Abstract
It is appropriate in a collection in honour of John Flint, and dedicated to the theme of agency in Africa, to include an example from the history of health and disease. This essay touches on agency in two respects. First, it examines the activities in Africa of perhaps the leading scientist of his age, Robert Koch. An extremely influential individual agent, Koch had a significant (although, unfortunately, negative) impact on the course of scientific research into cattle diseases in southern Africa. Human agency has a second meaning as well. It is often juxtaposed against ‘God’s Will’ (usually expressed in our more recent times as natural law) as a contending factor in determining causation. For example, in seeking to determine the causes of drought and famine, researchers have debated whether impersonal climatic changes or human actions have been responsible for a deteriorating environment. Increasingly, the explanatory weight has swung in the direction of human agency.1
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Notes
Drawing on the seminal ‘entitlements’ hypothesis of Amartya Sen, which attributes famine not to the absolute shortage of food, but to relative lack of access among the less privileged, research in Southern Africa has demonstrated the primacy of socio-economic and political factors. See Elizabeth Eldredge, ‘Famine and Disease in Nineteenth-Century Lesotho’, African Economic History, 16 (1987), 61–93; Diana Wylie, ‘The Changing Face of Hunger in Southern African History, 1880–1980’, Past and Present 122 (1989), 159–99; and the full-length monograph by Henrietta Moore and Megan Vaughan, Cutting down Trees: Gender, Nutrition, and Agricultural Change in the Northern Province of Zambia, 1890–1990 (London: James Currey, 1994). For an argument stressing the primacy of natural phenomena, see Charles Ballard, ‘Drought and Economic Distress: South Africa in the 1800s’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 17 (1986), 359–78.
A extensive bibliography on Koch can be found in ‘Robert Koch’, Dictionary of Scientific Biography (hereafter DSB) (New York: Scribners, 1981), 430–5. The recent English biography is by Thomas D. Brock, Robert Koch: A Life in Medicine and Bacteriology (Madison: Science Tech Publishers, 1988).
Brock, Koch, p. 24.
Brock, Koch, p. 241. It is rather sad that Brock, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, never bothered to run his text by any of the distinguished historians based in one of the world’s leading centres of African Studies right on his own campus.
My awareness of this problem was inspired by the argument put forward by Donald Harman Akenson in his remarkable study of historians’ dealings with biblical texts. See Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998), p. 545.
Theodore L. Sourkes, Nobel Prize Winners in Medicine and Physiology, 1901– 1965 (New and rev. edn, New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1967), p. 26, states that Koch ‘and his collaborators were able to show that bubonic plague was transmitted to human beings by the rat-flea’, where not an iota of evidence for this claim exists. Similarly, Brock, Koch, p. 5, states that ‘in his later years, Koch made major contributions to tropical medicine’ (his emphasis).
Charles van Onselen, ‘Reactions to Rinderpest in Southern Africa, 1896–97’, Journal of African History, 13 (1972), 473–88.
Van Onselen, ‘Rinderpest’, 483.
Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800–1960 (London: Macmillan – now Palgrave – 1982); Sheldon Watts, Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
The phrase comes from Sir Charles Bruce, ‘Tropical Medicine as Instrument of Empire’, Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 11 (2 November 1908), 334.
For an excellent recent overview, see Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (London: HarperCollins, 1997).
Watts, Epidemics, p. 216.
As a sample of the literature on the Pasteurians, see Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France. Translated by Alan Sheridan and John Law (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988); Anne-Marie Moulin, ‘Patriarchal Science: The Network of the Overseas Pasteur Institutes’, in Science and Empires: Historical Studies about Scientific Development and European Expansion, eds, Paul Petitjean, Catherine Jami, and Anne-Marie Moulin (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992), 307–21; and Christophe Bonneuil, Des savants pour l’empire: la structuration des recherches scientifiques coloniales au temps de la ‘mise en valeur’ des colonies francaises, 1917–1945 (Paris: Editions de l’Orstom, 1991).
Philip D. Curtin, Death by Migration: Europe’s Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990).
A sampling of the growing literature on colonial science and colonial imperialism would include: Lewis Pyenson, Cultural Imperialism and Exact Sciences: German Expansion Overseas, 1900–1930, (New York and Berne: Peter Lang, 1985); and Lewis Pyenson, Civilizing Mission: Exact Science and French Overseas Expansion, 1830–1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993); Daniel R. Headrick, Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); Michael Worboys, ‘The Emergence of Tropical Medicine: A Study in the Establishment of a Scientific Specialty’, in Perspectives on the Emergence of Scientific Disciplines. Edited by Gérard Lemaine et al. (The Hague: Mouton, 1976), pp. 75–98; Robert A. Stafford, Scientist of Empire: Sir Roderick Murchison, Scientific Exploration and Victorian Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Sheldon Watts, Epidemics. The work of Pyenson has been strongly criticized for its Eurocentric vision of science and empire. Watts, Epidemics, offers a contrasting view, as do Michael Worboys and Paulo Palladino, ‘Science and Imperialism’, Isis 84(1993), 91–102; Pyenson has defended himself in ‘Cultural Imperialism and Exact Sciences Revisited’, Isis 84(1993), 103–8.
Paul F. Cranefield, Science and Empire: East Coast Fever in Rhodesia and the Transvaal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 341.
Details on Koch’s life and a list of his extensive publications can be found in the DSB, 420–35. It is a measure of Koch’s significance in the History of Science that this is one of the longest, if not the longest, single entry in that important reference work. Unless otherwise stated, biographical details in this essay are from the DSB.
Brock, Koch, pp. 2–4 provides a list of seventeen achievements, although some, as will be seen below, were of dubious merit.
Koch’s postulates are a series of procedures that should be followed to prove that a specific micro-organism is the causal agent of a specific infectious disease. The organism must be constantly present in the diseased tissue; the organism must be isolated and grown in pure culture; and the pure culture must be shown to induce the disease when injected into an experimental animal. Lester S. King, ‘Dr. Koch’s Postulates’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 7(1952), 350–61.
DSB, p. 430. For more on what Cranefield calls his ‘dark side’, see Crane-field, Science, p. 341, and Brock, Koch, pp. 4, 287, and 291.
Linda Bryder, Below the Magic Mountain: A Social History of Tuberculosis in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
Brock, Koch, p. 239.
Robert Koch to Carl Salomonsen, no date. Cited in Brock, Koch, p. 237.
Cited in Brock, Koch, p. 237.
Watts, Epidemics, p. 256.
Cranefield, Science, p. 103.
DSB, p. 425.
Cape Times, 3 December 1896.
The locale was at Kisiba, a German plantation on the west coast of Lake Victoria. Koch observed that the banana plantations abounded in rodents, and that when the native observed rats lying dead, they ‘fly from their huts’. Special correspondence from Berlin, reporting on Robert Koch’s address to the German Society for Public Hygiene of 7 July 1898, published in the British Medical Journal, 16 July 1898, 205–6.
Koch, as reported in the British Medical Journal, 16 July 1898, 205–6.
McNeill, Plagues, p. 111; see also Calvin W. Schwabe, Veterinary Medicine and Human Health, 3rd edn (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1984), p. 225.
DSB, p. 427.
McNeill, Plagues, pp. 111–13. The theory has been repeated in the historical literature. See John Iliffe, Africans: The History of a Continent, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 113; and Marc Harry Dawson, ‘Socioeconomic and epidemiological change in Kenya, 1880–1925’. PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1983, 71–83.
John Iliffe, East African Doctors: A History of the Modern Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 10.
Iliffe, East African Doctors, p. 10.
Giblin has expanded on the original insights of John Ford, and discusses African loss of environmental control in his The Politics of Environmental Control in Northeastern Tanzania, 1840–1940 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992). See also his articles, ‘Trypanosomiasis Control in African History: An Evaded Issue?’, Journal of African History, 31 (1990), 59–80; and ‘East Coast Fever in Socio-Historical Context: A Case Study from Tanzania’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 23 (1990), 401–21.
Cranefield, Science, p. 2.
In an angry memo dated 27 October 1902 Chamberlain wrote: ‘It seems to me scandalous that we should have in the U.K. no one competent for this work & be obliged to ask German assistance.’ Quoted in Cranefield, Science, p. 67.
Arnold Theiler’s son Max became a research physician and virologist and went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1951 for his work with the Rockefeller Foundation leading to a yellow fever vaccine. Sourkes, Nobel Prize Winners, p. 291.
Cranefield, Science, p. 102.
Sourkes, Nobel Prize Winners, p. 26.
To be fair to Koch, Theileriosis was a complex viral pathogen that defied early, and necessarily primitive, microbiological attempts to diminish its impact. To this day, with much better technology at their disposal, immunologists have not been able to develop a vaccine.
Arnold Theiler and his associate Stewart Stockman debated with Koch in person at the Bloemfontein Conference in 1903 the wisdom of attempting immunization by blood inoculations, since this procedure was likely to transmit other serious blood-borne cattle diseases. Instead, Theiler and Stockman recommended dipping, fencing and quarantine, procedures that were in the end to bring the disease under control. Lounsbury’s work on ticks showed that Koch had been wrong and that it was the brown tick, not the blue, which transmitted the disease. He and Theiler correctly maintained that only where the brown tick flourished would East Coast fever be found. Even in the face of solid evidence from the South Africans, Koch stubbornly insisted that he still believed that the blue tick was the carrier. Cranefield, Science, pp. 177–84.
C. E. Gray, ‘East Coast Fever: A Historical Review’, Report of the South African Association for the Advancement of Science. Sixth Meeting, Grahamstown, 1908 (Cape Town: South African Association for the Advancement of Science, 1909), 194–208.
Diana Wylie, ‘The Broken Calabash: the Idea of Hunger in Modern South Africa’, unpublished paper.
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Echenberg, M. (2001). ‘Scientific Gold’: Robert Koch and Africa, 1883–1906. In: Youé, C., Stapleton, T. (eds) Agency and Action in Colonial Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230288485_3
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