle” were not only owned by the European settlers, they were, by and large, made up of imported strains.

The fate of the African-owned cattle concerns us for many reasons. The killing of the African-owned cattle during the outbreak of rinderpest unquestionably contributed to the uprising of 1896, and memories of that uprising led to fears that the appearance of a new lethal disease of cattle might provoke another uprising. Secondly, it concerns us because of the often expressed fear that, once the disease had invaded the African-owned cattle, those cattle would become a permanent and ineradicable reservoir of infection because of the insistence of the Africans on moving cattle when and where they would. And it concerns us because of the great importance of cattle to the Africans not only because cattle were a store of wealth but because the ownership of cattle was woven into the very fabric of their society.

The fear of an uprising provoked by the death of cattle was to last for a long time.

During a time when figures of great international reputation such as Laveran and Nocard were claiming that the new disease was only a form of redwater, and while Koch was claiming that the disease, though new, was transmitted by the blue tick and that he had found a way to immunize against it, two young men who were hardly known outside of South Africa were at work establishing the facts. They were the Swiss-born veterinarian Arnold Theiler and the American-born entomologist Charles Lounsbury; both worked closely with and had the strong support of the senior veterinarian of South Africa, Duncan Hutcheon.

Arnold Theiler

Arnold Theiler was born in Switzerland on March 26, 1867 and obtained his diploma as a veterinarian in Zurich in 1889. He found little work in Switzerland and decided to go to the Transvaal, where he arrived in March, 1891, in time to celebrate his twenty-fourth birthday. While working as “supervisor of cattle and forage” on a large farm, he lost his left hand in a farm-machinery accident; thus handicapped, he set up a private practice in Pretoria in September, 1891. That practice was so unsuccessful that Theiler was unable to send Christmas gifts to his family in Switzerland and was reduced to advertising a proprietary cure for horse sickness (for which there was and is no cure).

It is not easy to set the stage on which our story was played. It is a story of two diseases, of two kinds of parasite, of two kinds of tick, of many governments and of many people. The diseases were redwater (Texas fever) and Rhodesian redwater (East Coast fever). The parasites were those that cause those diseases. The ticks were the blue tick and the brown tick, which have very different habits. As many as eight governments played a role: those of Great Britain, Germany, Rhodesia and Australia, as well as the governments of the four provinces of what is now the Republic of South Africa. (When East Coast fever first invaded South Africa, two of those provinces were British colonies: the Cape Colony and Natal. The other two provinces, about to lose the Boer War and become British colonies, were the still independent Orange Free State and the Transvaal.) As to people, they ranged from the Secretary of State for the Colonies (Joseph Chamberlain) and a future winner of the Nobel Prize (Robert Koch) to bankrupt European settlers and African communal farmers whose store of wealth and way of life were at risk.

The country that is now known as Zimbabwe was, for many centuries, protected from the outside world by being remote from the Indian Ocean and by being, along much of its eastern border, separated from that ocean by a mountain range.

The first false trail in the history of East Coast fever arose from the belief that it was a virulent form of redwater introduced into Rhodesia by cattle that were imported by Cecil Rhodes at the end of 1900 to replenish the herds that had been destroyed by rinderpest. On May 26, 1900, while on a visit to Rhodesia, Rhodes wrote to the High Commissioner for South Africa, Alfred Milner, as follows:

The cattle (999 of them) arrived at the port of Beira in Mozambique in December, 1900. (We will hear of Beira again: as the seaport closest to Rhodesia, it was an important point of entry; it still is of vital importance to Zimbabwe.)