Member

I am currently reading ‘The Discovery of the Germ,’ a book by John Waller which “provides a gripping insight into twenty years in the history of medicine that profoundly changed the way we view disease.”

I came across an episode of British Colonial deceit which is worth sharing. This is not the stuff that we were taught in our school history lessons.

In 1883 cholera struck Egypt. It cut through the poorer districts of Cairo and Alexandria with its customary savagery and fear of its spread caused consternation throughout Western Europe. By August, 5,000 Egyptians were dying every week. And, as Europe braced itself for the disease’s onslaught, Britain, France and Germany all rushed expert medical teams to North Africa.

The experiences of these expeditions highlight the difficulties involved in gaining acceptance for radical scientific ideas. They also underscore the way in which political circumstances influence how and why medical debates are fought: for the conclusions drawn by the British doctors, who were the first on the scene, were complicated by a surprising factor.

By 1880, almost 80 per cent of the tonnage passing through the Suez Canal was British. In an increasingly competitive world market, the speed with which her ships could travel between East and West was a critical factor in allowing Britain to maintain her economic lead. As the canal slashed the journey time between Britain and India by almost 50 per cent, its military as well as commercial importance was simply immense.

Yet there was a major drawback to having personnel and ships pass so rapidly from one side of the world to the other. With the spices, silks and teas of the Orient could also come disease. Because of this, the crews of merchantmen had traditionally been forced to undergo long periods of quarantine before landing their wares. But quarantine cost Britain time and money, and had long been resented in a nation that depended on speedy maritime communications and uninterrupted trade. In 1882, Britain’s economic interest in the Canal led her to make Egypt, in effect, a protectorate of the Empire. Having become the effective suzerains, the British authorities rescinded as many quarantine procedures as they could.

As a result, when cholera hit Egypt in 1883, the British government was placed in a very tight spot. If the disease had been carried on board a ship from India, the colonial power would face the legitimate wrath of thousands of grieving Egyptians. The only way for the British to evade charges of valuing life less than trade was to show that cholera was not a communicable disease. Thus, the government panel that appointed the British medical team was careful to avoid including anyone already sympathetic to the germ theory of cholera. The team selected also lacked experts in microscopy, so that in Egypt it carried out totally inadequate microscopical studies of water supplies and made no attempt to isolate specific microbes.

Partly as a result of this travesty of investigative science, it took the British doctors working under Dr Guyer Hunter only a few weeks to reach their conclusion. According to them, the epidemic was caused by unusual weather patterns ‘reactivating’ cholera poisons that had lain dormant in the Egyptian soil since the last outbreak in 1865. Cholera had not, therefore, come from India. Nor was it a microbial disease. And there was certainly no cause to expect it to spread any further. There is no reason to think that Hunter and his colleagues had deliberately ruled out the germ theory before starting. The damage had been done by the British government’s selection of a team with inadequate microscopical training. And so pleased was the government with Hunter’s results that he was promptly made a Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George.

The German Cholera Commission, lead by Robert Koch discovered the vibrio that causes cholera and brought back pure cultures of it to Germany.

The bacterium had been previously isolated by Italian anatomist Filippo Pacini in 1854, but his work had been ignored due to the predominance of the miasma theory of disease. Koch was unaware of Pacini’s work and made an independent discovery, and his greater preeminence allowed the discovery to be widely spread for the benefit of others. In 1965, however, the bacterium was formally renamed Vibrio choler Pacini 1854.

powered by performancing firefox