The Making of Imperial Tuberculosis

Abstract From 1880 to 1914, Pastorians reinterpreted tuberculosis in the French colonies as a central public health problem. The disease had been previously considered of marginal importance, compared with tropical diseases such as malaria or yellow fever. This chapter looks at the epidemiological studies, new disease ecologies, and technical innovations that made this reinterpretation possible. Armed with the tuberculin skin test, a conviction that contact with the tubercle microbe determined symptomatic illness, and a network of laboratories, Albert Calmette convinced colonial officials that Europeans were infecting a “virgin soil.” This idea echoed emerging anticolonial arguments that highlighted the health costs of “civilization” at events such as the Anti-colonial Exposition of 1931.