Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities. Lenny A. Ureña Valerio

disease is noteworthy, given that the discovery he made in the 1880s was of information already known in the 1850s but which had remained a marginal opinion in the medical field back then. While in 1854 John Snow, a famous British anesthesiologist and hygienist, was the first person to point out that water was the mode of communication of cholera, Filippo Pacini, an Italian anatomist, was the first to isolate the cholera germ, which he gave the species name Vibrio cholerae, in the intestines of dead patients in Florence. Pacini’s studies, which also described correctly how to treat the disease through injecting a solution of water and sodium chlorine, were largely disregarded in Italy. Koch himself was unaware of these findings. But what had changed from 1854 to 1884 that made people support Koch’s ideas about cholera, and why did the miasma theory collapse so quickly in the 1880s and 1890s?

      The colonial drive that Germany experienced in the 1870s and 1880s made the germ theory more appealing to a new generation of German physicians who, armed with microscopes and other instruments, sought to explore and discover the secrets of nature and other organisms. Similar to cultures considered “primitive,” diseases were to be conquered and made into a thing of the past—something to learn from in exhibits and hygienic museums. When a disease ravaged populations in the nineteenth century, it was largely attributed to the poverty, ignorance, and uncivilized living styles of people in unhealthy environments. Therefore, physicians’ call for hygienic measures and the betterment of people’s health began to bear resemblance to the discourse of colonial propagandists who wanted to expand the frontiers of the German Empire and perpetuate a more aggressive political intervention of the state in the colonies. Moreover, as I have mentioned earlier, with his multiple travels in his quest against cholera, Koch had demonstrated that the colonial realm—which indeed provided much of the vocabulary and practice of bacteriology, as Bruno Latour and Thomas Lamarre have established in their works—was a fruitful place to study diseases.²⁸ The desire in Germany for overseas colonies paved the way for the acceptance and success of bacteriological views.²⁹ Nationalism and an increasing tendency of the state to interfere in German society, as Richard J. Evans has pointed out, were also significant factors accounting for Koch’s achievements.³⁰

      Disease, Acclimatization, and Race

      Cholera debates in the 1880s were symptomatic of a major transformation in the medical field with important consequences for the German Empire. By showing that diseases were caused by pathogens, which could be studied under the microscope, and not by the climatic conditions of a determined place, Koch and other bacteriologists were giving the German state the tools to expand the empire into overseas colonies. This was crucial at a time when some thinkers in the medical and anthropological fields were still stressing the inability of Germans to survive in the tropics. One of them was Rudolf Virchow, who in 1885 delivered a lecture on acclimatization at the annual Assembly of German Naturalists and Physicians (Versammlung der deutscher Naturforscher und Ärzte) in direct reaction to Bismarck’s colonial policy and against an evolutionary theory that he called the cosmopolitanism of people (Kosmopolitismus des Menschen), which was particularly popular among Dutch anthropologists.³¹ This view proposed that all humans shared a common origin and elementary biochemical processes that made them able to adapt to any region in the world after a period of adjustment.³² Koch and a group of young researchers who favored the expansion of the German Empire appropriated this cosmopolitan principle to assert that the best elements of Europeans could be settled in the tropics without having to perish there.³³

      Virchow did not believe in the quick acclimatization of any racial group migrating from one natural environment to another. In the annual assembly, he argued that northern Europeans could never adapt to African climates and defended the Lamarckian view, which stated that acquired characteristics could pass from one generation to another.³⁴ His ideas were directed against Germany’s acquisition of overseas colonies and intended to respond to a lecture delivered earlier at the convention by August Weismann on his new theory of the continuity of the germplasm.³⁵ Weismann’s theory proposed that reproductive cells, which he called “germ cells,” transmitted hereditary information without the influence of any somatic cells and independently from anything the body learned in the environment. According to the germplasm theory, acquired anomalies could not be transmitted to descendants when a pathological process had produced them. In Weismann’s words, “An organism cannot acquire anything unless it already possesses the predisposition to acquire it: acquired characters are therefore no more than local or sometimes general variations which arise under the stimulus provided by certain external influences.”³⁶ However, these variations could not be transmitted from one generation to another. According to Weismann, only the predisposition could be passed down to the progeny.³⁷ In light of this theory, diseases were not considered an intrinsic part of the human physiological development, but were viewed as “accidents” in human nature. Therefore, pathology was not considered a proper science but a study of all accidental causes acting upon human beings that changed their normal conditions in a lifetime. The only way diseases could be inherited was when they were congenital—not microbial—and directly affected the germ cells.

      Virchow criticized Weismann’s position because it proposed a division between the fields of pathology and physiology when a clear line separating the functions of the two could not be established. He was skeptical of the germ theory for the same reason, and, in his opinion, “Diseases have no independent or isolated existence; they are not autonomous organisms, not beings invading a body, nor parasites growing on it; they are only the manifestations of life processes under altered conditions.”³⁸ A disease occurred when “chemical or mechanical changes” took place in an individual’s cells. The role of pathology was to understand this structural modification of body tissues. Therefore, given this interdependency between physiology and pathology, he considered that all variations within a species, even racial ones, were pathological or a manifestation of the altered condition.³⁹ He claimed that variations at first looked accidental, but they became the norm through inheritance. Virchow dismissed any explanation concerning people’s descent, like the one Weismann was proposing, as highly speculative and lacking empirical evidence. He opposed Darwinism and considered human beings deeply connected to their cultural and physical environments. For him, the white race was composed of different members, the “Aryans” and “Semites” being the two most striking poles.

      Contrary to what colonial propagandists were proposing about the superiority of northern Europeans in the tropics, Virchow believed that the best colonizers were Jews, who he thought could undergo acclimatization more easily than the so-called Aryans, given their long history of migration and colonization. According to him, the Phoenicians were the first colonizers they knew of and were Semites who had colonized a great part of southern Europe.⁴⁰ Among the Aryans, he identified those living in southern Europe as having greater potential to adapt to warm countries, not necessarily because of their proximity to the tropics, but because of their racial mixture with Semitic elements. When comparing the colonizing projects and the settlement of Europeans in the Antilles, Virchow established that the Spaniards had been more successful than their French and British counterparts in the region. This success was to be correlated with the level of racial assimilation these people had with Jews, since experience had shown that Jews were best suited to migrate to foreign lands and form permanent colonies.⁴¹ In the realm of German overseas expansion, Virchow believed that racially pure Aryans were weak and vulnerable for the tropics, and there were only few temperate zones in the world where they could be settled at the end of the nineteenth century. The tropics and subtropics were useful for Germans mainly as research stations where the study of many dangerous diseases could be undertaken.⁴² Virchow considered that, before sending people to die abroad, the conditions and options for acclimatization needed to be further investigated.

      Considering this gloomy picture that Virchow and other medical anthropologists were painting for ethnic Germans, and given the population growth the empire was experiencing at the time, it is not difficult to understand why the state decided to embrace instead the work that came from experimental biology and bacteriology. These disciplines provided the solution for the settlement of Germans and the expansion of the German nation in warm climates. While Virchow believed that racial miscegenation was the only solution for the survival of northern Europeans in tropical colonies, Weismann gave