This, however, is no record of travel in Central Africa. There are many such to be had in any circulating library, written by abler and more fantastic pens.
Some of us who have wandered in the darkest continent have looked in vain for things seen by former travellers—things which, as the saying is, are nei-ther here nor nei-there […] nei-there is nothing new under the sun—even immedi-ately under it in Central Africa. The only novelty is the human heart—Central Man. That is never stale, and there are depths still unexplored, heights still unattained, warm rivers of love, cold streams of hatred, and vast plains where strange motives grow. These are our business.1
In Henry Seton Merriman’s imperial romance novel With Edged Tools (1894), his disarmingly self-aware narrator comments on the fictitious nature of nineteenth-century travel narratives. There are many forms of travel record to be found ‘in any circulating library’, written by ‘abler and more fantastic pens’ than his and containing things ‘neither here nor there’, he asserts. The remark plays with a double meaning that refocuses the reader’s attention—such ‘things’ are of little importance to his story—
whilst also suggesting that they are nowhere to be found because they are largely made up. Perhaps this comment is more astute than intended. As
1 Henry Seton Merriman, With Edged Tools (1894; London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1909) pp. 193–94.
critics, such as Patrick Brantlinger, David Arnold, and Mary Louise Pratt have argued, texts about the tropics—from travel narratives and anthropo-logical tracts to medical textbooks and imperial fiction—indulged in what Pratt describes as a process of ‘euro-imperial meaning making’.
Such works created imperial order for their reading publics by provid-ing them with ‘a sense of ownership, entitlement and familiarity with respect to the distant parts of the world that were being explored, invaded, invested in, and colonized’.2 They helped to create ‘curiosity, excitement, adventure, and even moral fervour about European expansionism’ for domestic subjects by subscribing, to a greater or lesser degree, to what Brantlinger calls the ‘myth of the Dark Continent’—to the racist idea that Africa was a mysterious land of savagery and superstition that needed civilising by the light of Western imperialism.3 Books like Richard Burton’s Lake Regions of Central Africa (1860), John Speke’s Discovery of the Sources of the Nile (1864), and Samuel White Baker’s The Albert N’Yanza (1866) are, for Brantlinger, ‘nonfictional quest romances […where] cen-ter stage is occupied not by Africa or an African but by a Livingstone or a Stanley or a Burton, Victorian St Georges battling the armies of the night’.4 As Merriman’s analogy between exploring Central Africa and exploring Central Man illustrates, narratives like these helped to form and universalise cultural ideals of Britishness and masculinity.
In 1876, a writer for Chambers’s Journal illustrated the shared appeal of travelogues and adventure tales by characterising the former as ‘narratives of courage, endurance, pluck, inventive resource, scientific observation,
2 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London:
Routledge, 1992) p. 15.
3 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 202; Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988) p. 174. Christopher GoGowilt explores the emergence of the twentieth-century idea of ‘the West’ as a ‘new his-torical fiction’ that was developed in the context of British imperial rhetoric during the 1890s. In the ‘aftermath of the nineteenth-century colonial penetration of India, China, and the Middle East’ the West became, he argues, a ‘signifier of Europe’s imperial project […]
merg[ing] with the concept of civilisation’. GoGowilt, ‘True West: The Changing Idea of the West from the 1880s to the 1920s’ in Enduring Western Civilization. The Construction of the Concept of Western Civilization and Its ‘Others’ ed. by Silvia Federici (Westport: Praeger, 1995) p. 66.
4 Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, pp. 180–81. Claire Pettit places travel narratives in the context of the emergence of the modern category of celebrity: ‘Exploration in Print: From the Miscellany to the Newspaper’ in Reinterpreting Exploration: The West in the World ed. by Dane Kennedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 80–108 (p. 86).
energy tempered by caution, firmness tempered by kindness […] and a little tinge of mystery’. Africa was a ‘new world’ explored by ‘gallant men’
and a ‘mighty geographical puzzle on which the imagination could dwell with pleasure’.5 As Bradley Deane has argued, late Victorian and Edwardian readers consumed stories in which manliness and empire were entwined, where variously ‘men made the Empire’ and ‘the Empire made men’.6 These tales of manly adventure in unfamiliar spaces were read for enter-tainment, but they also produced new ideals of imperialist masculinity that were fashioned in relation to conquest—of disease, of land, of cultures, and of peoples. Such ideals were given further reach by parasitologists who, I argue, appropriated the structural and ideological properties of travelogues and adventure tales to situate their research in relation to Britain’s changing global relationships. Thus, the cartographic imperial-ism of nineteenth-century exploration was bound up with the colonising practices of medicine, both of which weaponised narratives of African primitivism. In Ronald Ross’s Memoirs, for example, he narrates an expe-dition sent by the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in 1900 with the words ‘on the 21st March the School dispatched Mr. H. E. Annett, Mr.
J. E. Dutton, and Dr. J. H. Elliott (the latter being two of our most enthu-siastic students) to “carry the torch” into darkest Nigeria’.7
This triumphalist patriarchal language is characteristic of popular histo-riographical accounts of medicine which have tended towards a mode of heroic biography. Recent calls to decolonise science have brought to the fore the implicit legacies of British imperialism; the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine has funded a project to research its own colonial histories, and a wealth of historical and postcolonial scholarship has long established the political entanglement between medicine and colonial politics.8 In this chapter, I build on this existing scholarship by
5 ‘A New World in Central Africa’ Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts 649 (3 June 1876) 365–67 (p. 365).
6 Bradley Deane, Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) p. 1.
7 Ronald Ross, Memoirs with a Full Account of the Great Malaria Problem and its Solution (London: John Murray, 1923) p. 416.
8 See for example: Rohan Deb Roy, ‘Decolonise Science—Time to End Another Imperial Era’ The Conversation, 5 April 2018: https://theconversation.com/decolonise-science- time-to-end-another-imperial-era-89189; Lindy Orthia and Elizabeth Rasekoala, ‘Anti-racist science communication starts with recognising its globally diverse historical footprint’ LSE Impact Blog, 1 July 2020: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2020/07/01/
excavating the literary and historical contexts that informed and aug-mented the rhetorical constructions of parasitology. To fully appreciate and historicise tropical medicine and its sub-disciplines, I resituate it within the narratological contexts of research-as-expedition, examining cross- pollinations amongst a range of genres engaged in the work of ‘mapping’
Central Man—by which I mean texts that help to construct the particular kinds of white imperialist masculinity that have, until relatively recently, characterised Anglophone medical histories.9 Whilst a unidirectional or even bidirectional relationship between tropical medicine and any one of these genres would be overly simplistic, I want to emphasise the sharing of stylistic convention, and especially the cultural currency of heroism and cartography in constructing narratives of medicine.
Asserting that ‘masculinities are lived out in the flesh, but fashioned in the imagination’, Graham Dawson identifies ‘the narrative resource of a culture—its repertoire of shared and recognized forms’—as a kind of ‘cur-rency of recognizable social identities’.10 As I explored in my first chapter, the public and professional communications of parasitologists were stylis-tically influenced by the medieval revival, which produced ‘endless stories of chivalry, daring, knights, gentlemen and gallantry’ and contributed sig-nificantly to conceptions of the English gentleman.11 The rhetorical con-structions of parasitologists, which were reproduced in periodicals, biographies, medical travelogues, and national and regional newspapers, manipulated these national myths so that the practices of their discipline became narratively—if not materially—synonymous with bravery, hero-ism, duty, self-sacrifice, and manful endurance. Parasitologists were mod-ern heroes exploring new realms and fighting a war against inimical
antiracistsciencecommunicationstartswithrecognisingitsgloballydiversehistorical -footprint/.
9 Lindy A. Orthia has examined how SciComm (science communication) and ‘popular sci-ence’ are broadly concerned with the ‘relatively recent history associated with the spread of Western-style science beyond the West’ and perpetuate an understanding of ‘science’ as a privileged practice and form of knowledge emerging from white, Anglophone cultures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Lindy A. Orthia, ‘Strategies for Including Communication of Non-Western and Indigenous Knowledges in Science Communication Histories’ Journal of Science Communication 19.2 (2020) https://doi.
org/10.22323/2.19020202.
10 Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire, and the Imagining of Masculinities (London: Routledge, 1994) p. 23.
11 Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981) p. 7.
enemies for the glory of Britain. In this way, the fantasies of the ‘knights of science’—as Ross would characterise parasitologists at the turn of the century—brought the realities of empire tantalisingly close to the romance of fiction.
Here I further problematise the boundaries between parasitology and imperial romance by examining how these shared forms—the chivalric knight, the soldier hero, the brave explorer—informed a ‘great man’ nar-rative of history that underpinned the identities of protagonists and pro-fessionals alike for popular audiences. Like Dawson I am interested in the relationships between the ‘narrative imaginings of masculinity’ and ‘the forms through which these imaginings materialise’ in the sociopolitical world.12 If, as Martin Green argues, ‘adventure narratives are the generic counterpart in literature to empire in imperial politics’ then the knight of science and tropical medicine complete the triptych.13 Parasitologists’ co- opting of imperial romance is perhaps unsurprising given the genre’s ‘deep ideological investment in the empire as a place of renewal’.14 During a period in which imperial anxiety, self-doubt, and pessimism were creeping into widening sections of the populace, the knightly science of tropical medicine offered a vision of empire as a project of heroic sanitary transfor-mation. Perceiving, as many did, that there were dwindling opportunities for heroism in the modern world, parasitologists reached back to the real and imagined past to sate a kind of nostalgia for an ideal of masculine citi-zenship that never really existed. Here, I tease apart some of the fantasies that helped construct medicine and empire jointly as manly enterprises, exploring how the adventure mode helped to remap medicine, gender, and nation in ways that remain with us today.