Expeditions into ‘Central Man’: Imperial Romance, Tropical Medicine, and Heroic Masculinity

Abstract

In this chapter, Taylor-Pirie considers how parasitology became rhetorically and materially entangled in the imperial imagination with travelogues, anthropological treatise, imperial romance fiction, and missionary biography. These modes jointly constructed the colonial encounter as a feat of manly endurance, using the linguistic enjoinment of medicine and exploration to frame parasitologists as modern heroes. Examining the influence of Thomas Carlyle’s conceptualisation of the heroic in history and imperial cartography as a strategy of representation, she demonstrates how tropical illness became a subject associated with pioneers, poets, and prophets, mapped onto the larger field of empire by the adventure mode. Through close readings of Henry Seton Merriman’s With Edged Tools (1894), John Masefield’s Multitude and Solitude (1909), and Joseph Hocking’s The Dust of Life (1915), she demonstrates the utility of forms like the ‘soldier hero’ and ‘imperial hunter’ in elaborating masculine citizenship in the context of tropical illness and ‘muscular Christianity’.

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 neither here nor there […] there is nothing new under the sun—even immediately 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 EdgedTools (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 critics, such as Patrick Brantlinger, David Arnold, and Mary Louise Pratt have argued, texts about the tropics—from travel narratives and anthropological 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 providing 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’sLake 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] center 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, 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 entertainment, 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 imperialism 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 expedition 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 enthusiastic students) to “carry the torch” into darkest Nigeria’.⁷

This triumphalist patriarchal language is characteristic of popular historiographical accounts of medicine which have tended towards a mode of heroicbiography. 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 excavating the literary and historical contexts that informed and augmented 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 ‘currency of recognizable social identities’.¹⁰ As I explored in my first chapter, the public and professional communications of parasitologists were stylistically influenced by the medieval revival, which produced ‘endless stories of chivalry, daring, knights, gentlemen and gallantry’ and contributed significantly to conceptions of the English gentleman.¹¹ The rhetorical constructions 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, heroism, duty, self-sacrifice, and manful endurance. Parasitologists were modern heroes exploring new realms and fighting a war against inimical 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’ narrative of history that underpinned the identities of protagonists and professionals 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 transformation. 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 citizenship 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.

Pioneers, Poets, and Prophets

In 1928, British-born physician and explorer Arthur Torrance published his popular medical travelogue, Tracking Down the Enemies of Man, wherein he described how many times a white colonist had been saved because ‘a doctor, in the spirit of true heroism, broke through the jungle woods and streams on horseback, foot, or by canoe, and mastered the murdering parasite’.¹⁵ In describing his travels through Africa and South-East Asia researching sleeping sickness, he indulged in a familiar story of medical heroism, encapsulating the collision of two cultural fantasies: the heroic triumph of white imperialism and of Anglophone medicine. First published in the United States, and a year later in Britain, the book included the subtitle: ‘being the romance of a doctor’s life in the jungles’, with a publisher’s foreword that asserted: ‘it is the pull of the adventurous life that brings into existence the tropical doctor’ (vii).

The foreword perpetuated a narrative of Western exceptionalism by describing the tropical medical practitioner, of which Torrance is an example, as a

lone-wolf disease-searcher, stamping out epidemics, warding off scourges of cholera, fever, plague, sleeping sickness […] which wipe out towns and valleys full of helpless primitives […] gleaming like [a] light of glory […] pitting all his strength into the daily task of weaving the fabric of advancing civilization. (vii–viii)

Dr Morris Fishbein, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, also supplied a preface in which he wrote about the ‘mystery that is Africa, Borneo, and India’. Fishbein insisted that ‘romance pours from the tropics as from an overflowing cauldron of some magical brew’ along with ‘sleeping sickness, yellow fever, malaria, and dozens of tropical diseases’ (xi).

Like many of his contemporaries Fishbein tied the romance of the tropics to disease and the possibilities it opened up for medical adventures. Bishop George Frodsham similarly declared for readers of the Saturday Review that ‘there is a certain magic in the tropics which bewitches alike the memory of the man who knows them well and the imagination of those who know them only through the mediatory offices of others’. He wrote of the tropical world as ‘sometimes alluring, sometimes horrific’ and narrated tropical life as ‘the heat and the flies and the smells and the noise and the fevers and the bad food and the worse water’. ‘To the uninitiated’, he commented, ‘the subject of tropical sanitation seems utterly bereft of the glamour of romance’. And yet he insisted that this is not the case; tropical sanitation is filled with ‘the glamour of warfare against disease’.¹⁶

As more and more of the populace began to know the tropics through ‘the mediatory offices of others’ and, by association, began to know medicine ‘in the imagination’, some sounded notes of caution. In 1902, British physician Dennis Vinrace had warned against the rhetoric of glamour being attached to the medical profession through the tropics. Responding to a speech at the Charing Cross Hospital Medical School in which Sir Frederick Treves had waxed lyrical about the ‘romance of medicine’, Vinrace asked whether ‘glowing and unqualified eulogia of the calling’ was of ‘unmixed benefit to the profession or the public at large’. Treves’s words may give ‘the general public a false and distorted idea of the prospects offered to young men’. Such ‘rainbow hues’, he argued, imply that ‘Dr Patrick Manson’s pursuit of the deadly mosquito’ might be done with only ‘a stout heart and a diploma’.¹⁷

This anxiety is unsurprising, given the volume of works that reproduced these rainbow hues for popular audiences. In Torrance’s book, for example, he recounts an incident in which a doctor at a tropical hospital in East Africa examines a slide of a patient’s blood, espies the protozoa of malaria swimming about and diagnoses him accordingly. However, in response to the young doctor’s boasting, a more senior doctor re-examines the blood to find the spirochete of relapsing fever ‘curled up’ in a corner of the slide. After another bout of bragging, a third, yet more senior doctor enters—and lo and behold both have missed the trypanosome of sleeping sickness hiding in plain sight in the middle of the slide! The patient is suffering from not one, not two, but three distinct tropical diseases in a dramatic moment that seems likely to be the product of artistic licence. Nevertheless, for readers, the episode functioned as a ‘romance’ of medical insight and a thrilling window into the dangers of inhabiting tropical space.

Torrance’s book was well received and he was even given a regular slot on CBS radio at 8 pm on Saturday nights to regale his listeners with tales of his pioneering tropical adventures. Intrigue surrounding the explorer intensified in 1931 after he was widely reported to have drowned whilst on an expedition in the Belgian Congo. On 29 April 1931, following a telegram about the calamity, national and regional newspapers in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, as well as various American and Australian papers lamented his death. A week later however reports emerged of his triumphant survival, bolstering his public visibility. Torrance went on to publish another book called Junglemania: Exploring the Jungles for Science (1933), allegedly based on his travels in Central Africa and Borneo at the behest of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine. The book, heavily illustrated with photographs of his travels, was, according to one journalist, far from a ‘long, dry, cold edition of “the Lancet”’ but rather ‘a tale of adventure in which the lure of the jungle and of medicine are equal’.¹⁸ It was a bestseller in the United States; however, it was shortly withdrawn by its London publishers owing to similarities between it and British author Owen Rutter’s novel Passion Fruit (1924).

Rutter, formerly a district officer in Borneo, argued that in his novel he had made up a town called ‘Malang’, which Dr Torrance wrote about as having visited, and that whole passages from his story had been reproduced almost verbatim. ‘My fictional episodes in “Passion Fruit”’, he commented, ‘are related by the author of “Junglemania” as having happened to himself’.¹⁹ Plagiarised passages included unlikely incidents such as a trick in which the protagonist turns water into blood to impress an unfriendly chief. Rutter also pointed out that it was unlikely that Torrance had shot a tiger as he suggested in his book because there were in fact no tigers in Borneo. Controversy also surrounded the photographs that accompanied the book, which resembled popular picture-postcards of Borneo. In a compelling twist, the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine, whilst admitting that Torrance was a member, denied ever having sent him on any expeditions.²⁰ This is a particularly stark example of the indistinct lines between fictional and nonfictional accounts of tropical travel, which often shared ideologies, images, forms, and—in the above case—whole sections of prose. Such intertextual exchanges participated in romantic formulations of medicine and empire that helped to write the practice of medicine into a history of heroic adventure.

In Propaganda and Empire, John Mackenzie argues that a new, fast-expanding juvenile book market had a formative influence on childhood by producing works that ‘enshrined contemporary hero-worship’ in the youthful imagination:

Stories of travel and exploration, missionary writings and biographies, the endless stream of popular lives of General Gordon and other heroes, books celebrating military and naval exploits […] all these became Christmas and birthday present staples, and above all prizes for school and Sunday school.²¹

M. Gregory Kendrick similarly identifies the wide influence of a sensationalist mass press that lionised explorers like Richard Burton and David Livingstone by ‘accent[uating] the challenges and dangers [of scientific exploration and] playing up the heroic features of the latter-day knights errant who led them’.²² The characterisation of explorers as ‘latter-day knights errant’ invoked a legendary ideal to confer on explorers a collection of attributes that set them apart from the ordinary citizen. This was continuous with broader conceptions of the ‘empire hero’, which Ted Beardow argues was forged in the ‘Western warrior heroic tradition’.²³

In 1841, historian Thomas Carlyle had galvanised interest in heroes and heroism in a series of lectures that offered a protean masculine ideal, which—as Graham Dawson argues—‘became fused in an especially potent configuration with representations of British imperial identity’.²⁴ In On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History (a collected anthology of his lectures), Carlyle considered history as a ‘biography of great men’ in which the thoughts and deeds of individual ‘heroes’ are responsible for the progress of civilisation: ‘the history of what man has accomplished in this world is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here’.²⁵

Using models as diverse as Odin, Napoleon, and Shakespeare, Carlyle identified the hero in six forms: ‘divinity’, ‘prophet’, ‘poet’, ‘priest’, ‘man of letters’, and, finally, ‘king’. His heroes come in different guises but they are united by several universal characteristics: physical and mental strength—‘the first duty of a man is still that of subduing Fear […] a man shall and must be valiant’ (32); reverence for a higher power and the ability to influence through speech, especially poetic speech—‘a great soul, open to the Divine Significance of Life […] fit to speak of this, to sing of this (185); and a passionate, self-sacrificing commitment to a cause—‘the chief characteristic of a hero [is] being heartily in earnest’ (185) ‘to fight and work […] in a great victorious enduring manner’ (115).

For Scottish writer Peter Bayne, ‘the ethical elevation, the earnest and spiritual religion, the impassioned sympathy with valor [sic], devout self-sacrifice, all that is heroic in man, and the resolute determination to recognise nobleness under all disguises’ is what rendered On Heroes (as late as 1879) ‘one of the best [books] that can be put into the hands of young men’.²⁶ In her introduction to the 1905 edition of On Heroes, American essayist Annie Russell Marble argued that Carlyle’s lectures were still popular because they offered ‘an inspiration not a final authority in criticism’.²⁷ Carlylean heroism was certainly inspirational; it was reproduced in best-selling self-help manuals, adapted for boy’s adventure fiction, provided narrative resources for journalists, and significantly contributed to the burgeoning ‘hero industry’.²⁸ In turn the hero industry produced an array of texts that employed comparative historicism to try to identify what was contingent and what was timeless about heroes and the heroic. In 1858, English historian Charles Duke Yonge published Parallel Lives of Ancient and Modern Heroes, a book that sought to ‘bring ancient and modern times and nations into juxtaposition’ to ‘examin[e] and compar[e] the lives of some of those illustrious men of both eras whose great deeds, or as it may be, whose eminent position has kept them before the eyes of all the succeeding ages’.²⁹

Many writers were drawn to the ancient Greeks whose mythologies they saw as providing a kind of urtext for heroism. Charles Kingsley, a good friend and devotee of Carlyle, for example, published The Heroes; or Greek Fairy Tales for My Children in which he laid out the Hellenic ideal of the hero:

that was the name the Hellens gave to men who were brave and skilful and dare do more than other men […] men who helped their country; men in those old times, when the country was half wild, who killed fierce beasts and evil men, and drained swamps, and founded towns […] we call such a man a hero in English to this day, and call it “heroic” to suffer pain and grief, that we may do good to our fellow-men.³⁰

It is not hard to see how this view of heroism might be co-opted to endorse British imperial projects.³¹ Indeed, it is just these kinds of analogical manoeuvres that were used to characterise parasitology as a heroic science of empire. Taming wild countries, draining swamps, founding towns, even killing fierce beasts were all tropes employed by parasitologists and their proponents in the late century. In 1904, for example, a contributor to the British Medical Journal characterised the ‘richest mines’ and ‘most fruitful plantations’ of empire as being ‘in the keep of invisible guardians more dreadful than the dragon that watched over the gardens of the Hesperides’.³² In 1922, then editor of the journal Dawson Williams repeated the frame of reference when eulogising Patrick Manson. Recounting Manson’s contributions to the mosquito-malaria hypothesis, he wrote ‘malaria continued to be the dragon which guarded the golden apples in the garden of the Hesperides. To slay this monster Manson came forth armed with the spear of knowledge and with unconquerable enthusiasm’.³³ In this way, and as I explored at length in the previous chapter, parasitologists were made the modern counterparts to the mythic heroes of ancient Greece.³⁴

In his discussion of the great men of history, Carlyle had advocated, not only heroism itself, but also the practice of hero-worship, which he lamented was waning in the 1840s:

society is founded on Hero-worship […] in these days Hero-worship […] professes to have gone out, and finally ceased […] an age that as it were denies the existence of great men; denies the desirableness of great men. (12)

There is no nobler feeling, for Carlyle, than the ‘heart-felt prostrate admiration for one higher than himself’, itself a heroic deed (11). Eight decades later, Ross aligned himself with Carlylean heroism by asserting in his Memoirs: ‘perhaps the soundest of all religions is Hero-worship’ (6), and: ‘I was and am a hero-worshipper’ (288). Rodolphe Louis Mégroz similarly invoked Carlyle by dedicating his biography of Ross ‘to all true Hero-worshippers’. Writing in 1931, he asserted ‘Hero-worship in this age is unfashionable’ but ‘[we have] in our midst one of those great men described by Carlyle as the hero’, Ronald Ross.³⁵

Carlyle’s notion of heroism, more so than any other, appealed to Ross because it suggested that there was admiration to be found not only in the doing but also in the telling. Ross believed, like Carlyle, that the poet was ‘a heroic figure belonging to all ages’ (78). He modelled himself on Carlyle’s conception of the man of letters as both bard and man of action, agreeing with his assertion that he ‘could not sing the Heroic warrior unless he himself were at least a Heroic warrior too’.³⁶Mégroz argues in kind that by practising both science and art Ross was ‘enabled to play the part of labourer and the singer of labour’.³⁷

In 1933, Malcolm Watson eulogised Ross in Science Progress and in doing so he also leaned heavily on Carlylean heroism. He prefaced his essay with two quotations from On Heroes and quoted it throughout to drive home Ross’s heroic polymathic nature: ‘the Hero can be a Poet, Prophet, King, Priest […] I have no notion of a truly great man that could not be all sorts of men’. Ross was, he insists, triply a poet, a prophet, and a scientist. Watson reminded his readers that Ross’s now-famous malaria day poem was ‘written while the lens of his microscope was still dim with sweat of his travail’ and that Ross’s words are those of ‘a prophet and a poet’.³⁸ He reiterated that Ross was ‘a precious gift’, a ‘man of genius […] a “Great Man”, a “Hero”, Carlyle would have called him’, and insisted that in Ross’s letters to Manson, he shows us a new type: the ‘Hero as Scientist’ (379).

Ross’s own poetry features prominently in the eulogy, providing a double evidence of Carlylean greatness by recounting his feats of heroic endurance and, at the same time, demonstrating his ability as a poet:

It was the suffering in the wards of his Indian hospital that was to bring out the greatness in this Great Man;

• “The painful faces ask can we not cure? We answer. No, not yet; we seek the laws”. (379)

Watson also used the words of poet laureate John Masefield to conceptualise Ross’s malaria research as a pioneering expedition that required endurance in the face of adversity:

“Follow the flagellum” was Manson’s advice. Unfortunately, it proved impossible to “follow the flagellum.” It disappeared utterly soon after it entered the mosquito’s stomach. Ross could find no trace of it in the insect. But as if he had heard Masefield’s song of the watchers of ships—

• “Adventure on, for from the littlest clue

• Has come whatever worth man ever knew;

• The next to lighten all men may be you.”

• […] with “only one star to steer by, Hope”, on he pressed. (381)

Masefield, who was in his teens when Ross was carrying out his experiments, had not yet written these lines for Ross to be inspired by. Nevertheless, the two men, who became firm friends, shared similar philosophies. Looking back on his own life in 1941, Masefield used Ross’s by-then-famous poetic phrase to conceptualise an early formative moment. Struck by a desire to become a doctor and work on yellow fever, he asserts: ‘I longed to work at that enemy, and to help find “its unseen, small, but million-murdering cause”’.³⁹ He again quoted Ross when the unforeseen closure of the mill that he worked for left thousands of workers suddenly penniless:

It was frightful to me, as it is still, that any depression or other cause could so threaten the lives of active willing workers:

• “Cannot the mind which made the engine make

• A nobler life than this?” (104)

These lines from Ross’s poem, ‘India’ written in 1881, precipitated Ross’s ‘whole philosophy of life’, as he told the audience of his ‘Science and Poetry’ lecture given to the Royal Institution in 1920. ‘In short’, Ross said, ‘I invoked Science to heighten civilization and to prevent decadence’—an ideal that aimed at ‘the conquest of nature and the perfectibility of man and of society by Science’.⁴⁰

In 1909, Masefield embraced Ross’s poetic worldview by writing Multitudeand Solitude, a novel about sleeping sickness that dramatised the work of tropical medicine as an antidote to fin de siècle ennui and a source of national regeneration. At the end of the novel, Masefield, through the mouthpiece of Roger, urges: ‘Let us build up an interest in the new hygiene and the new science; in all that is cleanly and fearless’.⁴¹ This rallying cry to the reader is situated within the context of contemporary parasitology research; the protagonist Roger studies parasites at the British Museum and reads ‘Reports of the Commission, various papers in the Lancet, the works of Professor Ronald Ross and Sir Patrick Manson, the summary of Low in Allbutt, [and] the deeply interesting articles in the Journal of Tropical Medicine’ (123). Masefield also invokes the discipline stylistically when Roger contemplates his ailing friend Lionel—who has contracted sleeping sickness during his investigations—as like ‘a crusader dying outside the Holy City’ (152). It is not difficult to see how Masefield’s story about an amateur playwright who goes to Africa to find a cure for sleeping sickness aligns with Ross’s romantic ideals. Indeed, Mégroz would make this connection for his readers in 1931, reminding them of Masefield’s public admiration of Ross’s poetry and remarking: ‘Multitude and Solitude showed long ago [Masefield’s] appreciation of the scientific hero’.⁴²

‘It’s a Heroic Thing to Do’: Exploring the Microscopic Frontier

Patrick Brantlinger argues that the late nineteenth century experienced an ‘eclipse’ of the British hero, alongside numerous attempts to revitalise him, which ‘became increasingly militant in the era of the New Imperialism’.⁴³ The resurgence of heroism and hero-worship was precipitated by the ‘burgeoning new industry of Boy’s adventure tales’, itself inspired by the great explorers of the mid-century and the heavily stylised travel narratives that they published. Such narratives were often informed by ideals of historical masculine endurance, as is made plain by a review of Henry Morton Stanley’s travel narrative In Darkest Africa (1890), which was claimed by a writer for the Edinburgh Review to have been read ‘more universally and with deeper interest than any other publication’ that year.⁴⁴ The reviewer characterised Stanley’s trip through the Congo to the Egyptian Soudan as ‘one of the severest trials of endurance which ever attended the exploits of such heroes of antiquity or of modern history as Alexander, Caesar, and Bonaparte’.⁴⁵

Readers are thus invited to perceive Stanley’s narrative using ‘one of the most durable and powerful forms of idealised masculinity’—the soldier hero.⁴⁶ By demonstrating military virtues of endurance, Stanley could explore new lands in a feat tantamount to the wars waged by past emperors. Here, and in many similar narratives (including those of medicine) the myth of the Dark Continent prevails as a guiding framework for characterising the colonial encounter as one of heroism versus savagery. However, as Brantlinger demonstrates, this binary was disrupted by increasingly complex and pessimistic depictions of empire as the century waned.⁴⁷ As the glamour of exploration was displaced by ‘mere travel’—a ‘sordid spectacle of tourism and commercial exploitation’—opportunities for heroism seemed vanishingly slight.⁴⁸

In Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel The Lost World (which makes reference to Stanley’s book as well as to explorer and anthropologist Richard Burton), a newspaper editor tells the protagonist Edward Malone that ‘the big blank spaces in the map are all being filled in, and there’s no room for romance anywhere […] The day for this sort of thing is rather past’.⁴⁹ Nevertheless, Conan Doyle gives us a ‘wild romance’ of dinosaurs and savages, which Brantlinger reads as ‘in defiance of this fact of modern life’.⁵⁰ When Professor Challenger shows Malone a pterodactyl wing, Malone is amazed. Referring to both the size of the specimen and to the size of the achievement, he declares ‘it’s just the very biggest thing that I ever heard of! […] it is colossal’. Professor Challenger is ‘a Columbus of science who has discovered a lost world’.⁵¹ Whilst these words prompt us to recognise the wonder to be found in ‘bigness’, the early pages also point us towards another avenue for adventure and heroism when Malone meets bacteriologist Henry Tarp. Tarp, who ‘lives in a nine-hundred-diameter microscope’, is a self-confessed ‘frontiersman from the extreme edge of the Knowable’.⁵²

Such a characterisation not only illustrates how the frontiers of science and empire were simultaneously imagined in macro and microscopic scales, but also how opportunities for romance and adventure were routinely located in the distant realms of inaccessible time (the evolutionary and historical past) or inaccessible space (the microscopic present)—worlds lost to history or vision. Kathleen E. Hames goes as far as to read the plateau that they travel to in The Lost World as itself suggestive of a biological cell. She argues that whilst critics have considered Conan Doyle’s indebtedness to Everard Im Thurn’s descriptions of Mt Roraima in constructing the geographical and geological details of his lost world, ‘the biological symbolism of the region is more suggestive of Doyle’s [sic] experience as a physician and his fascination with laboratory science’.⁵³ She reads the battle between man and ape-man in South America as a dramatisation of the relationship between host body and the tropical microbe.

The imagined interchangeability of ‘savage natives’ and ‘savage microbes’ enabled proponents of tropical medicine to identify the microscopic fields of empire as frontiers that offered new opportunities for heroism. By rewriting the colonial encounter as microbiological, parasitologists could emerge as modern heroes traversing treacherous lands in pursuit of deadly foe. When Lionel expresses his desire to find out about the life cycle of the trypanosome parasite in Multitude and Solitude, for example, Roger responds: ‘But I think it’s heroic of you […] it’s a heroic thing to do […] Heroic’ (145–46). He conceives of the pathogen as an imperial enemy and those researching it as scientists and soldiers dying on behalf of their fellows:

[Roger] thought of [sleeping sickness] no longer as an abstract intellectual question, but as man’s enemy, an almost human thing, a pestilence walking in the noonday. Out in Africa that horror walked in the noonday stifling the brains of men […] he thought of the little lonely stations of scientists and soldiers, far away in the wilds, in the midst of disease […] they were giving up their lives cheerily and unconcernedly in the hope of saving the lives of others. (154–55)

The characterisation of the disease as a ‘horror’ that ‘walks in the noonday […] out in Africa’ offers pathology as a form that structures the colonial encounter, reinforcing the pivotal defensive role—not to mention bravery—of tropical pathologists. And whilst they didn’t give their lives ‘cheerily and unconcernedly’ many scientists did indeed perish in the service of tropical medicine. Dr Walter Myers died from yellow fever whilst on a Liverpool-funded expedition to investigate the disease in Brazil in 1901 (aged 28), Dr Joseph Everett Dutton died from relapsing fever in Africa on a Liverpool-funded expedition in 1905 (aged 29), and Lt Dr Forbes Mason Grant Tulloch died after contracting sleeping sickness whilst on a Royal Society-funded commission in 1906 (aged just 27).

Masefield’s rhetorical techniques were shared by other writers who employed the language of battle and sacrifice to communicate the stakes of tropical medical research. A writer eulogising British special commissioner to East Africa, Sir Gerald Portal, for instance, asserted that his death from malaria in the prime of his life was ‘a tragic reminder of the tribute which Africa extracts from its white conquerors’. The writer went on to describe Africa as a ‘malarial frontier’, quoting Rev Prof Henry Drummond in lamenting, ‘how capricious and yet how remorseless, how constant and yet how unaccountable the extraction of this tribute is’.⁵⁴ Such language frames Africa as a ruler and tropical illness as a tax—or, as the OED notes of ‘tribute’: ‘the price of peace, security, and protection’.⁵⁵ This was a commonly invoked trope in discussions of the political context of tropical medical research. In 1905, Joseph Chamberlain framed the study of tropical illness as part of Britain’s ‘duty to reduce this blood tribute that we paid to the Empire’.⁵⁶ When speaking about the risks of studying malaria in 1897, the British Medical Journal had positioned tropical research in a similar light, reporting on Ross’s recent illness as a ‘reward’ for the ‘devotion which he has shown in the cause of medical science and humanity’.⁵⁷ Likewise, in a lecture to medical students in Glasgow, Governor of Lagos, Sir William MacGregor, had spoken of the ‘heavy national imperial responsibility’ of Britain to carry out malaria research owing to their possession of ‘the Lion’s share of the malarial areas of the earth’:

We hold those vast territories subject to the tyranny of the destructive giant Malaria, who bestrides the globe, and exacts his yearly tribute of scores and scores of thousands of human lives from white and black indiscriminately.⁵⁸

Writers often invoked dragonslaying and giant killing as a way to meet the representational challenges of tropical medicine. By employing the adventure mode—a mode of gallant battles, perilous quests, and treasure-seeking adventurers—parasitologists were able to chart a new conceptual domain: that of tropical disease.

In 1933, a writer for the Cornish Guardian identified Ross as part of a list of ‘modern adventurers’, arguing that, contrary to popular belief, the ‘age of adventure is not past’. ‘It is perhaps because adventures that are worth calling adventures are the experience of a privileged few of mankind that we love to read about them’, they remark, ‘indeed we probably love better to read of other people’s adventures than to go out and court death in adventures ourselves’.⁵⁹ Going on to write of anonymous sailors and pilots; Captain Ahab from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851); First World War pilot and adventure writer Captain W. E. Johns; English explorer Bertram Thomas; colonial office intelligence officer St John Philby; high-altitude balloonist August Piccard, ‘who ascended by balloon ten miles into the stratosphere to report his scientific findings’; the adventure stories of Captain Marryat and R. M. Ballantyne; Homer’s Odyssey; and ‘the late Sir Ronald Ross’, the author demonstrates what Felix Driver describes as the ‘unsettled frontier’ between discourses of adventure travel and of scientific exploration.

This ‘frontier’ was a site for the struggle of professional identities and methodologies, where common ideas, vocabularies, and narrative patterns circulated between ill-bounded genres. Travel writings, imperial adventure stories, newspaper articles, obituaries, speeches, and medical texts shared in the same kind of imaginative work. Like the aforementioned article, many of these texts lionised exploration in colonial space and perpetuated a view of Western medical knowledge as—in Masefield’s words—‘cleanly and fearless’. In these texts, imperial exploration was a dangerous but morally laudable duty; when tropical illness afflicted white bodies it was often characterised as a toll, as a price for civilisation, and a testament to the bravery of those working to build a better world. This is an extension of the narrative work of parasitologists discussed in my first chapter and part of a larger type of depiction of the colonial world characterised by what Joseph Conrad described as ‘Geography Militant’.

Writing in 1924, Conrad described three epochs in the history of geographical knowledge: Geography Fabulous, Geography Militant, and Geography Triumphant. The middle of these was prevalent from the late eighteenth century through to the ‘scramble for Africa’ and involved the empirical mapping of the world by military and imperial powers—the creation of the globe through discovery and exploration. For Conrad, this was a transitional stage between a time when maps were speculative and bounded by dragons, and a time when ‘white spaces had succumbed to the domination of science’ and there was nothing left to discover.⁶⁰ As Driver notes, Geography Militant represented a ‘spirit of heroic exploration’ built on ideas about explorers as missionaries of science ‘extending the frontiers of (European) geographical knowledge’.⁶¹ Conrad laments the loss of genuine heroic exploration with the onset of Geography Triumphant, which he associates with the mundane, and with imperial opportunism and corruption. The slow reveal of modernity’s corrupting influence on idealistic exploration is reflected in what Driver calls the ‘murky impressionism’ of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899).

Conrad’s perception of Geography Militant is an idealisation, reflecting a zeitgeist fuelled by imperial fervour and nostalgia for a Britain that never really existed. Thus, we might view these imagined geographies, not as sequential historical epochs, but as the expression of ‘inescapable tension[s] within projects of European exploration’—between idealism and political reality, between discovery and conquest, between philanthropy and exploitation.⁶² As I explore in the following section, linguistic and structural exchanges between narratives of medicine and narratives of imperial romance reveal writers’ attempts to ‘resolve imaginatively what could not be resolved in other ways’.⁶³

Fantasy Worlds and Fantasy Medicine

At the seventieth annual meeting of the British Medical Association in 1902, Sir William R. Kynsey, president of the Section of Tropical Diseases, quoted the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, in asserting ‘we live in a small bright oasis of knowledge surrounded on all sides by a vast unexplored region of impenetrable mystery’.⁶⁴ The original address, printed in Nature and Popular Science Monthly, was given by Salisbury at his inaugural speech as the president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1894. In discussing the problems yet to be solved by science, he instructed his British listeners ‘to turn [their] eyes to the undiscovered country which still remains to be won’.⁶⁵ Such rhetoric employs cartography as a form to understand the relationship between science and society, between knowledge and nation. Salisbury’s imperialist politics—apparent during his stints as Secretary of State for India (1874–1878) and Foreign Secretary (1878–1880, 1887–1892, 1895–1900)—and the new context given by tropical disease in Kynsey’s speech expose the deep-seated imperial ideology behind his borrowing of these words. For Kynsey, science is a tool of empire, helping to win—for Britain—those vast unexplored regions of the tropical world. He goes on, tellingly, to reflect that ‘malaria was the great scourge of many lands which were the finest on earth, teeming with the products of tropical nature, and filled with the treasures of the richest mines’. Kynsey’s words, which placed medicine in the context of treasure-seeking, contributed to circulating images, motifs, and patterns of speech that accumulated at the imaginative intersections of disease and nation.

British explorer Edward Glave, who worked with famous explorer Henry Morton Stanley (of Dr Livingstone fame), published his Six Years of Adventure in Congo-Land in the year preceding With Edged Tools (the text with which I opened this chapter). Within his narrative, Glave cites the formative power of adventure stories alongside Stanley’s own travel writings in pushing him to become an explorer. He is enraptured to hear the same stories from Stanley’s lips: ‘I had read his books in old England, and his vivid narratives had carried me into the midst of savage African life; but now how much more was I affected as I listened to the graphic words of the author, and heard of the marvellous adventures from his own lips, in the land where the brave deeds were done’.⁶⁶Glave lives out the fantasy of his readers by clinging to a vision of the world in which he can heroically triumph over adversity just like the fictional protagonists of imperial romance. Within the first three pages, he characterises Africa as the ‘dark continent’ no less than three times and recounts his dreams of following in the footsteps of the adventurers and explorers of his boyhood to conquer those ‘vast unnamed blank spaces’ on the map that adorned his classroom wall (16). Such an opening calls forward in time to the beginning of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), which stylistically mimics Glave’s narrative with young Marlow inspired by similar imagined cartographic adventures: ‘I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth […] a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over’.⁶⁷

The fetishising of maps that opens both texts provides a structure that transcends genre as a symbol of imperial ambition. The literary maps that pervaded boy’s adventure stories by the likes of H. Rider Haggard, G. A. Henty, and Robert Louis Stevenson were steadily replaced as the readership grew up by the maps of travel narratives written by prominent explorers like Glave or Stanley. Megan A. Norcia has drawn attention to the prominence of maps in childhood in the form of ‘dissected puzzles’ and geography primers as a way of communicating the idea of empire to children.⁶⁸ ‘The children’s puzzle-play prepared them to encounter, identify, and oversee an empire pieced together from distinct territories’ and, like the literary maps of novels, explicitly gave power to the player or reader in constructing, or finding meaning, in global geography.⁶⁹ Such puzzle maps, Norcia argues, ‘transmit[ted] social and political geography’ and ‘reinforce[d] a hierarchy of imperial power and knowledge’.⁷⁰

Cartography was a mode of imperial meaning-making that justified colonialism by recasting vast areas of the globe as new, unclaimed, and empty. As Charlotte Rogers argues, the ‘blank space’ fallacy was used to facilitate the erasure of non-Western histories: ‘Europeans projected their own ignorance on to the regions unknown to them, transferring the blank space of their minds onto geographical and historical realities about which they knew nothing’.⁷¹ Dane Kennedy recognises this as a central paradox of nineteenth-century exploration—that it became possible to ‘explore territory that was not truly terra incognita to the explorers or their sponsors. Their aim was to discover the known anew’.⁷² Parasitologists also used mapping as a tool for reinvention: first to partition landscapes as inherently different from ‘temperate’ Europe, and then to demonstrate how these ‘pathological’ landscapes might be remapped anew by Western medical knowledge. In the introduction to Andrew Davidson’s medical textbook Geographical Pathology (1892), which contains a mass of statistics, charts, and tables, he invokes this form by setting out his aim to ‘map’ the geographical distribution of infective and climatic diseases. This, he declares, will be of ‘interest’ to the student but of ‘practical importance’ to the statesman, army medical officer, and sanitarian, implying that disease might be mitigated by good governance and hygienic infrastructures.⁷³

Davidson’s book tacitly suggests that it might be possible to remap the globe with new, more salubrious geographies—an epidemiological extension of the British imperial project. The confluences between the practices of tropical medicine and the practices of empire are made even more explicit in his Hygiene and Diseases of Warm Climates published the following year, in which he remarks that the book aims at ‘filling up the blank’—a phrase that evokes a map of empire coloured in with the marks of European powers.⁷⁴ In 1902, parasitologist Ronald Ross made a similar parallel, noting that ‘red marks of empire are really marks of disease’.⁷⁵ In this way, cartographic practices aided the political imagining of nations and colonies across geography and medicine, enabling writers to imaginatively map the contours of empire in respect of medical knowledge.

In their article ‘Quintessentially Modern Heroes: Surgeons, Explorers, and Empire’, Christopher Lawrence and Michael Brown make a case for the conceptual twinning of geographers and surgeons owing to ‘affinities in practice, professional identity, public representation, and ideology […] their aspirations were shaped by the same social forces and predicated on the same social values’.⁷⁶ Both professional figures, moreover, took advantage of the new status afforded to empiricism, rebranding their disciplines as ‘scientific’ and thus ‘modern’. Lawrence and Brown argue for continuities between the ‘material and rhetorical resources’ that surgeons and geographers used ‘to pursue their practical and ideological goals’, drawing attention to, for example, the parallels between the collection of specimens from places and from people (152):

Central to explorers’ everyday activities was the deployment of their knowledge of natural history in the collection of specimens. After allowing a fly to bite through his flannel pajamas, Stanley collected the “specimen.” Likewise, when surgeons removed items of particular pathological interest from their patients, they preserved them, reporting, for example, “A Case of Surgical Kidney with Specimen”. (167)

Here I make a similar case for the continuities between explorers and tropical pathologists; however, I argue that for parasitologists such parallels were not only comparative practices, but also examples of the slippages of profession—a parasitologist would have just as much interest in preserving insect specimens as Stanley. Indeed, tropical medicine specialists Michael Barrett, Frank Cox, and Lee Inness include famous explorer David Livingstone in their history of Scottish parasitologists, arguing that he pioneered the use of arsenic to treat trypanosomiasis and suggested a tsetse fly vector for animal trypanosomiasis (nagana) before David Bruce, who went on to discover both the causative organism and insect vector for human and animal trypanosomiases at the end of the century (1894–1903).⁷⁷ Incidentally, by referring to Livingstone as a ‘Victorian hero’ on a ‘quest’ to ‘rid the world of slavery’, Barret, Innes, and Cox uncritically perpetuate a triumphalist Western understanding of empire and tropical medicine, demonstrating the lasting legacy of the narratives analysed in this book.

Scholars such as Helen Tilly, Markku Hokkanen, Alan Bewell, and David N. Livingstone have identified the role of cartographers and geographical societies in describing and bringing into being the biomedical boundaries of the modern world.⁷⁸Cartography provided a means by which to think about, as well as to represent, the relationships between disease and geography. For Tom Koch, maps are a type of story-telling that represent ‘neither the world nor an objective record of our worldly experience, but a means whereby we come to understand aspects of it’.⁷⁹ Maps and mapping, whether depicted graphically or narratively, are also ways in which we exert authority over space; they have rhetorical power in shaping our experiences and understandings of geography—a phenomenon embodied by fictions of adventure as much as by the travelogues of real-life explorers. As Merriman’s narrator points out in With Edged Tools, the boundaries between real and imagined geographies are not themselves always easy to map since adventure fiction and travel writing shared a familiar formula—‘applauding the same heroic virtues of pluck and forthrightness in the conqueror, Othering the native in familiar ways, and making use of similar expressions, images, and plot’.⁸⁰ Moreover, imperial romance novels increasingly mimicked the paratexts of travel writing (including maps, forewords, and footnotes) in order to claim authenticity for the imagined adventures inside.

To complicate matters, many explorers including H. M. Stanley, Verney Lovett Cameron, and Samuel White Baker also wrote adventure novels for children, a phenomenon that Justin D Livingstone identifies as a ‘turn to fiction’ in the landscape of Victorian exploration.⁸¹ In a significant parallel, Ross was attempting (and failing) to establish a literary career whilst stationed in India, writing novels, poetic anthologies, and plays alongside his medical practice. His first novel The Child of Ocean, a South Seas adventure story of shipwrecks, pirates, and forbidden love, received mixed reviews on its publication in 1889. Nevertheless, he did receive two prominent positive reviews: one from Mrs Lovett Cameron (British romance author and Verney Lovett Cameron’s sister-in-law) and the other from adventure writer H. Rider Haggard. It is notable that the book is what first connected Ross with Haggard, who wrote a letter to Ross (then unknown to him) praising the novel shortly after it was published. In his Memoirs, Ross asserts Laetus sum laudari a laudato viro! (I am pleased to be praised by a man of such praise) (86). The two subsequently became lifelong friends.

Ross’s early interest in the aesthetic possibilities of imperial romance went on to inform his experimental work, and later, the historicising of his discovery, in which he repeatedly invokes the tropes of the explorer-adventurer, the stormy seas of inspiration, and perils of (intellectual) piracy. In Philosophies (a poetic interpretation of his malaria research), Ross included ‘Death-Song of Savagery’, a poem that forms the epilogue of The Child of Ocean, suggesting that his experiments in novel writing were in some respects intellectually continuous with his malaria work. In his Memoirs, Ross invoked the romance of finding ‘uncharted treasure island[s]’ (a classic imperial fantasy) as a frame of reference for his scientific discoveries, writing of his competitors:

I am sure that none of them would ever have embarked on so vast and stormy a sea, would ever have been a Columbus of so wild an adventure, would ever have shown—I will not say the patience, the passion, and the poetry—but the madness required to find that uncharted treasure island! Really they have forgotten what was their true vocation—to stay at home and draw the maps after the event, to colour them red, blue, and yellow, to put their own names to the continents and islands, and to draw their salaries.⁸²

Ross perceives his malaria work as tantamount to feats of historical exploration—the mosquito an uncharted territory waiting to be mapped by scientific explorers. He even perceives the eggs of mosquitoes as ‘shaped curiously like ancient boats with raised stern and prow’ (233). The characterisation of his competitors as simply map-makers implicitly criticises them for being wrapped up in the geopolitics of empire, rather than engaged in the romance of discovery. In his eyes, his research is above the petty politics of imperial cartography. He instead aligns his work with the romantic mapping of imperial adventure, using the fraught language of fantasy and exploration to place emphasis on the drama of discovery and distance his work from the messiness of imperial administration.

Drawing parallels between cartographic and literary ‘mapping’, Chu-Chueh Cheng has argued that processes of writing and of charting are encoded with both ‘wish and anguish’.⁸³ This is certainly true of the fictional maps in stories like Haggard’sKing Solomon’s Mines (1885), which scholars have read as enacting a wishful but anxious heteronormative and Eurocentric ordering.⁸⁴ It is also true of textbooks like Davidson’sHygiene and Diseases of Warm Climates, which attempt to carefully delimit European and non-European diseases, and of the speeches and lectures by parasitologists like Ross, who use cartography as a form with which to reimagine imperial space. In a lecture delivered to the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce in 1899, for example, Ross asserted:

We love to point out on the map those tracts of red which represent our possessions in that great continent [Africa]. See here, we say, the mighty extent of the British Empire! But […] it is an empire of graveyards, a kingdom over tombstones. What really are those tracts of red in Africa? Scarcely possessions of Englishmen, but rather battlegrounds between Englishmen and King Malaria—unstable conquests maintained only by the sacrifice of hecatombs of our countrymen.⁸⁵

Ross’s remapping of British Africa as a deadly battleground draws on imperial fantasy to voice both anguish about the viability of British rule and a deep pessimism about the purported ‘progress’ of imperial expansion. But at the same time, he poses a wishful future. Asserting that ‘the success of Imperialism will be found to depend very largely on our success with the microscope; the conquest of the world will depend on our conquest of invisible atoms’, he suggests that research in parasitology holds the key to future British dominion—to remapping the colonies in a new, more salubrious colour. Without malaria, he asserts, Africa would

ere now have been civilised, peopled and prosperous; at any rate Europeans would now be able to live there, trade there and teach there, without the very imminent risk of death or severe sickness which they are now compelled to face; and our armies would be able to push forward into the heart of the country without fear of an enemy much more dangerous than any savage tribes to be found in it. (4)

In Ross’s vision of West Africa, prosperity is clearly determined by Europeans ‘liv[ing]’, ‘trad[ing]’, and ‘teach[ing]’ there, while his desire to ‘people’ the region obscures the presence of indigenous populations and plays into the fantasy of West Africa as a ‘blank space’ on the map. This lecture is characteristic of his oratory style—which often borrows linguistically and conceptually from genre fiction—and illustrates a broader system of exchange between tropical medicine and imperial fantasy. Here he discards the language of realism and opts instead for romance by suggesting, not slow progress with a complicated political fallout, but an idealism whereby simply slaying the enemy, King Malaria, will result in the real-world counterpart to a tidy narrative resolution.

Haggard’sKing Solomon’s Mines performs similar rhetorical work. Published just a few months after the conclusion of the Berlin Conference, the novel depicts the recent past, shortly after the Anglo-Zulu War and before the majority of the region came under British rule. As Helen Goodman argues, Haggard uses this setting to encourage ‘cultural support’ for the British Empire, and to ‘glamourize imperial careers’.⁸⁶ His fiction, and fiction like it, tries to recapture an earlier moment in imperial history where Africa was more wild, more mysterious, more divided by conflict, and where men could enact a nostalgic heteronormative masculinity that probably never existed at all. In doing so—as Haggard biographer Morton Cohen argues—he ‘let the reader turn his back on the troublesome, the small, the sordid’ taking him on a journey to ‘perform mighty deeds he could believe in’.⁸⁷ The ‘he’ here refers to its self-avowed position as a book for boys. Justin D. Livingstone argues that such fictions were aimed at a ‘porous readership’ that ‘took advantage of the fluid boundary between men and boys’.⁸⁸ This porousness is evident in the book’s dedication to ‘all the big and little boys who read it’. Notwithstanding such marketing, Haggard’s books had a much broader audience; with readerships in girls’ schools as well as in boys’; Haggard appealed to ‘critics, schoolboys, housewives, and working men alike’.⁸⁹ Nevertheless his fiction dramatises a specifically masculine kind of fantasy. As Graham Dawson argues, ‘soldier heroes composed in adventure narratives […] function[ed] psychically and socially as positive images set against the fragmenting and undermining effects of [imperial] anxiety’.⁹⁰ For Goodman, Haggard’s imperial fantasy is one that ‘reifies the alleged virtues of the military in relation to empire and masculinity’, depicting male identities that ‘both constitute and are constituted by imperial instincts to control and subdue hostile, feminised African landscapes’.⁹¹

Haggard’s novels took on a central role in the critical debate about realism and romance in the 1880s. In 1887, literary critic Andrew Lang celebrated the revival of romance in verses which he dedicated to Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Stanley Wayman:

Verse

Verse KING ROMANCE was wounded deep, All his knights were dead and gone, All his court was fallen on sleep, In the vale of Avalon! […] Then you came from south and north From Tugela, from the Tweed; Blazoned his achievements forth, King Romance is come indeed! All his foes are overthrown, All their wares cast out in scorn, King Romance has won his own, And the lands where he was born!Footnote

Andrew Lang, ‘The Restoration of Romance’ in The Poetical Works of Andrew Lang Vol. III. ed. by Mrs Lang (London: Longmans, Green and Co.,1923) pp. 196–97.

Lang’s borrowing of medieval knighthood to conceptualise the male romance genre demonstrates how both the stories themselves and the processes of writing them were conceived with reference to a kind of masculinity that linked fighting and adventure with imperial masculine citizenship. The language recalls Ross’s mapping of Africa as a land in which Englishmen battle with ‘King Malaria’. Writing in the late 1890s, and having already cultivated a friendship with Haggard, it is likely that Ross was influenced by the ideological appeal of the romance genre. Jessica Howell argues that in Ross’s notebooks, and in his Memoirs, he focuses on linear mappings of illness and on sequential narrative structures when describing his experiments because they ‘shared more with a conclusive plot structure of discovery’.⁹³ Elsewhere she notes that H. Rider Haggard does the same thing by ‘consolidat[ing] the circuitous routes of imperial exploration and illness into a linear and conclusive path towards British success’ (71). Both writers use maps or mapping as forms to make material—for different audiences—‘the fantasy of progress in the face of tropical disease’ (97, footnote 2).

‘Puny Carpet Knights’ and Muscular Christianity

At the end of John Masefield’sMultitude and Solitude (1909), playwright-turned-explorer Roger asserts ‘the world is just coming to see that science is not a substitute for religion, but a religion of a very deep and austere kind’ (299). Reviewers were inclined to agree, characterising the novel as ‘find[ing] a new gospel in science and service’.⁹⁴ Whilst out in Africa Roger understands his fear of ‘giving way and relapsing to the barbarism about him’ in terms of ‘the spiritual war’; his experimental work trying to cure sleeping sickness is ‘the duty of one who had taken a military oath of birth into a Christian race’ (262). He resolves to form a ‘brotherhood’ of amateur scientists with ‘a little school and laboratory’ and monthly paper ‘preaching [their] tenets’ to rid the world of ‘dirt and cowardice’ through the fearless invocation of sanitary science. Throughout the novel he is spurred on by visions of his dead fiancée, Ottalie, who—with her ‘fine, trained, scrupulous mind’—embodies a ‘new spirit coming into the world’, the spirit of science:

she seemed to him to be something of all cleanness and fearlessness, waiting for him to lead her into the world, so that men might serve her. (298)

He prays that Ottalie’s influence on him might help him to

bring to earth that Promised life in which man, curbing Nature to his use, would assert a new law and rule like a king, where now, even in his strength, he walks sentenced, a prey to all things baser. (300)

These powerful final lines of the novel use a religious imperative to advocate for man’s absolute dominion over nature. Science, cleanly and fearless, is imagined as a tool of imperialism on a global scale.

The entanglements between medicine, religious dogma, and imperialism in Multitude and Solitude reflect a rhetorical framing of the colonial encounter in which the conquest of tropical illness was championed as part of the Christian ‘civilising mission’. This was literalised in a subset of stories published at the turn of the century in which recovery from sleeping sickness was associated with Christian conversion. In Alice Garland Steele’s ‘Awake Thou Sleeper!’ (1923), published in the semi-religious periodical The Quiver, a doctor recounts the tale of a friend of his, John Chalmers, who went to Africa as a missionary and caught the fatal sleeping sickness, but against all the odds recovered. The recovery, which the doctor describes as ‘a miracle’, is attributed to his steadfast belief in God and his conversion of a wayward woman. Despite dosages of atoxyl, variants of arsenic, and ‘a clinical thermometer in one hand and a dose of bluff in the other’, the doctor could not help John, who continued to deteriorate and eventually became comatose. However, upon seeing a girl he had met on the steamer over, who prayed, for the first time in her life, for him, John makes a sudden recovery—the only explanation given is divine intervention.⁹⁵

In Joseph Hocking’sThe Dust of Life (1915) British protagonist, Cedric Essex, similarly contracts sleeping sickness whilst on an expedition to Africa. He is considered as good as dead by the missionary doctor; however, he subsequently consumes the titular substance and undergoes both recovery from the illness and a powerful Christian epiphany. The dust, which turns out to be a naturally occurring compound containing large amounts of radium, is found deep in the African mountains.⁹⁶ It is a precipitate of the ‘Water of Life’, a term that occurs in The Book of Revelation and the Gospel of John referring to the Holy Spirit, and in some versions of the Alexander romance. The dust is given to Cedric by African prince, Sunflower, himself a Christian whose support of Cedric is framed as a displaced gratitude to the British missionary who converted him. Sunflower dissolves the compound in water and within half an hour Cedric regains a healthier colour and his breathing becomes regular. Mr Taylor, a British missionary, asserts that the ‘salts must possess some qualities as yet unrealised by the medical world’ (128), characterising the action of the drug as ‘like a miracle of which one reads in the New Testament’ (116). Sunflower similarly remarks: ‘you see! It is life fighting with death. It is like Christ in my heart. He overcome death!’ (116). Here Hocking, who was himself a United Methodist Free Church minister, provides narrative justification for the ‘civilising mission’ by celebrating the combined efficacy of religion and medicine. As missionary Mr McFinn puts it, the work of Christianity is tied up with the ‘romance’ of exploration, and the practical work of medical science:

Was it not Livingstone who climbed a mountain one morning, and from the summit of the mountain saw the smoke rising from a thousand African villages, and who said that, God helping him, Christ’s work should be known in each of those thousand villages before end of the century. Isn’t there romance in a thought that? […] I’ve cured hundreds of sickness. I’ve taught them something of the meaning of sanitation, of decency, of the laws of health.⁹⁷

The material overlap between Divine and medical intervention depicted in imperial romance was reinforced by parasitologists’ own investment in theological language. Patrick Manson, for example, refers to mosquitoes as ‘the twelve apostles in glycerine’ and himself as a ‘preacher of the gospel of Laveran’. Meanwhile Ross invokes a form of theological redemption when he thanks ‘relenting God’ for showing him how to end human suffering in the form of scientific inspiration.⁹⁸ In his Memoirs, Ross recalls trying to persuade Surgeon-Colonel Lawrie of the Indian Medical Service to believe in Alphonse Laveran’s still disputed discovery of the malaria parasite, which he conceptualises as a belief in ‘Laveranity’. He writes, ‘being a convert like St Paul I became a militant apostle’ (178). Such language implies that ‘belief’ is a practice conserved across both realms: religious and scientific.

Examining the complex politics of Ross’s intellectual affiliations and disputes with Patrick Manson, Alphonse Laveran, and Robert Koch over the course of his career, Jeanne Guillemin argues that in the late nineteenth century ‘a medical scientist might strategically choose intellectual forebears to legitimize the claim to originality’.⁹⁹ Ross’s own assertion that he was converted to the ‘gospel’ of Laveran alleged a prestigious and foreign patrimony that helped to reinforce Ross’s priority claims. His choice of language and poetic framing of his work as divinely ordained doubly benefitted Ross by reinforcing the gospel-like authority of scientific knowledge and quelling what Ross went on to call ‘petty inter-tribal advantage’ by claiming God as his true mentor. He writes: ‘I, with eyes upcast/Gazing warn and weary from this Dark World/Ask of thee thy Wisdom, steadfast Eye of God’.¹⁰⁰ His poetic anthology, which was published in 1911 in tandem with a malaria textbook, contains many such appeals to Divine intervention:

Verse

Verse In this, O Nature, yield I pray to me. I pace and pace, and think and think, and take The fever’d hands, and note down all I see, That some dim distant light may haply break. The painful faces ask, can we not cure? We answer, No, not yet; we seek the laws. O God reveal thro’ all this thing obscure The unseen, small, but million-murdering cause.Footnote

Ross, ‘Indian Fevers’ (1890–1893) in Philosophies, p. 21.

When Ross finally found his experimental proof, he made room for both the benevolence of God and for the innovations of the scientist, writing ‘This day relenting God hath placed within my hand/A wondrous thing’, but also: ‘the voice of God is heard/Not in the thunder-fit;/A still small voice is heard,/Half-heard, and that is it’ (53–54). Ross’s narration of his work subscribed to a form of idealised masculinity, embodied by Carlylean heroism and the ‘muscular Christianity’ of writers like Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes, by presenting himself as a lone genius persevering in earnest for the good of humanity, informed by both Christ and his own innate skill.

Norman Vance has highlighted the wide reach of the concept of ‘Christian manliness’, which ‘represented a strategy of commending Christian virtue by linking it with the more interesting notions of secular moral and physical prowess’.¹⁰² Donald E. Hall characterises this as a ‘religious, social, and literary movement’ which ‘evinced not only admirable agendas for moral and social salvation, but also sexist, classist, and imperialist ideological underpinnings’.¹⁰³ The muscular Christian movement forged an association between ‘physical strength, religious certainty, and the ability to shape and control the world around oneself’ (7). The overlap between these tenets and the political discourses of tropical medicine are particularly visible in fiction like Hocking’sThe Dust of Life where tensions in the imperial project are inscribed onto male ‘sporting’ bodies.

The novel establishes an association between physical health and moral virtue by describing the protagonist, Cedric, as ‘springy, muscular, with health and vitality manifesting itself in his every movement and look’ (8). He is an ‘open-air English boy’ and his first action in the narrative proper is to win a rugby game (3). His victory on the field foreshadows his eventual victory in the empire, a common narratological progression born of a culture in which competitive and team sports (and the kind of masculinities associated with them) became ‘rhetorically and practically imbued with a spirit of martial imperialism’.¹⁰⁴ As Vanessa Heggie argues, educational reformers drew on ‘games-based models of fair play, sportsmanship and muscular Christianity’ to instil ‘discipline, self-sacrifice, leadership and stoicism in middle- and upper-class boys’ in preparation for them to become the military and political leaders of the future.¹⁰⁵ The triumphant conclusion to the novel, in which the ‘lionine’ Cedric—newly converted to Christianity—wins himself a fortune and a wife reiterates the kind of heroism to which readers should aspire.

Cedric enacts an idealised imperial masculine citizenship by demonstrating his athleticism, bravery, stoicism, and fair-mindedness in a series of mini-trials with increasing stakes. First, he wins a rugby game and then he saves a young woman from drowning in the sea in the Cornish town of Perranzeth. After swapping the playing field for the ‘real thing’—the African jungle—Cedric demonstrates his marksmanship and loyalty by saving his friend, the duplicitous and cowardly Roger, from a lion. John M. MacKenzie argues that the lion became a ‘national and imperial symbol […] the epitome of empire itself’, with fantasies of lion killing representing ‘the striving and victory of civilised man over the darker primeval and untamed forces still at work in the world’.¹⁰⁶ Juvenile literature, annuals, journals, and travelogues were filled with pictorial representations of lion hunting, particularly of David Livingstone’s famous encounter with a lion, to illustrate the heroism of missionary-explorers (48). Indeed, Hocking too makes reference to the attack on Livingstone, dropping his narratorial voice to remark: ‘I think it was Livingstone who, when explaining some scars on his arm which he carried to his grave, declared that when the lion’s teeth had entered his arm—which had caused the scars—he felt no pain’ (91).

Cedric goes on to save Roger’s life again—this time by rescuing him from the mouth of an extinct volcano, which their native companions call the ‘mountain of the devil’, and which Cedric considers to be ‘like the mouth of hell’ (96). Descending into the fiery darkness suspended by a rope, Cedric enacts the mytheme of descending into the underworld and recites lines from Dante’s Inferno. After returning triumphant, he recovers swiftly owing to his ‘vigorous young life’ and his ‘splendid physique’ (102). He is heralded as a hero and a sportsman; as we are reminded throughout, he was invited to come on the expedition in the first place because he is ‘a sportsman to the fingertips’ (77)—a shorthand that speaks to the strength of his character as much as to his physical ability.

In Masculinities in British Adventure Fiction, 1880–1915, Joseph A. Kestner locates imperial romance within a landscape of crisis in which the coherence of British masculinity and British nationhood were being steadily and catastrophically undermined by fracturing gender roles, the increasingly insistent voice of the working class in domestic politics, and decreasing confidence in the imperial project. One response to these crises was an intensification of the adventure genre in which male readers could gratify their desire for a stable masculine ideal.¹⁰⁷ Anthea Trodd argues that in the Edwardian period, English literature was increasingly dominated by discussions of manliness, a phenomenon that helped to inculpate the voice of a masculine ruling class and, in turn, to map Englishness and masculinity in close proximity.¹⁰⁸ A variety of stories emerged in Britain at the fin de siècle which reimagined, reinforced, lauded, negotiated, and interrogated masculine ideals using empire as a conceptual space within which men might ‘practice’ manhood (in more ways than one). Amongst the diversity of masculinities that operated in this period, one prominent imagined identity was that of the man-of-action, most often typified by sports and big game hunting.

Hunting was part of the cult of English public-school athleticism in which activities like game shooting and sports, especially team sports, were thought to cultivate manly virtues. As MacKenzie argues, towards the end of the century,

the hunting cult was transferred overseas, often searching for a genuine wilderness, and generat[ing] an entire ethos which distinguished certain characteristics of the Hunt as markers of civilisation and gentlemanly conduct […] the combination of science and ethic, nature study, human control and moral code began to take a central role in popular fiction and juvenile training.¹⁰⁹

Hunting was widely conceived as ‘preparation and training for European expansion and conflict with other peoples’ and, for writers like G. A. Henty and H. Rider Haggard, ‘lay at the centre of imperial experience’ (43). An article in ‘country gentlemen’s newspaper’, Field, drew on the association between sportsmanship and empire to communicate the value of Ross’s ‘mosquito crusade’ in 1901. The sanitation work that Ross had been carrying out in West Africa would be of the ‘very first importance to travellers, sportsmen, and all those whose duties or pleasures take them to unhealthy tropical regions’, a comment that perpetuates the concept of empire as an extension of the playing fields of English public schools. The article goes on to advise sportsmen and travellers to avoid the ‘huts of the malaria-stricken natives in which the mosquitoes absorb the poison’ and to advocate the extermination of mosquitoes, not from ‘the whole of the dark continent but from those parts of it which white men particularly frequent’.¹¹⁰ It could not be clearer here that the writer is concerned, not with global health, but with the accessibility of Africa to sportsmen. They conclude ‘there could be no more cheering news for those who travel in tropical swamps whether to kill game or dig gold’, a statement that suggests that these are the dominant activities of men in imperial space.

As an article in the New York Times demonstrated in 1895, the activities of parasitologists were often moulded to fit this narrative; it opened: ‘the world’s mightiest hunters in the last thirty years have been those who have pursued infinitesimal game—who have found, caught, killed, or held captive those curious little organisms called microbes or bacilli’.¹¹¹ In 1926, Paul de Kruif published a popular history of microbiology entitled Microbe Hunters, which similarly professed to be ‘a tale of the bold and persistent and curious explorers and fighters of death’.¹¹² He used the sports and games ideology to characterise the work of parasitologists such as Ross, David Bruce, Louis Pasteur, and Robert Koch as heroic. In de Kruif’s words, Bruce discovered the connection between tsetse flies and sleeping sickness ‘because he was a hunter. Not only with his mind—but a bold everlasting curious snouting hunter with his body […] he carried the fight to the enemy’ (267–68). He was a fighter and a ‘viking’ (277); his wife and collaborator, Mary, ‘was a scientific Diana’—the Roman goddess of wild animals and the hunt (267–68). The British edition of the book included a preface that read: ‘Here is the true story of the adventures of explorers in the fantastic world of the unseen’. Reviews of the book made the lexis of sport and romance even more explicit; the Saturday Review of Literature asserted that Microbe Hunters was ‘a chapter of scientific history [as] thrilling and romantic as any conquest, or voyage, or discovery’. The Emporia Gazette characterised it as ‘a hunting story as interesting as any story of African game hunters, or tiger hunters in Asia’, and the Boston Transcript dubbed it ‘an adventure story’ full of ‘biography, science, and heroism’.¹¹³

This type of heroic imperial masculinity was, however, undermined and destabilised by the very fictions that sought to promote it. In Multitude and Solitude, Roger contemplates death from sleeping sickness, now dispossessed of the glory and heroics of earlier chapters: ‘this death of which he had thought so grandly seemed very stupid now that he was coming to know it’ (319). He writes a death note and reflects, dejectedly, on who might find it:

Some great German scientist about to banish the disease. Some drunken English gold prospector with a cockney accent. Some missionary, or sportsman, or commercial traveller. More likely it would be some roving savage with a snuff-box in his earlobe and a coil of copper wire about his limbs. (318–19)

The confidence in British scientists and soldiers that he had had before embarking on his trip is now replaced with disappointment and bitterness about the shallowness and shortcomings of the British imperial project. Roger goes on to recover and to save the life of his companion by finding a cure for sleeping sickness. However, his triumph is dampened when they find out that a Japanese researcher has beaten them to it. Thus, notwithstanding the rousing call to action at the end of the novel, the reader is unsure how to appraise the adventure. The narrator summarises their accomplishments (many of which happen off page) in the following words:

Scientifically, they had done less than they had hoped but more than they had expected to do. They had been the first to cure cases with animal serum. They had been the first to study in any way the effect of nagana upon the young of wild game, and to prepare an (as yet untested) vaccine in young antelopes, quaggas, and elands. They had discovered a wash of Paris green and lime which destroyed the tsetse pupae. They had cleared some three miles of fly belt. They had studied the tsetse. They had surveyed the whole and excavated a part of the Zimbabwe. (295)

The narrator’s summary here reads, as many would complain, more like a report of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine than the climax of a romance novel. Nevertheless, and despite this inelegant deployment of realism, Masefield fulfils the requirements of male romance by reminding us of an equally important outcome of the trip—the solidification of homosocial bonds:

Lastly, they had settled the foundations of friendship between them. That was, perhaps, the best result of the expedition. They had settled a friendship likely to last through life. (295)

In Henry Seton Merriman’sWith EdgedTools, homosocial bonds also occupy a prominent place in the narrative; the friendship between Jack Meredith—the beau-ideal of London society—and big game hunter, Guy Oscard, threatens (but doesn’t quite manage) to eclipse the traditional marriage plot. When they meet for the first time in Loango, they bond over the shooting of a leopard, and their friendship, ‘inaugurated at the rifle’s mouth’, does not end with the adventure but ‘extend[s] through that long expedition over a strange country called life’ (115). The narrator explains that ‘there was about these two men […] a mutual and common respect for all things pertaining to sport’ (113). Continuous with the public-school games ethic, their sportsmanship denotes not only physical strength and skill but also a keen sense of fair play, which underpins their motivations throughout the novel.

Guy is recruited to the expedition because he is ‘a soldierly fellow full of fight’, a description that prompts the narrator to reflect:

There are some Englishmen left, thank Heaven! Who love fighting for its own sake, and not only for the gain of it. Such men as this lived in the old days of chivalry, at which modern puny carpet-knights make bold to laugh, while inwardly thanking their stars that they live in the peaceful age of the policeman. (74)

Merriman’s ideal Englishman embodies the collision between an honours-based form of the gentleman—represented by concepts of chivalry—and the outdoorsy masculinity of games and sport. Whilst honour and fair play were modelled in team sports, and bravery and skill were modelled in hunting, codes of chivalry were promoted through the iconography of St George, in which ‘slaying the dragon’ signified the ultimate hunt (47). As I explored in the previous chapter, this concept was bound up with journalistic accounts of parasitology research. In Merriman’s fondness for the ‘old days of chivalry’, he perpetuates a naturalised ‘ethos of honour’ that ‘sought authority from an imagined continuity with the past’.¹¹⁴ His criticism of the ‘puny carpet knights’ of the modern age articulates a disappointing end-point to this ancestry.

Nevertheless, the hopeful vision of manliness embodied in ‘men who love fighting for its own sake’ is a complicated endorsement. In this same period, many writers became engrossed, as Bradley Deane argues, ‘in charting vectors of convergence between Britons and those they regarded as primitive, and in imagining the ways in which barbarians might make the best imperialists of all’.¹¹⁵ Despite championing fighting and sports, Merriman rejects a shallow model of masculinity based solely on brawn. He criticises Maurice Gordon, the local head of a large trading association in Loango, as ‘one of those large, hearty Englishmen who seem to be all appetite and laughter—men who may be said to be manly, and beyond that nothing’ (102). Thus, Merriman rejects the kind of man whose ‘manliness is so overpowering that it swallows up many other qualities which are not out of place in men, such as tact and thoughtfulness, and perhaps intellectuality and the power to take some interest in those gentler things that interest women’ (102). In a novel that frustrates reader’s expectations by being as much about debutantes and ‘wordy warfare’ as it is about foreign climes and fierce battles, Merriman’s clarification that men should retain an interest in ‘the gentler things that interest women’ feels particularly pointed, subtly intervening in the critical debate about realism and romance at the end of the century.

Merriman exposes the shortcomings of the archetypes of romance by juxtaposing his own characters with those idealised behaviours of ‘people in books’—as when the protagonists find out that their cowardly business partner Victor Durnovo has deserted his companions and left them to the dangers of contracting smallpox:

“And what is to be done?” he inquired.

“Nothing. People in books would mount on a very high pinnacle of virtue and cast off Mr. Durnovo and all his works; but it is much more practical to make what use we can of him. That is a worldy-wise, nineteenth-century way of looking at it; we cannot do this without him”. (140)

By appealing to the ‘worldly-wise, nineteenth-century’ perspective, Merriman rejects the high-minded virtues of conventional romance in favour of realism. Merriman’s anthropological approach to his characters and frequent references to the ‘techniques of the discrete novelist’ allow the reader to enjoy a curious dissociative moment of complicity in the fictionality of the reading experience. The reader remains complicit in this negotiated fantasy as Merriman uses character dialogue to poke fun at both the male romance and the sentimental novel. When asked about his fianceé, beau-idéal Jack Meredith says

I ought to always have [a photograph] with me in a locket round my neck or somewhere. A curiously-wrought locket is the correct thing, I believe. People in books usually carry something of that description—and it is always curiously wrought. I don’t know where they buy them. (174)

Some 30 pages later, the reader is called upon to appreciate the irony of this dialogue when Guy Oscard unwittingly enacts the ‘people in books’ fantasy: ‘he was fumbling in his breast-pocket and presently he rose, crossed the room, and handed her, quite without afterthought or self-consciousness, a photograph in a morocco case’ (208). In this instance, Guy’s conformity to the tropes of literary romance makes him an inferior love interest—and indeed he fails to resolve his own narrative with the marriage that convention demands. Jack, on the other hand, does manage to secure an engagement, if not quite a marriage, and is afforded the virtues of chivalric masculinity when Guy characterises him as ‘a steel gauntlet beneath a velvet glove’ (207).

Nonetheless, Merriman’s novel refuses to offer narrative closure—the Simiacine scheme (for which they travelled to Africa) is exposed as a cover for slavery and does not, in the end, make the protagonists rich; Jack and Guy are both betrayed by their love interest, who turns out to be the same woman (unbeknownst to them); Jack’s father dies before he hears of his son’s survival or romantic happiness; and Jack returns from Africa not triumphant and unafraid, but ‘nervously apprehensive’ (454). It is a story of a failed business plan, a failed marriage, and a failed adventure, or as Merriman’s narrator characterises it: ‘a very lame story indeed [in which Jack] was not the hero’ (452). Jack’s sportsmanship is not enough to triumph in African space where ‘the respective positions of hunter and hunted [are] imperfectly defined’ (110). Instead, like the other characters in the novel, he proves to be ‘a puny insignificant helpless being in a world that is too large for him’ (62). Merriman invokes the games ethic, not to endorse imperialism but to contain it. For Merriman, diseases like malaria and sleeping sickness are God’s way of levelling the playing field:

The Almighty speaks very plainly sometimes and in some places—nowhere more plainly that the West Coast of Africa which land He evidently wants for the black man […] we don’t get on in Africa. The Umpire is there, and He insists on fair play. (89)

Medicine as New Romance

During a speech about imagination held at the Delphian Coterie dinner in 1924, which was reported by The Times, The Daily Telegraph, Westminster Gazette, Kentish Independent, Irish Times, and Newcastle Chronicle, Ross asserted that he was pleased to learn that his Memoirs had won a prize for ‘best Romance’ published last year.¹¹⁶ He was probably referring to the recent award of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (biography category) and his joke was met with laughter. However, it certainly wasn’t the first time his scientific work had been characterised as ‘romance’, as chapters in this book attest. The tongue-in-cheek remark draws on a complicated landscape of exchange between the fantasies of imperial romance fiction and the imagined and reported romance of imperial science.

In his Nobel Prize lecture of 1902, Ross establishes malaria as ‘the principle and gigantic ally of barbarism’, arguing that it ‘strikes down not only the indigenous barbaric population, but, with still greater certainty, the pioneers of civilisation, the planter, the trader, the missionary and the soldier’. Notwithstanding his narration (in his Memoirs and elsewhere) of his research as being characterised by tedious hours spent over a microscope, Ross here paints a much more swashbuckling vision of battle and sacrifice. He veers into the language of imperial romance when he asserts that ‘no wild deserts, no savage races, no geographical difficulties have proved so inimical to civilisation as this disease’.¹¹⁷ The picture of an Africa in which the landscape, the people, and the climate are all in stark opposition to the European ‘pioneers’, models the most basic plot of an imperial adventure story. Indeed, Ross draws on the conventions of the genre to explicate his understanding of scientific research, describing his discovery as ‘the climax of an intense drama, full of hopes and despairs, visions seen in darkness, many failures, and a final triumph in which the protagonists are man and nature’.¹¹⁸

It is rather unsurprising that parasitologists like Ross take up the language and metaphors of imperial romance when, as Nicholas Daly argues, it is a genre that in the late century readily ‘embodies the fantasies of [an] emerging professional group, whose power is based on their access to and control of certain kinds of knowledge’.¹¹⁹ Daly is not talking about parasitologists here, but his characterisation of late nineteenth-century romance as a genre that ‘pits a team of men with particular skills—sometimes actual professionals—against some outside threat’, more or less seamlessly embodies the widespread characterisation of parasitologists as new, semi-professionals (with or without specific training), who journey into colonial space to research and ultimately ‘battle against’ disease.¹²⁰Neil Hultgren argues that imperial romance fiction ‘reflects and creates fantasies that emerged from the avid imperialism of late Victorian Britain’. The same ‘intertwined registers of the imperial and the fictional’ that underscore such fantasies might also be read in Ross’s speeches, lectures, and in his Memoirs.¹²¹

This is not just a narratological choice, but rather reflects complex interactions between social, intellectual, and material networks. Ross was, after all, friends with H. Rider Haggard and John Masefield as well as with writers like Arthur Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling. Moreover, he frequently dined at the Athenaeum Club in London, where Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad were members. Indeed, the gentleman’s social club was a significant nexus for the diffusion and interchange of ideas. Ross was a member of clubs at Madras, Secunderabad, Calcutta, Liverpool, and London, where he mixed with figures as diverse as English industrialist and politician William Lever; Irish journalist and M. P. Stephen Gwynn; British engineer Sir Charles Parsons; Oxford professor of poetry Sir Thomas Herbert Warren; Canadian physician Sir William Osler; professor of astronomy and editor of Nature (1919–1939) Sir Richard Gregory; and many others besides.

In 1916, Gregory published Discovery; or the Spirit and Service of Science, a book that, in one reviewer’s words, undertook a ‘definite campaign of popularisation of the true aims and aspirations and methods of the scientific discipline of thought’.¹²² In the preface, Gregory insists that, to the popular mind, the man of science ‘is a Faust who has not yet made a bargain with Mephistopheles and is therefore without human interest’. However, he pushes back against this view and the view that ‘humanistic’ and ‘scientific’ studies are at odds.¹²³ Gregory explains that he seeks to ‘justify the claim of science to be an ennobling influence as well as a creator of riches’ (vi). Using another literary reference point, Gregory insists that ‘[n]ature [is] a Katharine [sic] to be tamed by the Petruchio of Science rather than a Juliet to be worshipped by a love-sick Romeo. Only those who consider her worthy of battle have the patience or the power to affect a conquest’ (4–5). The language of conquest (not to mention the gendering of the empire) reveals an anthropocentric imperialist understanding of science that works forcefully for the imagined betterment of the Western world.

In a chapter aptly named ‘Conquest of Disease’, he summarises Ross’s malaria work, quoting lines from two of Ross’s poems and adding ‘where the teachings of science have been followed, our race has triumphed over its enemies; where ignorance or apathy prevails, the toll is being paid in human lives’ (228). This is strikingly similar to the rhetorical thrust of Ross’s Memoirs, which he would publish in 1923. Upon doing so Ross sent complimentary copies to many of his network, including his friend H. G. Wells, writing ‘you will find a long tale told in those memoirs which ought to support your philosophy with which I always agree, as to the possibility of men improving their lot by proper efforts’.¹²⁴Ross also sent Haggard a copy, which he read with ‘the deepest interest’ and summarised as a ‘tale of official stupidity’ and ‘a great story of a great achievement’ of which his countrymen should be proud.¹²⁵

This framework of the power of scientific research to better man’s lot and the resistance to it due to ignorance and apathy is repeated again and again in the discourses of tropical medicine and hygiene. In 1924, The Lancet published an article on the tropics that drew attention to the ‘tragedy and romance’ behind tropical medical research, to ‘the tragic burden of insufficiency, sorrow, misery, and despair […] lost opportunities, in the strangling hold of vested interests, in the stupidity, folly, and pig-headedness, aye, and wickedness of those who opposed progress, who were deaf to the claims of science’. However, such pessimism is tempered by the ‘wonders’ and ‘romance’ of scientific investigation:

[T]here is an element of romance in the strivings of devoted men to solve the mysteries of tropical disease, in the astonishing results they achieved, in the marvels they revealed […] there is an abundance of romance in the application of knowledge gained and the transformation effected by such application.¹²⁶

Such language draws attention to the twinned projects of imperial romance and imperial science, and to the role that fiction played in the creation of modern scientific selfhood through a particular kind of masculine self-fashioning. During the 50-year fin de siècle between 1880 and 1930, colonial expansionism and the rapid professionalisation of science were interpolated with circulating ideas about masculinity and nationhood, such that manly conquest and scientific investigation in the tropics became one and the same. This is also a period in which Michael Salerhas identified the emergence of the ‘New Romance’ genre, which he describes as a form of ‘modern enchantment’ that combined ‘tropes of fantasy with those of objectivity’, including the use of footnotes, maps, appendices, and photographs. Saler argues that readers were drawn to science fiction, fantasy, and detective stories at the turn of the century because ‘they were seeking to be enchanted through the gratification of their reason’.¹²⁷ His contention that stories in this genre shared a ‘combination of realism and romanticism’ and were ‘amalgams of wonder and reason’ might convincingly be used to characterise works popularising or historicising scientific research in this period too. In such texts, the narration of the pursuit of scientific knowledge becomes itself a form of modern enchantment, as I explore in the following chapter. The fitness of parasitology research to sate the appetite for enchantment is evident in newspaper articles that contemplated the readerly experiences of Ross’s Memoirs versus the more traditional tale of adventure: ‘it is romance for which we hunger to-day. We look to our novelists and our playwrights, and they reward us with sour milk and stale bread [but] the life of Sir Ronald Ross is a romance more thrilling, more inspiring, more wonderful than the best romance in fiction’.¹²⁸

In her survey of the changing sociocultural status of the scientist, Rosalynn D. Haynes identifies a subset of fiction at the turn of the century that imagined the scientist as a utopian ruler. In these stories, scientists are directly responsible for the physical and social improvement of society. She draws our attention to H. G. Wells as a purveyor of such fiction, arguing that he became a ‘literary spokesperson for those contemporary scientists who were crusading vigorously […] for greater political influence’.¹²⁹ In his journal Science Progress, Ross also singles out Wells as an arbiter between science and society, identifying what he considered to be the significant role of scientific romance in bridging the gap: ‘many of the romances of H. G. Wells have probably done more to stimulate interest in science than all the publications of our learned societies’. He goes on to review Atoms by D. C. Wignall and G. D. Knox (1923)—a science-fiction novel involving a sensational plot to take over the world following the discovery of ‘super radium’—and advocates its use in schools:

Here the public will find some of the wholesome powder of physics combined with the jam of a stirring tale […] we wish a large sale of this bold book, and recommend it particularly to the attention of science masters, who will find it of assistance in their teaching.¹³⁰

In a private letter concerning an invitation to a dinner in honour of Wells, Ross again identifies him as a literary spokesperson for science:

He has done more to instruct the public on the meaning and value of science than all the academies put together. The art exhibited in the style and construction of his novels can be apparent only to those who have attempted to work on similar lines; his imagination is wonderful; and I for one, agree with his philosophy which amounts to this: that men can better themselves if they choose.¹³¹

Ross clearly considers his own insight into Wells’s social value a result of ‘work[ing] on similar lines’, although it is unclear whether he means his forays into novel writing (none of which were science fiction), or his popular narrativisations of scientific research. The boundaries between scientific romance, as Wells called his earlier stories, and science proper are blurred here. Perhaps it is the gap between utopian visions of science and its real-world practice that speaks most forcefully to Ross; in Wells’sA Modern Utopia (1905), which Haynes identifies as a prototype for all his utopian novels, Wells writes, ‘Science stands, a too-competent servant behind her wrangling underbred masters, holding out resources, devices and remedies they are too stupid to use’.¹³² Such a sentiment was echoed in Mégroz’s biography of Ross:

How long will it be before the best countries of the world are freed from this universal scourge [malaria] depends, to quote once more the words of the man who opened the door of a new era [Ross], “on how stupid people are”.¹³³

Ross also vented his frustration at the perceived apathy of the public towards science at the Delphian Coterie dinner with which I opened this section. He joked that he wished he’d spent his life ‘creating beautiful romances’ as Haggard had done instead of ‘trying to prevent diseases, or what [is] much more difficult, in trying to persuade all the fools of the world to prevent diseases when they kn[o]w how to do it’.¹³⁴

But in a sense ‘creating beautiful romances’ is what Ross had been doing all along. He perhaps unwittingly exposes the continuities between his attempts at fiction and his narrations of science by championing romance as a lasting genre. He argues that, unlike the novel—which ‘describes the life of every one […] and of what happen[s] every day around [one]’—romance must present ‘something idealised’ and ‘must contain the quality of imagination’. Haggard gave a definition of imagination at the same meeting as ‘an unusual power of putting ourselves into the places of others and of deducing the unknown from the known’, a definition that complements Ross’s understanding of the methodologies of the scientist as much as of the writer of fiction.¹³⁵ The ‘something idealised’ that Ross locates in romance is certainly also recognisable in his many projects of science communication, as this chapter has illustrated. He even uses the same phrase in an article in Science Progress, asserting that the only way that science can be communicated to the public is ‘by way of narratives […] the constructions of the men of science […] have to be idealised’.¹³⁶ This assertion encapsulates the essence of my argument in this chapter: that, at the turn of the century, imperial romance was not confined to the realm of the fictional but also voiced itself through scientists’ interactions with empire, where the gap between reality and rhetoric became another blank space on the map.