Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities. Lenny A. Ureña Valerio

were caused by microorganisms that could travel anywhere according to epidemiological evidence. This biological proximity between the “cosmopolitanism” of human beings and bacteria and the tensions between race and space redefined in important ways the cultural and political relations among Germans, nonethnic Germans, and subjects in the tropical world. The main question at stake in discussions about diseases and acclimatization was, of course, racial degeneration. In Virchow’s work, the environment, by way of diseases, had the potential to degenerate an imagined “pure” German race, and only racially mixed people could resist such degeneration in the colonies. In Weismann’s theory, it was precisely miscegenation that produced racial degeneration. Yet, even Virchow’s idea of miscegenation could be viewed as racist because his anticolonial stance was based on the premise that northern Europeans should not be settled in overseas colonies due to racial degeneration.

      Both the germ theory of disease and the germplasm theory of inheritance helped eliminate two significant fears people had about overseas expansion. One was the belief that diseases in the tropics were undefeatable and the other was the notion that Germans could “go native” in overseas colonies. With appropriate measures to control both miscegenation and infectious diseases, Germans could be settled in overseas colonies without having to give up their Germanness. In addition, the theories brought important transformations in the practice of colonialism, in the way physicians interacted with patients, and in the mode in which individuals related to the state. For colonialism, the introduction and institutionalization of these two theories meant that the colonial state began to rely more on experimental science and medical expertise, replacing the local knowledge provided by indigenous populations, on which earlier forms of European colonial expansion depended so much.⁴³ Relations between doctors and patients in Germany were also affected in the sense that the knowledge obtained in the laboratory took priority over patients’ own descriptions of the condition. The theories also gave power to states to introduce regulations that controlled individuals’ personal choices and behaviors in the name of the greater well-being of the nation-state.

      Carl Flügge, head of the Department of Hygiene at the University of Breslau, gave a good description of the significant role that experimental science began to have in German medicine in his study of the spread of diphtheria in Breslau from 1886 to 1890. In this work, the author celebrates the fact that experimental approaches to diseases, contrary to previous medical observation and statistical methods, had led to more effective and accurate knowledge of the sources of contagion.⁴⁴ The discovery in 1884 of the diphtheria bacillus by two German bacteriologists, Edwin Klebs and Friedrich Löffler, had enabled people to artificially recreate the conditions of the illness in the laboratory and uncover the peculiarities of the pathogen and its mode of communication. In 1890, these studies culminated in the creation of a serum therapy developed by Emil von Behring, Erich Wernicke, and a Japanese bacteriologist, Kitasato Shibasaburō, who was trained by Koch in Germany. According to Flügge, only experimental science could lead to a successful understanding of the disease. Previous methods used in its study were inefficient mainly because “it was difficult to obtain reliable statistical material either about diphtheria or the cases of death produced by it in larger areas and groups so that the natural variations in the ways in which the illness was spread could be associated with different possible factors.”⁴⁵ One of the main goals was to find specific causes, and it was rather challenging to establish the origins of infection just by looking at diseases from a statistical point of view. Flügge was proposing to move away from epidemic studies whose explanations of the disease were too strongly attached to climatic conditions and place of incidence. He believed that whenever people moved to a new locale, they brought with them their “lifestyle habits and peculiarities” and the same risks and dangers of the illness.⁴⁶

      Even though the new ways of defining disease and laws of inheritance introduced at the end of the nineteenth century could be interpreted as more liberalizing and less deterministic from a theoretical point of view, they turned out to be even more restrictive, since they gave additional power to doctors and authorities to interfere with individual and communal living styles. The notion that diseases were not determined by climatic and geographic conditions but by “cosmopolitan” bacteria did not translate into an equal treatment of populations regardless of the place, ethnicity, and racial group they belonged to. As many scholars have pointed out, microorganisms, carried by vector hosts, became identified with different groups in society and came to be seen as political and national threats.⁴⁷ John Farley argues that in the colonial realm the germ theory helped create policies of racial segregation in which the natives themselves replaced the tropical climate as the major threat and were seen as the source of life-threatening germs.⁴⁸ Moreover, people began to believe that an individual, even when not suffering from an illness, might carry the predisposition to acquire the disease from previous generations.