Social Science Research Council

“Locating the Laboratory: German Tropical Medicine and Sleeping Sickness Research in East Africa, 1898-1914”

In my research, I explore the history of German tropical medicine in European and African contexts, focusing on sleeping sickness research.  The sleeping sickness epidemic, which began in 1898 and resulted in the deaths of at least 250,000 people in the Lake Victoria basin before 1914, had a dramatic and permanent impact on both the lives of local Africans and the development of imperial public health agendas. I examine how expeditions such as Robert Koch’s on sleeping sickness in East/Central Africa, jointly sponsored by tropical medicine institutions and European governments, were affected by changing scientific, cultural, and political circumstances. Specifically, I analyze the impact of microbiological laboratory and fieldwork practices, local European and African cultural contexts, and global social and political imperatives on the production of knowledge about sleeping sickness. The project demonstrates the importance of collegiality, collaboration, and rivalry in shaping research agendas, determining investigative practices, and building professional careers.  I also consider how early public health research shaped interactions between local societies around Lake Victoria and the increasingly aggressive German and British colonial governments. Applying transnational and comparative methodologies to new sources, I examine sleeping sickness research in Europe and Africa, building on historical analyses of imperial rivalry and cooperation as well as established histories and anthropologies of public health and the life sciences.  My project aims to establish a transnational history of public health that departs from previous historical scholarship that has focused largely on national styles of scientific research, impacts of imperial medicine, isolated scientific biographies, colonial boundaries in Africa.