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10300 results in History of science: general interest

Page 78 of 515

  • 6 - Making monsters

  • from I - Early modern ventures
  • Edited by Helen Anne Curry, University of Cambridge, Nicholas Jardine, University of Cambridge, James Andrew Secord, University of Cambridge, Emma C. Spary, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Worlds of Natural History
    Published online:
    13 December 2018
    Print publication:
    22 November 2018, pp 94-111
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  • Chapter 4 - The Boy Doctor of Empire

  • Jessica Howell, Texas A & M University
  • Book:
    Malaria and Victorian Fictions of Empire
    Published online:
    14 December 2018
    Print publication:
    24 October 2018, pp 137-165

  • 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.

  • Chapter 5 - Rewriting the Bite

  • Jessica Howell, Texas A & M University
  • Book:
    Malaria and Victorian Fictions of Empire
    Published online:
    14 December 2018
    Print publication:
    24 October 2018, pp 166-195

  • Summary

    The late nineteenth and early twentieth-century history of medicine in colonial India informs Amitav Ghosh’s 1995 science-fiction novel The Calcutta Chromosome. This chapter argues that the novel 'rewrites the bite' by reimagining Ronald Ross’s malaria experiments through the lens of twenty-first century Calcutta and New York. First, the chapter analyses fin-de-siècle Gothic literary tropes related to blood and blood science in Dracula in order to demonstrate that Ghosh uses these tropes in order to highlight the ways in which mosquitoes transgress bodily bounds. In Calcutta Chromosome, he then reallocates agency to subaltern subjects by giving them power over the moment of puncture, both via needles and via mosquitoes. His work shows the connection between contemporary practices of stigmatizing contagious racial others and the ideological legacies of colonial medicine. Further, Ghosh also adapts the mutational patterns of malaria within his fictional forms in order to deconstruct Western scientific rationalism itself. He thus 'writes back,' not only to colonial medical history, but also to the neocolonial strain of malarial imagery in contemporary biomedical fiction. By focusing on the insistent corporeality of malarial bodies in the text, one may avoid pushing the postcolonial body itself to a marginal position in contemporary readings of global health.

  • Chapter 1 - Nationalism and Acute Malaria in Transatlantic Fiction

  • Jessica Howell, Texas A & M University
  • Book:
    Malaria and Victorian Fictions of Empire
    Published online:
    14 December 2018
    Print publication:
    24 October 2018, pp 29-69

  • Summary

    In Martin Chuzzlewit and Daisy Miller, authors Charles Dickens and Henry James use endemic, acute malaria to highlight the wrongness of certain environments, namely the American south and Italy, for English and American subjects. This chapter traces the use of acute malarial illness in both authors' work in order to show how Victorian transatlantic fiction contributed to the nineteenth-century process of rescripting malaria from a domestic illness of Britain to one that occurred abroad. The authors depict Italy and the American south as places where individual and national fortunes are haunted by the potential of failure. However, they vary in their perception of the aesthetic and artistic merits of these disease-ridden landscapes. While Dickens depicts the local inhabitants of America and Italy as hopelessly backwards and the natural environment as swampy and foreboding, James draws upon the miasmatic and ruinous landscape in order to craft a malarial picturesque, pushing back against encroaching medical modernization. In this sense, their works show competing literary models of malarial viewing. Dickens depicts British subjects escaping the physical and social corruption of malarial environments. In contrast, James creates a fiction of sensory dilation, which embraces both the erasure of boundaries and the illness this erasure may bring.

  • Introduction

  • Jessica Howell, Texas A & M University
  • Book:
    Malaria and Victorian Fictions of Empire
    Published online:
    14 December 2018
    Print publication:
    24 October 2018, pp 1-28

  • Summary

    The Introduction outlines malaria’s significance within the Victorian imagination. It explains the book’s focus on the mid-to-late Victorian and postcolonial periods, justifies the chosen set of authors and locales, and situates the book’s argument within the context of relevant criticism. It sets the stage for the forthcoming analysis by closely considering how malaria was linked in the last half of the nineteenth century to concerns about imperial progress. The Introduction outlines the symbiotic relationship between guides for tropical medicine, colonial doctors’ diaries and the fictions of empire. It also stresses the subversive potential of metaphors of malaria within imaginative literature.

  • Chapter 3 - Malarial Feminisms

  • Jessica Howell, Texas A & M University
  • Book:
    Malaria and Victorian Fictions of Empire
    Published online:
    14 December 2018
    Print publication:
    24 October 2018, pp 102-136

  • Summary

    South African novelist Olive Schreiner suffered from lifelong health difficulties, including malaria. This chapter thinks critically about how to read her personal illness alongside her artistic production. It argues that Schreiner draws upon female colonial settlers’ lived experience of chronic malaria in order to form her critique of colonial medical logic, which is based on a ‘metonymy of exchange’ whereby colonial bodies and environments are epitomized by their productive value. This chapter traces how representations of malaria evolve in Schreiner's fiction. Her earliest work, Undine, depicts the corruption and risks of colonial capitalism in terms of ‘camp fever’. In Story on an African Farm, Schreiner breaks open the form of disease allegory to question colonial-meaning making. In her last novel, From Man to Man, Schreiner shows female characters allied with the traditionally ‘threatening’ aspects of the colonial environment, such as extreme heat and insects. The chapter argues that Schreiner’s project was timely and important, as the eradication of mosquitoes, specifically feminized mosquitoes, became central to colonial medical discourse in early-twentieth-century South Africa.

  • Chapter 2 - Malaria and the Imperial Romance

  • Jessica Howell, Texas A & M University
  • Book:
    Malaria and Victorian Fictions of Empire
    Published online:
    14 December 2018
    Print publication:
    24 October 2018, pp 70-101

  • Summary

    H. Rider Haggard’s novel King Solomon’s Mines seems to perpetuate an imperial fantasy, by encouraging British readers to believe that they are separate from the severe physiological dangers of disease in Africa. However, the novel’s gothic and melodramatic qualities also highlight the unrealistic quality of this infallibility. This chapter shows that, by studying representations of malaria, one may observe the ways in which discourses of white vigor and health in imperial adventure narratives are haunted by their own counter-narratives. Sickness from malaria seems to be successfully displaced onto racial and national others, but by examining the shifting metaphors of yellowing skin, wasting, maps, parchment and mummies in the novel, one may see an underlying anxiety that tropical illness is not predictable or containable. The chapter places Haggard’s adventure fiction in dialog with discourses of South African medicine and colonialism, including the speeches of Cecil Rhodes. In conclusion, the chapter demonstrates that Haggard’s latent ambivalences about the possibility of South African colonial settlement manifest in his later life writing on disease and empire, wherein he discusses malaria at length in order to demonstrate his deep uncertainty about whites’ ability to survive in South Africa.

Page 78 of 515